The reflexive potential of silence: Emotions,the ‘everyday’ and ethical international relations

Introduction

I begin this article with a confession. (Not a confession as interrogated by Foucault (1998), but a personal avowal of a goal I seek to achieve.) Simply put, I no longer want to do damage to others. I am not a physically violent person. Violence, however, is not always physical. It can be internal, to one’s self, and it can be structural as well. There are wide-ranging interpretations of what constitutes a violent act. I focus on the internal personal experience, always mindful of an institutional influence, because I believe this is the form of violence that I am guilty of. Perhaps I am no longer party to this experience, I do not know for sure. It is this uncertainty, in my own beliefs, and my own agency, that has led me to work on the ensuing ideas of silence that shape this article. I suggest, aware of my confessional act, that silence as an eloquent rendering of ethical reflexivity and moral agency might be a place to continue my ongoing negotiation of being an academic seeking accountability in the research that I perform while generating a space for surrender and vulnerability to the relationships that emerge within the research journey. More broadly, I suggest that my autoethnographic reflections provide a particular approach to the theorisation of the politics of everyday emotions in International Relations (IR). As my story unfolds, and the transformative potential of trauma is rehearsed, the possibility of excavating otherwise silenced emotions, guided by an affective empathy, comes to the fore. I suggest, building on my own lived experience, that as the researcher cum agent embraces this position, discounted and discarded stories are revisited. This process, I contend, excavates emotional qualities that may hitherto remain unacknowledged.

I experienced what Ellis (2004) calls ‘a knock’. At that moment in time, I didn’t recognise it for what it was – a shattering of my world, a loss of faith; what I now label trauma. In 2004 I found myself off balance, reeling from a letter from the U.K. government stating, in no uncertain terms, yet in decidedly legal jargon, that I was being deported from the United Kingdom. It is a well-rehearsed story (see Beattie 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2015) in which, among other things, I embraced a form of personal self-reflexivity and professional autoethnography to negotiate what had happened to me. The emotional turmoil surrounding this lived experience was more than I could negotiate on my own, and I have turned to professionals to help me re-story my own identity and my position in the world. This personal venture now informs my professional activities which I rehearse herein to wonder what intermingling role silence and reflexivity might offer those engaged in the task of knowledge creation. I offer a subjective, personal, mode of being and knowing, at odds with universal, top-down prescriptions, and reflective of the ideas and arguments put forward by Naumes (2015).

Naumes (2015) poignantly writes of the violence of the research process. She suggests that authors vigorously deny their personal affiliation to the ideas they are working on in an elusive quest for objectivity. Drawing on Doty (2004) she suggests that authors silence themselves in the production of knowledge adopting a sterile voice and thereby denying the role of embodiment and positionality in the construction of knowledge. She writes,

When IR scholars write from a place that buries the author, we commit violence not only against ourselves as murdered authors, but also because of the silence we institute around explaining our situatedness. Although I contest the notion of objectivity outright, we certainly are not and cannot be objective analysts of the situations on which we research and write. Most of us have chosen our niche topics of study for personal reasons, which begs the question: how do our lived experiences change what and the way in which we research? (Naumes, 2015: 827)

As I queried my ‘knock’ I discovered I was not alone. A growing number of scholars attuned to the methods of critical reflexivity suggest they too have negotiated similar crises (see Dauphinee, 2015; Steele, 2015). Yet, I was also learning, to speak of this trauma in objective terms was to come at a cost. Doty (2004) accurately portrays the need to engage with objective writing styles if the goal of knowledge production is promotion within a particular framing of the academy. But this is not the only way to negotiate the tasks of the academe. This awareness frames the aims and ends of this article.

My decision to embrace a reflexive and openly subjective position within this piece as an author is an acute decision to disrupt status quo rehearsals of global ethics that eschew an explicit acknowledgement of authorial voice. I attend to the role of silence, as a positive ethical contribution to storytelling, in order to allow the stories of others to emerge and reveal how it might inform the process of knowledge production. It was within the chaos of my own trauma that I was ultimately able to identify a positive role for silence. One that enabled me to listen, with empathy, to the stories of others. I align this lived experiences with the argument of Hutchings (2014) who asks if the universal ethicists can begin to de-centre themselves in order to better negotiate the demands of a global ethic in IR. I suggest that being quiet is one way to heed this particular call. Silence, I go on to write, can enhance the imaginative capabilities of authors as listening communities opening them up to the possibilities of evocative truth.

As I set out to tell this tale, however, it became increasingly apparent that I could not do it effectively without turning to the explicit role that emotions played in its unfolding. A technical, universal, and rational knowledge critiqued by Naumes (2015) and Doty (2004) alike could not do justice to the fear of deportation and being separated from my family. Nor could it describe the anger and feelings of being let down by the chimera of a cosmopolitan moral ethic. Equally, it could not describe the solace I found in the stories of those who, like me, were experiencing the devastating power of the state in a political world characterised by uncertainty and unpredictability. These emotional experiences, while deeply personal, I would come to learn, were also as Bondi (2005) writes, transpersonal. She draws on her own training in psychotherapy to elaborate on a theory of practice whereby by emotions enact a process of ‘betweenness’ (Bondi, 2005: 442). Emotions flow from within, between and among people. This resonated in my own experience of telling my story as well as listening to the stories of others. Emotions, as Bochner and Ellis (2016) write, resonate. It is a power which allows stories to move beyond the personal. Herein lies the power of evocative autoethnography. It gives shared meaning to the lived experiences that inform our daily lives in an otherwise unpredictable and uncertain world.

This article rehearses certain aspects of my own deportation experience within the context of being a scholar of global ethics in order to showcase this very point. This unique experience fosters an innovative rehearsal of an emerging fascination with the micropolitics of global ethics, as discussed by Solomon and Steele (2016). They point to the role that emotions can play in the understanding of this micropolitical iteration of global ethics as ‘grand strategies’ and ‘grand theories’ of IR fail to make sense of a post 9/11 world. I draw inspiration from Tolia-Kelly (2006) who makes the point that writing is itself ‘an experiential and emotional activity’ (2006: 213). So, while this writing stands on its own, as an example of evocative autoethnography, it likewise demonstrates how scholars might begin to excavate the emotional qualities of the stories that inform the everyday sites of IR. In so doing I am crafting an explicit link between the work of IR scholars who have embraced autoethnography (see, for example, Bleiker and Brigg, 2010; Dauphinee, 2010; Doty, 2010; Löwenheim, 2010; Neumann, 2010) and the idea of evocative autoethnography as outlined by Bochner and Ellis (2016). I hope, in so doing, to provoke a wider conversation on how this method can attend to the role of emotions within the discipline of IR in general, and global ethics in particular.

Part 1: The disorientation of trauma and the potential of reflexivity

Trauma, as Edkins (2002) writes, is disorientating. The experience can leave you confused and as Crossley (2000) notes, without words to explain what you are experiencing and its effect on you. My trauma, which I rehearse in this first section, begins when my own worldview began to fall apart. It began when I was ordered to be deported from the United Kingdom. An act, I would later learn, which while experienced personally, is a political tool used by the state to demonstrate its power (Nyers, 2003, 2006). Deportation stands at odds with a vulnerable rendering of humanity in need of care and protection. This I knew almost instantaneously. What I could not make sense of, however, was why it was happening to me. I identified as a cosmopolitan, both professional and personally. Among other things it allowed me to embrace a form of moral agency predicated on practical reasons (see O’Neill, 1986, 2001). So while I recognised the fragility of goodness and the role that moral luck played within our lives (see Nussbaum, 2001), and our shared, inherent vulnerability, I remained bewildered. The personal experience of being ordered deported stood in stark contrast to the professional worldview I had constructed, premised on a cosmopolitan ideal of friendship, nonviolence and shared human vulnerability (see Lu, 2009). My ensuing silence emerged chiefly because I could not reconcile the havoc that moral luck was wreaking on my own life and the inability of practical reason to counteract this uncontrollable force. To find myself without words to describe the turmoil I was negotiating, as my position in the world became increasingly precarious, was disarming. Yet, as this section reveals, it also pushed me to discover, and ultimately embrace, a reflexive position in the world.

As I positioned myself within a professional cosmopolitan world during the course of my PhD, my need for security and belonging within this framework excluded the voices of many others. While the singular act of embracing cosmopolitanism may have enacted a personal level of comfort, it simultaneously denied to many the space to negotiate their own subjective and ethical rendering in my safe and certain world. The task which befell me was to transform a traumatic experience into a creative journey of self-discovery, or re-discovery, while carving out a space within this journey for the voices I had previously shut out. It was reading the works of Ackerly and True (2008) that prompted me to consider what, if any, value a lack of words might have as I embarked on this task. They write of the research process and push academics to reflect on the outcomes of their research design, especially those which were unexpected. In this negotiation, they suggest that when academics find themselves with information that does not ‘fit’ into the research paradigm they can choose from a variety of options. They can ignore the outcome. They can attempt to pigeonhole the findings into a structure that most likely does not allow for the information to fit comfortably within it. Or they can reflect on the structure of knowledge production and query the outcome in order to better understand what has emerged and how it happened. In this final act they show how reflexive thinking can help gain greater insight into the production of knowledge and, in turn, enrich and query the process of research design.

Ackerly and True (2008) provide an image of the academic as an agent responsible for the production of knowledge. This image is not the idea of an individual moral agent in its traditional rendering (see O’Neill, 1986, 2001, or MacIntyre, 1999), as someone who deliberates, acts, and then moves within a particular moral framing. Instead, the academic agent emerges when choices are made about what information to put forward and disseminate. I suggest this idea with an awareness of the writings of Hutchings (2007, 2015) and her reflections on the temporal nature of IR and political theory more broadly. Hutchings attends to the way in which scholars in the social sciences have embraced a scientific method that eschews the particular and embraces the universal and in so doing champions a form of rationality that has dominated the academe. Hers is not the only work that documents an unfolding version of knowledge production that begins with an acute appraisal of the West’s interpretation of the enlightenment. Much of what she says is likewise discussed in the writings of Toulmin (1992) and MacIntyre (2013). Both authors offer their own challenges to the notion of enlightenment. Yet Hutchings’s work is interesting because she suggests that within this unfolding history it is the monks, and their role in monasteries, that privileges their social status affording them the possibility of predicting an unfolding history.

I suggest that it is not a far step to imagine that those engaged in the production of knowledge might enjoy the privilege of the monks discussed and challenged by Hutchings (2015). I turn to the writings of Malkki (1995, 1996) to support this claim. Malkki draws on an ethnographic framing of her fieldwork experiences working with refugees and exiles in Burundi in a post-genocide environment. Malkki’s work problematises the experience of displacement and wonders how exile is absorbed into a common identity and the group’s narration of the self; however, while visiting Burundi to excavate this claim she noticed a wider phenomenon which she labelled corporeal anonymity. She soon discovered that the information that she was collecting did not fit within the humanitarian structures that informed a Western aid agenda. When she confronted those charged with delivering aid, and queried this emerging problem – that the lived experiences of the exiles did not align with the structures of liberal humanitarian aid – she was shut down. There was no space within which to conduct such conversations. What is more, it was made clear to her that this was not a new problem, rather an acknowledged but undiscussed one.

Malkki’s (1996) work provides an excellent example of Ackerly and True’s (2008) reflexive suggestions. A cursory, albeit limited and brief, look across disciplines reveals such silencing, in various guises, is not isolated. For example, Mauthner (2000) provides a detailed description of her experiences as a researcher excavating and reporting on the bonds of sisterhood. Mauthner seeks to portray an honest story of what it is to be a sister. She hopes to reveal the emotional qualities of the experience but also the micropolitical lived experiences of growing up as, and with, a sister. Yet her ability to do so is stymied when she reflects on her findings in light of her ethical responsibilities as a researcher. She feared that some individuals had revealed too much having blurred the boundaries of researcher/researched when it became known that she too was a sister with her own lived experiences. She details her worries surrounding how to report such personal and emotional disclosures and not enact harm on both her research participants and their sisterly bonds.

Mauthner’s (2000) piece is exceptionally telling in its reflexive capacities. Her original desire was to report on those exact findings that, in the end, she felt compelled to exclude for fear of enacting harm. She reflects, by way of conclusion, on this fact. Hers is an interesting contradistinction to the outcomes of Malkki (1996). Both scholars witnessed and attended to a silencing in their research; however, their outcomes were significantly different. While Malkki (1996) problematised her lived experience as researcher and incorporated it into her findings, Mauthner (2000) for fear of harming her participants remained quiet. In so doing they both enacted a form of reflexive agency in the telling of their research story revealing along the way the privileged position of the academic. Both scholars offer up uncertainty and insecurity within a position of privilege in as much as they ruminate on what stories to omit, what stories to tell and perhaps equally importantly, how to tell them. Within this negotiation silence enables a form of reflexive thinking allowing the ethically positioned researcher to engage reflexively with their findings. This act suggests a positive rejoinder to Hutchings’s (2014) question. Can the universal ethicist enact a similarly minded reflexive imagination?

Hutchings (2014) writes of the vulnerability of the ethical universal agent and wonders if they are able to surrender to the demands of reflexivity. This question is posed with an awareness of the global, universal, positioning of the archetypal ethicist within IR. While Malkki (1996) and Mauthner (2000) reveal a reflexive imagination that fosters a negotiation of their unexpected outcomes, it is only very recently that steps have been taken to broaden the discussions of a reflexive practice among scholars of IR. Amoureux and Steele (2016) suggest that while reflexive methodologies have long peppered IR writings (see, for example, Eagleton-Pierce, 2011; Guzzini, 2000; Hamati-Ataya, 2011, 2013; Neufeld, 1993), little has been done to enact a serious discussion of a rigorous understanding of the varieties of reflexivity and how it might inform the discipline. They offer a fourfold typology of reflexive approaches, one of which is a form of reflexive agency as practice. Reflexivity in this rendering demands that academics are vigilant in their use of reflexive tools. Amoureux and Steele (2016) go so far as to suggest that there is an obligation on the part of the researcher to engage reflexively. As such, this approach to the world is closely aligned with an ethical sensibility. More recently Amoureux (2015) has built on this work suggesting an ethical reflexivity predicated on difference. His account eschews the universal and draws on an intermingling account of Foucault and Aristotle to negotiate the world.

Amoureux’s (2015) claims suggest less certainty than alternative engagements with more traditional renderings of global ethics. Yet making sense of what this unknowing might bring forth is important. It is a call that I continue to attend to, albeit unwillingly at first, in the hopes of addressing Hutchings’s (2014) question. I do so chiefly because the freedom that has followed the abandoning of the universal assumption of a common vulnerability, long associated with a global cosmopolitan ethic, has been awe-inspiring. While I continue to interrogate my subjective positioning(s) within this unfolding journey, I do so with a commitment to decolonise my mind and recognise that the lens I was trained to look out upon the world may purport to provide safety and cushion vulnerability. In reality, what being ordered deported revealed to me was that universal prescriptions of ethics foster insecurity, deny many a sense of belonging and foster rupture at the site of community building. While I now possess the words to articulate this experience, the words do not foster security. Instead, I openly negotiate a daily sense of precarity and insecurity. To deny this anxious reality is to return to my previously held position in the world. So, I carry it with me, openly, aware that silence is a central tool in my personal decolonising experience.

Part 2: The reflexive potential of eloquent silence

My understanding of silence within the production of knowledge began with an awareness of Malkki (1996) and Mauthner (2000). Yet it did not end at this point. Instead, as I showcase in this second section, I was pushed to further discover its roles in my own personal transformation, but also how it might inform my own research. With this in mind, my negotiation of silence continued with the writings of Li (2004) who reminds readers that a desire to define what silence might be will ultimately end up in a series of regressive definitions. Li (2004) suggests, drawing on Jaworski (1992), that ‘a critical inquiry into silence should focus on how silence works in different communicative texts’ (2004: 157). Most helpfully, he reminds us that silence is not a standalone concept. Silence is a relational concept that exists on a continuum of human communication. He notes that ‘the complementary relationship between speech and silence indicates that silence and speech are functionally equivalent’ (Li, 2004: 158). Following on from this I am mindful of the claims suggested by Picard (1952) who writes that silence does not begin when speech concludes. ‘Silence’, he writes, ‘is an autonomous phenomenon. It is therefore not identical with the suspension of language. It is not merely the negative condition that sets in when the positive is removed; it is rather an independent entity, substring in and through itself’ (Picard, 1952: 17). It is, he suggests, in the absence of language that silence gains a higher level of prominence.

A relational, communicative, description of silence sets the stage for a discussion of how silence might enable a reflexive deposition on the part of the agent predisposed to the excavation of emotions. I borrow from Ephratt’s (2008) description of an eloquent silence to further elaborate on this claim. Eloquent silence, he writes, is ‘an active means chosen by the speaker to communicate his or her message’ (p. 1913). In articulating this idea, he is drawing on the works of others who have likewise championed this particular theme (see, for example, Dauenhauer, 1980: 3–6, 55; Saville-Troike, 1985; Kurzon, 1998: 9–19; on Poyatos, 2002). ‘Silence’, Ephratt (2008) writes, ‘in such cases is the socially built-in means whereby one expresses one’s empathy as in cases of loss and sorrow, or one’s admiration, reference or bewilderment in the presence of the mighty’ (p. 1917). Eloquent silence reveals a multidisciplinary, built-in emotive force. This function emerges either through words or silences when the agent ‘express his or her emotions, internal experiences’ (Ephratt, 2008: 1913). Eloquent silence can capture pain, empathy and care. Moreover, it can embody both positive and negative moments.

Silence, then, becomes the vehicle through which emotions can enact their transpersonal nature moving beyond individual experience to a more communal negotiation. In making this claim I am positioning my own understanding of emotions as both individual and communal and I draw on the works of Bondi (2005) to support this understanding. Bondi’s work embraces a psychotherapeutic understanding of emotions. She draws on a theory of practice which attends to the relationship of patient and therapist, to highlight the relationality of emotions while articulating the distinction between emotion and affect. While her argument is directed at the discourses of emotional geopolitics, there is much to learn from her interpretation. She refers, by way of example, to the patient/client relationship within this professional setting to demonstrate how emotions are lived and experienced, but also interpreted and shared, in the context of a therapeutic dyad (that is to say, client and therapist). The inherent value of this approach, she goes on to write, is that it simultaneously discusses emotions as deeply personal, subjective experiences while acknowledging that emotions emerge and flow in between people.

Emotions, Bondi (2005) writes, have a ‘betweeness’, or a connective medium within which researchers, research subjects and knowledge production are all immersed. There is, she writes, an emotional environment whereby emotions can be communicated beyond words. As she recounts her experiences of therapy she reiterates the importance not only for silence, but also ‘pacing, non-verbal utterances, voice timber and the felt sense’ enabling emotional communication beyond words. If this space embraces a reflexive practice, the possibilities of an eloquent silence come to the fore and the possibilities of ‘re-storying’, as described by Epston and White (1990), can begin. Re-storying facilitates an act of remembering that unearths previously discarded and otherwise forgotten aspects of lived experience. It can prompt alternative interpretations of lived experiences, or unearth altogether new modes of being and knowing. In short, it focuses on what they call ‘secondary knowledge’. Such knowledge, I suggest, can be emotional. Indeed, there is reason to believe it ought to be. As Jaggar’s (1989) writings on outlaw emotions remind us, the production of knowledge has long silenced the role that emotions play in the rehearsal of objective modes of being and knowing. As I embraced this autoethnographic position I was coming to understand the centrality of an eloquent silence in the task of reflexive work, but also in recognising, and attending to the emotional qualities within the stories I heard, but was also being told.

I wonder if by turning to the works of Saulitis (2013) my own interweaving of a reflexive silence and transpersonal form of emotions might gain clarity. Eva Saulitis is a trained biologist who turned, towards the end of her career, to creative writing as a means of disseminating her findings. Her work centres on the life, and plight, of transient orca whales in Alaska, in particular after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. She reflects, in her creative moments, on the task she is undertaking and wonders if she is equipped to tell the story of the transient orca. Saulitis gathers her data following the swimming path of the orca whale. She relies on orca sightings from others in the region to start her day. Then her ability to track the orcas rests chiefly on being able to identify the whales by their dorsal fin markings. When they dive Saulitis relies on a hydrophone (under water microphone) to track their calls and (hopefully) follow them while they swim under water.

Saulitis is studiously reflexive of her reliance on sight and sound to gather data. Intuitively she wonders if she is doing a good enough job at telling the story of the transient orca whale because, as she points out to her reader, she can only report what the orca allows her to witness. There is a somatic quality to her reporting. She relies on sensory interpretation to tell an incomplete story. Here, I would suggest that silence is being used not only to be actively reflexive, to imagine a story not being told, but it is also being used to complete an otherwise incomplete story. There is an awareness of her shortcomings as a researcher and a surrendering to the way in which the transient orca conducts her daily engagements. She appeals to the reader to allow her this leniency chiefly because the transient orcas are going extinct. They cannot reproduce in the aftermath of the oil spill. That Saulitis turns to silence provides a way of reflecting not only on the limitation of her methods but also the limitations of relying on the senses to gather a complimentary form of raw data. What I want to suggest is that she is, in telling of this absence, turning to an eloquent form of silence.

I suggest that it is within this negotiation of silence that Saulitis (2013) situates her own lived experience of tracking orcas. She adopts a narrative approach that allows her to embed herself in the telling of the orcas’ story/ies. She rehearses what is to track, but also grieve for, the orca whales. Within this grief for the orcas, Saulitis interweaves her own grief and mortality. The book begins by way of a vignette describing her absence from the lives of orca whales as she combats an aggressive form of breast cancer – an indication of her own silence. Indeed, as the orcas continue to disappear from the Alaskan landscape so too does Saulitis’s presence dwindles. The increasingly frequent absences of the transient orcas are narrated against the backdrop of a devastated and permanently altered Alaskan landscape. This absence, and sense of decay, is likewise unfolding on a slightly altered canvas – the body of a woman. While one woman’s battle with breast cancer, and its impact on her ability to perform research, might seem a long way away from the discipline of IR, I suggest that there are important commonalities. Saulitis is negotiating her own, personal, uncertainty. Her disease will not provide her with certainties. She reflects on how much time she may or might not have, with her own loved ones, but also with her love of the transient orca whales. It is within this reflection that she turns away from an objective scientific method and embraces a narrative form of inquiry. Indeed, the title of the book reveals so many levels of attenuated discovery – Into Great Silence is more than simply a story of a woman, with breast cancer, studying transient orca whales – it hints at how in the face of uncertainty we surrender to what we cannot make sense of.

Part 3: The emotional resonance of stories and affective empathy

The discipline of IR is familiar with such uncertainty. I turn to the potential for uncertainty, alongside reflexivity, in this final section to discuss the particular emotions that unfold within my own lived experiences. In order to do so I turn first to The Politics of Exile (2013). As the pages of this story unfold, the reader is asked to imagine how the main protagonist can negotiate her feelings of care and love to another who, it is subtly hinted, might have participated in war crimes during the Balkan Conflict. Dauphinee’s (2013b) discussion of writing this book reflects on this theme asking how we might love those that can perform hateful acts. Yet for me, the more compelling story to this work is in its birth. Dauphinee (2010) describes how she came to write a narrative and adopt a subjective approach to knowledge production as she grappled, as a PhD student, with questions of authority and representation in the conduct of fieldwork. She recalls being asked on what authority might she research war, not having lived through it, and what privilege she enjoyed that allowed her to tell the stories of others. What I take away from this story, and why I recount it here, is to highlight the thematic relationship this doubt has with the writings of Saulitis (2013) in attempting to convey the story of the transient orcas, albeit a story that is peppered with silences and omissions. It sets the stage for a rehearsal of my own negotiation of anger, which then prompted an experience of affective empathy, which I go on to argue, is valuable in the process of listening, and telling evocative stories.

Dauphinee’s (2010, 2015) writing is comforted by a humility that begins with anger. This anger, she recounts, bubbles up when she is let down by a method of interrogating the world which, up until she is posed this question, draws on a personal faith. I recognise this negotiation. I suggest to you that not only have I experienced it on a personal level, but I continue to negotiate it on a professional level as well. I was once an ardent supporter of a universal ethic couched in the idea of ‘do good and avoid evil’. It is an approach to the world best evidenced in the writings of Lu (2009), which suggests a shared, human, vulnerability, seeking out friendship and eschewing violent practices. It was a comforting worldview that allowed a privileged understanding of empowered moral agency. I believed everyone had the voice they needed to represent themselves and achieve their own particular life goals. Yet as I navigated the process of appealing my deportation order I would soon learn that many of the stories I would come to hear, and remember vividly, did not resonate with my own cosmopolitan worldview. Moreover, I harboured a growing uncertainty that their stories might never feature in its discussions at all. There was frustration and confusion within this realisation one which, I would later understand, was rooted in anger.

I was angry; however, I lacked the words to describe and explain this experience. Shilliam (2013) writes of anger. He suggests, in a chapter on anger and vulnerability, that the western coloniser might just ‘need therapy’. He draws on the writing of Fanon to discuss the relationship and of the Maori and their colonisers. He writes that until those who engaged in the destruction of the Maori culture ‘get angry!’ they will not be able to move forward with the reconciliation process. Reading this work in 2014 I struggled to understand what he was saying. There exists, in this argument, an emotional complexity that did not fit into my own cosmopolitan worldview. Yet rather than engage with this confusion and reflect on its transformative potential as an eloquent silence suggests, I suppressed it, aware on some level of the problems that would emerge if I did surrender to such negotiations. To pursue a line of thinking which advocated being angry, and reflect on what this might mean, I acknowledge, was to surrender to a world that seriously challenged the safe structures of cosmopolitan agency I had constructed. Yet, these structures had already, unwittingly, begun to crumble. The sheer bewilderment of being ordered deported had inadvertently started to destroy any cocoon of security I believed I enjoyed. I was negotiating a precarious and uncertain terrain in which my future was by no means safe or secure. I recognise within this lived experience what Crossley (2000) describes in her writings on trauma; namely, that it instantaneously removes any vestige of security and comfort.

As I tried to remain objective, and ignore the increasingly visible cracks and fissures in my daily life, the uncertainty that being ordered deported generated played out in many ways, always beyond my control. For example, owing to the deportation order I had to sit a Life in the United Kingdom Test. This is one of many things that those wanting citizenship in the United Kingdom must do. It cost £50 (in 2014) to take the test and the text books cost another £36 to acquire. The test is comprised of 50 multiple-choice questions and must be taken in English. I studied diligently for the test, yet I was scared I would fail. The fear of failure was one of pride, not one of means. I was aware that if I did fail I could take the test again. I had plenty of time to facilitate this, and I also had access to funds to do it. I completed the test in a room with six other individuals. Five of us were women. I was the only one who spoke English as a first language. I was also the only one whose country of origin was Western and White. I recall the uncertainty, indeed even the nausea, I experienced when taking this test vividly as I recount this story here. Yet I know in that moment my lived experience paled in comparison to that of the other women I waited with for our results. We all cried in that 60-minute interval as our tests were marked. I only noticed my tears as I listened to what these other women, in broken English, were telling me.

We all shared a sense of fear of failure – yet their failure was altogether different than my own. One recalled the 12 months in which she had put aside enough money to take the test. That it took so long to save up meant that she only had one opportunity to take the test and pass before her current VISA expired. Another spoke of the need to first learn English to understand what she needed to learn. Again, this having taken so much time she too only had this single opportunity to take and pass the test before she was separated from her 4-month-old baby who would, she had been informed by her husband, remain in the United Kingdom with him if she was deported to Pakistan. These women had run out of time and money to continue their fight to stay with their families. If they did not pass the test they would be separated. These stories remain with me many years after I sat the test, as does their emotional impact. Their stories prompted me to wonder where, in my cosmopolitan universalism, such stories might emerge. The lived experience of these women suggests a hierarchy of vulnerability in which the plight of some is prefaced over that of others. It is a stark reminder of the ‘abject cosmopolitan’ (Nyers, 2003). The abject cosmopolitan does not fit within my carefully constructed worldview. They are situated outside of its care and attention. The abject nature of these women’s stories reveal, as Cole (2016) writes, that vulnerability might emerge in a common desire for survival but it is experienced in multiple and diverse ways. Ways, I was learning, that challenged my universal iteration of cosmopolitan morality.

On a more personal level, however, these stories resonated. Bochner and Ellis (2016) write of the resonant power of stories. They suggest that when a story resonates it connects individuals with one another. A story, they contend, can connect lives lived at a distance. Moreover, an evocative story can also bridge time and space in such a way that compels the audience to make use of its message. Coles (1989) calls this experience, ‘evocative truth’, and suggests that a good story allows individuals to ‘take it in and use it for [them]selves’ (1989: 47). I could, when listening to what these women were telling me, identify with their fear of being separated from their families. Similarly, I understood the confusion that the migration policies within the United Kingdom had enacted in their daily lives. What is more, I shared a similar feeling of helplessness that comes with the arbitrary rules that deny families the opportunity to be together. So, while I could not in that moment, speak and offer words of solace and comfort, my silence unknowingly began a very personal journey. The resonant quality of these stories pushed me to wonder how best to communicate the stories I was hearing. It also led me to wonder what stories I was otherwise silencing within my iteration of a cosmopolitan global ethic.

It was, with this awareness, that I re-imagined the writings of Hutchings (2014) and discovered, along the way, an alternative way of being and knowing in the world rooted in what I have come to call affective empathy. In suggesting this particular approach to the world, I am drawing heavily on the writings of Krznaric (2007). He writes that empathy has an imaginative quality that provides individuals with the capacity to extend beyond themselves. It is, he writes, ‘the imaginative act of stepping into another person’s shoes and being able to look at the world from their perspective’ (Krznaric, 2007: 8). The perspective taking approach to empathy is, as Head (2016) writes, open to interpretation. A normative interpretation, she writes, ‘implies some form of positive identification with the feelings of others’ (Head, 2016: 175). What is more, normative forms of empathy seek, as Krznaric (2007) writes, to expand the boundaries of moral concern. They can easily align with the underlying assumption of a cosmopolitan ethic endorsing not just universal claims to vulnerability and wider notions of global humanity but also ethico/political decision making that supports these ideas (see, for example, the works of Appiah, 2006, or Linklater, 2007).

Normative interpretations of empathy, like emotional resonance, share an important feature – the ability to imagine. Yet, at the same time, the way in which this imagination unfolds is slightly different. The emotional resonance of a story suggests that the audience is affected by the story chiefly because the experiences recounted by the storyteller is, or are, comparable. There is, in this moment, a shared experience or memory that has the potential to have a wider impact. It implies a personal touch, albeit imagined, through the vehicle of a story. We see this creative form of imagination playing out in the writings of Saulitis (2013). She takes her audience with her on her daily Zodiac journeys as she tracks the orcas’ unfolding daily lives. She similarly invites her audience into her studio to listen to their calls to one another, explaining the idiosyncratic nature of each orca call. She wonders, with the reader, what this call might mean, for the community and relationships that inform the whale pod, but also, in the context of a community on the verge of extinction. She builds a relationship with her audience so that, when she begins to recount her negotiation of breast cancer as a sight of unknowing and uncertainty, the empathy extended to the whale community moves simultaneously over to her character and authorial voice.

The emotional resonance of a story, then, relies on the relational quality of author and audience and the shared emotional experience that the story evokes. At the time of writing ‘The Life in the UK Test’, and hearing the stories of the women who wrote it that day as well, I had not yet discovered the writings of Saulitis (2013) or Dauphinee (2013a, 2013b). I could not, at that time, articulate this notion of an affective empathy stemming from a particular understanding of resonance and evocative truth. I did know, however, that their stories had affected me, both personally and professionally. In rehearsing the shared imaginative capacities of resonance and normative empathy I am not suggesting empathy is the antidote to all that ails a global cosmopolitan ethic. I am suggesting that the resonant power of emotional storytelling can help individuals to see beyond their daily lives and imagine the plight of another. It is a point rendered poignantly by Khaled Hosseini (2018), in his recent Guardian column. ‘Stories are the best antidote to the dehumanisation caused by numbers’, he writes. ‘I see myself, the people I would give my life for, in every tale I am told’. Yet to capture the resonant quality of stories we must learn to be a good audience, to listen in silence, to what is being said and actively reflect upon it.

Conclusion

I began this article by way of a confession – to embrace an accountability in the research I perform. The awareness that I, as a researcher, was actively silencing the lived experience of those who Nyers (2003) labels abject cosmopolitans, owing to my position and worldview, was deeply troubling. I recognise that my construction of a global cosmopolitan ethic was both a personal endeavour and a professional goal and in so doing am complicit in the silencing of authorial voices noted by Naumes (2015). It was the reflexive stance that I embraced, as my deportation experience drew to a close, that allowed me to reflect, with honesty, on this state of affairs. I recount it here, with an awareness that reflexivity is an ongoing activity, and that my desire to remain open to the ends of eloquent silence, and continue to find evocative truths in the stories of others is one that must be maintained with vigilance and determination. Moreover, I am aware that it is a path that not all individuals will choose to follow. That being said, in telling my story, and excavating its emotional qualities I hope to have set out a conversation that can forge a strong relationship between autoethnography and the study of everyday emotions within the discipline of IR.

My goal of unlearning, and recreation, within insecurity is far from complete. I remain exceptionally uncertain as I navigate this newfound, critical terrain. I am continuously reminded of how tenuous an experience this is and how it requires a vigilance that ensures I do not slip, unaware, into old habits. In order to help with this task, I have turned to the writings of Spivak (1988) and her articulation of the subaltern. She suggests that the subaltern cannot speak and wonders how to enact a conversation that might redress this silence. She suggests that only those who are privileged and who can unlearn through loss will begin to recognise and attend to a relationship with the subaltern. Yet for Spivak (1988) it is not enough to simply recognise and listen to the stories of the subaltern. The process of unlearning through loss suggests the possibility of a conversation and that this act will begin a process. We must learn how to hear, and listen actively, to what is being said. Be it the language I adopt, the stories I tell or how I listen to others, the task before me – of unlearning and being quiet – continues. This journey is decidedly more uncertain in its structures than what I was previously trained to experience. It requires me to surrender an accountable version of myself to my audience to strive, as Bochner and Ellis (2016) suggest, for ‘honest, authenticity, clarity, and meaningfulness’ (2016: 25), as I interrogate the evocative truths of my past experiences.

I suggest, by way of conclusion, that acknowledging the value of an ethical, and eloquent silence, might just be one of many tools to facilitate this process. Like Saulitis’s (2013) rumination on the trajectories of the orca whales, the emotional meeting points suggested in an eloquent silence can prompt stories of an emotional and personal quality that are otherwise silenced in the hierarchical forms of knowledge production that dominate the discipline of IR. Eloquent silences, I suggest, carve out spaces for others to intervene within the telling of a story and provide a much-needed juxtaposition to objectivity and sterility like that noted by Naumes (2015). Within this space, I have come to know, there is a space for learning, albeit subjectively. As I embrace a form of critical reflexivity I can attest to the fact that the occupants in my lived experience have changed. In the silence that has been prompted by insecurity and unknowing what, and how I listen, has transformed. The stories that provide solace and comfort are uniquely different than those that once informed both my personal and professional life.

Yet, at the same time, surrendering to reflexivity, and embracing the personal and emotional, is a risky business. The scariest part of this surrender is the potential for criticism that comes from those who eschew autoethnography and the knowledge fostered by a surrendering to somatic presentations of knowing and being. The simultaneous act of being both the source of knowledge and its cultivator sets out many risks for the academic. As Bleiker and Brigg (2010) have written, in the context of IR, autoethnography, and inter alia, reflexivity, must attend to the challenges of navel gazing. Those engaged in this form of inquiry must not simply emote, or engage in a form of personal therapy, a point well noted by Crossley (2000). Instead, she suggests, it is a space within which the individual can gain insight into their very being prompting insight into the self and the other within a socially constructed world. Yet in order to do this, individuals must, in the spirit of Amoureux (2015) eschew the universal and attend to the particular. It thus bears reminding that the stories that emerge within an emotionally framed context such as this are deeply situated and are highly contextual. With this in mind, I acknowledge that adopting an autoethnographic form of storytelling is an unorthodox approach that is only beginning to enjoy a slightly less tenuous foothold within the discipline. Yet I offer up my own stories aware of the call to attend to micropolitical ethics (Solomon and Steele, 2016) and alternative methodologies that might carve out spaces for otherwise silenced stories (Stanley and Jackson, 2016). In so doing I hope to enact a form of reflexive agency that displaces the power of the monks highlighted by Hutchings (2015) while showcasing how autoethnographic methods have a role to play in the excavation of emotions within everyday IR, and how their resonance has an important role to play in the articulation of a micropolitical ethics of IR.