Interview – Brent J. Steele |
Dr Brent J. Steele is the Francis D. Wormuth Presidential Chair and University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. He has been the co-editor in chief of Global Studies Quarterly, a journal of the International Studies Association, since its inception in 2020. Before moving to Utah, he was at the University of Kansas from 2005-2013. He is the author of Vicarious Identity in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2021), with Chris Browning and Pertti Joenniemi, and Restraint in International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which co-won the ISA Theory section book award for 2020. His most recent articles have appeared in the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Australian Journal of International Affairs, Global Environmental Politics, and Cooperation and Conflict. He teaches courses on US Foreign Policy, Interpretive Methods, International Ethics, and International Relations.
Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?
I’d point to three areas, one within my own research community and one beyond it. The first, within ontological security studies, is more of a general trend of innovation by early and mid-career scholars doing excellent conceptual work within OSS. I’m risking naming those folks here because there’s so much going on that I fear I’m leaving some folks out, but the work on anxiety in OS drives has been vibrantly engaged and retheorized because of the contributions of Nina Krickel-Choi (again among many others), as has the reinvigorated debates on state personhood that Bianca Naude’s book fostered. I also find the new twists on old concepts, like Lauren Rogers’s work on ‘ontological stress’ and Ben Rosher’s on ‘intergenerational anxiety’, so useful towards gaining better precision in OS studies. Finally, I’ve been lucky enough to be in a working group on ‘Creating Ontological Security’ that includes a lineup of earlier career scholars, which has culminated in a forthcoming special issue of European Journal of International Studies co-edited by Cornelia Baciu. Of course, those examples only scratch the surface of what work is being done in OSS that has pushed it forward as a research community.
A second, which I see as related to that last thread in the above paragraph on creativity, is illustrated by work on ‘creating’ and ‘making’ in International Relations, including forms of art as resistance to violence. This is reflected in the outstanding recent special issue of Security Dialogue that Marie Berry and Milli Lake edited on ‘Creative and caring resistance to violence’, as well as a forum that we published in Global Studies Quarterly on ‘Making International Things, co-edited by Jonathan Luke Austin and Anna Leander. I often assign Michelle Weitzel’s article from that forum to my students on ‘Material-Aesthetic approaches’ because it is a vivid example of the many forms of expression beyond writing that we as scholars can and do engage in to think creatively about the world. It’s probably because we’re in an era where AI mish-mash is being shoved down our throats from almost every direction, so I find expressions of artistic creativity in the context of global politics refreshing and uplifting.
Third, the Women in the History of International Thought (WHIT) project has in my view revolutionized the way in which we think about and teach International Relations. We published a special issue of GSQ that was one of the expressions of that project, which gave Jelena and I even more appreciation for it.
How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?
Some of my ways of viewing the world have changed, but I also just generally think I’ve gained a bit more complexity on how I approach studying and teaching it. I suppose if there are changes it’s that (1) I’m not sure there are socially........