Ithaca College

 Professor Cory Brown, Department of Writing, has contributed the epilogue to Narrative Global Politics: Theory, History and the Personal in International Relations, edited by Naeem Inayatullah and Elizabeth Dauphinee. 

https://www.amazon.com/Narrative-Global-Politics-International-Interventions/dp/1138182664. 

 In the prologue to this collection of essays by writers from around the world, Inayatullah and Dauphinee describe the project as follows:

"These essays do their work by addressing theoretical problems as autobiography. They probe questions that are central to the academic vocation: How do racism, sexism, classism express themselves not merely as abstract forces but as exact moments and precise movements in actors' lives? ... How exactly do structures and institutional patterns make our actions complicit? What counts as an act when a retrospective look at a life produces a sense mainly of compliance to abstract forces? Does knowledge of structures, institutions and our complicity in them allow for change? If during encounters something is always lost in translation, what is communicated and what miscommunicated? If the violence of the nation is homologous to violence between individuals, what moves between and across levels to reproduce violence? How do we make a meaningful life? Do institutions learn? Do individuals? What might such learning look like? In what ways do aesthetics and politics overlap?"

Professor Brown's epilogue alludes to several of the essays in the collection while itself probing, autobiographically, issues of identity, racism, and the connections between family and institutional violence. In particular he asks if globalization is inflicting a pain somehow specific to itself, and if so how do we forge an identity from it, and how can the aesthetics of writing function in that task?

A copy of his essay can be found on his IC website: https://faculty.ithaca.edu/cbrown/