Research @ Richmond Biannual Conference

07/11/2011

R@R: 9th Research at Richmond biannual conference

R@R, the 9th Research at Richmond biannual conference, showcasing current faculty research and scholarship, was held on Thursday 3 Nov at the Kensington campus. The four exciting papers - full abstracts below - ranged across international relations, curating contemporary art, the psychology of leadership and the history of the crusades. The attendance was impressive, with undergraduate and postgraduate students, faculty, staff and invited guests in the audience, which packed-out room 216 in Asa Briggs Hall - there was standing room only. The conference closed with a wine reception and the launch of Charlotte Bonham-Carter's co-edited volume, 'The Contemporary Art Book'. The conference is organised by the Research & Scholarship Committee.

Vassilis Fouskas & Preslava Stoeva
The constructivist moment in US Grand Strategy: Dean Acheson, Paul Nitze and the Militarisation of Containment
Our central argument is that realism, the dominant theoretical paradigm of Cold War politics, was essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy in the hands of key individuals in a position of power who used essentially constructivist concepts to define the grand strategy of the US. Despite conventional wisdom shared by both international relations (IR) scholars and theory historiographers, theories do not always follow historic developments. Their logic can be used to shape political realities and influence political outcomes. We define constructivism not only as an approach to understanding IR, incorporating ideas, norms, and identities, but also as a tool to shape such ideas and identities in the hands of professional politicians in the practical realm of policy-making. For example, in our view, constructivism is pronounced and empirically observable when political agencies and individuals use ideational instruments and constructed identities to exaggerate the threat coming from the “other” in order to achieve a specific power-political landscape and other objectives. This paper examines the actions of two practitioners who shaped post-WWII US grand strategy: Dean Acheson and Paul Nitze. Their view of containment was radically different from that originally envisaged by George F. Kennan in his “Long Telegram” (1946). Acheson and Nitze were driven by the political objective of American primacy within the industrialised core (Europe and Japan), rather than a sole focus on the USSR and the buck-passing strategies by which it could be brought to its knees. Acheson and Nitze were the inventors of a hub-and-spoke system of imperial governance, whose defining parameter was the subordination of the industrial core to the US. For this purpose, the threat coming from the USSR had to be exaggerated and the idea and practice of communism demonised. By unravelling the story of US grand strategy after WWII, this paper will argue that key US policy-makers in the late 1940s employed an ideationally based strategy without having any theorisation or conceptualisation of it, which in turn requires us to rethink our understanding of the relationship between theory and practice in international relations and global politics.

*****************************

Charlotte Bonham Carter
Curating in the Expanded Field
Contemporary artists work in an expanded way across film and video, performance, music, sound, installation and socially engaged art. In response to this kind of production, curating has come to mean something much more than exhibition making. Exhibitions are only one aspect of curatorial potential. Curating involves commissioning new work and working beyond the walls of an institution, as well as what would traditionally be called programming and education. In the early 2000s, institutions – especially European Kunsthalles – embraced the practice of New Institutionalism, a curatorial framework defined by the beliefs that exhibitions no longer preside over other activity (such as learning, research, talks and performances), that production is as important as presentation and that the institutions should be flexible, experimental and artist-led. My curatorial work, typified through the commissioning of new work from artists working across art forms, embraces activity in the expanded field and foregrounds the principles of New
Institutionalism. I will cite two curatorial projects executed in my position, as Curator of Visual Arts at the ICA (a position I held until June 2011), to illustrate how I foreground production, interdisciplinarity and art-led activity in my curatorial work. These projects are Oscar Tuazon – My Mistake (June 2010) and Nathaniel Mellors – Ourhouse (March 2011). I will also discuss how I plan to evidence curating in the expanded field, in my current post as Curator of Art on the Underground. This will involve a discussion of a new, socially engaged commission at Stratford station, planned to coincide with the Olympics.

******************

Bryan McIntosh and Benjamin Voyer
Power & Self-construal: consequences for understanding leadership.
This paper explores the relationship between power and self-perception, emotions and behaviours and its consequences in relation to individuals’ leadership behaviours. We argue that power creates cognitive changes that transform the way individuals assimilate and differentiate their self from others. This transforms the way individuals behave as leaders, as well as followers. We argue that individuals’ self-construal plays a pivotal role in determining the behaviours of both powerful and powerless individuals. We argue that self-construal serves as an interface between power and leadership. This conceptualisation reconciles individual dynamics of trait theories of leadership and the environmental positions of situational theories of leadership.

********************

Lucas Villegas-Aristizabal
The decline of the Anglo-Norman Involvement in the Reconquista after the
Second Crusade c. 1150-1248.
From the outset of the First Crusade the historical record clearly shows an increase in the number of Normans and later Anglo-Normans participants in the Iberian Reconquista, which culminated in the great interventions of the Second Crusade. The sieges and conquests of Lisbon and Tortosa during the Second Crusade included the largest numbers of Normans and Anglo-Normans in all the campaigns of the Iberian Reconquista. However, the consequences of this large campaign on Norman and Anglo-Norman involvement are contested. Instead it triggered a gradual decline of their involvement in Iberia. It is therefore, the purpose of this paper to explain why this occurred, especially in an era when the Reconquista won its greatest Christian victories. The paper will explore these changes within the context of the formalisation of relations between the Iberian realms and the English crown.

Link to this page: http://www.richmond.ac.uk/n/1235.aspx