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The Visual Turn in IR: Documentary Filmmaking as a Critical Method

Although the field of international relations (IR) is arguably in the midst of a ‘visual turn’, few scholars have directly discussed research methods for studying visual international politics. This article follows the aesthetic turn’s call to resist the rational methods that frame our understanding of ourselves and the world. Yet it also argues that the visual turn is more than an elaboration of the aesthetic turn. While analyses of visual culture are characteristically suspicious of the power of images, this article argues that making films can provide an innovative method for studying IR. In particular, the visual turn can better examine the IR of self/Other relations in terms of affect, bodily sense and experience. The article thus goes beyond such theoretical discussions to offer an autoethnographic account of the methods used to produce a documentary film about being the Other in China: toilet adventures. It argues that fieldwork that employs on-camera interviews does not just gather the ‘facts’ of people’s experiences, but can also illustrate the affective politics of the estrangement, the giddiness, and thus the excess evoked by such experiences. The goal of this article is to show what documentary filmmaking can ‘do’ by providing an innovative method for creating new sites and senses of international politics.