Creative Practice and Transnationalism: Visual Art, Aesthetics and Resistance

International relations and politics are often 'mediated' by the visual, whether through photographs shared online or through exhibitions in museums and other institutions. Yet, art often plays an active role in social and political change. My research explores the role that artists, creative production and artistic outputs play in transnational movements of resistance. It aims to analyse how art moves beyond just representing politics, to creating it. It does so by focusing on the work of artists and creatives in Myanmar's diaspora, especially those from ethnic minority communities such as the Kachin. This research looks at the ways in which transnational resistance can be consolidated in cultural, aesthetic and artistic ways.

My work also aims to re-frame how knowledge is produced through practice-led methods. Production as method in IR and politics is widely underused as a methodological approach, despite it holding immense potential to generate novel and affective sources of knowledge. My project seeks to build on this growing approach by collaborating with artists directly as a method of research. This project seeks to generate new empirical, methodological and theoretical insights into the power that aesthetics hold in our daily and political lives, thereby constituting a wider spectrum of transnational resistance.