Time: Friday 10 February 10:15-11:30 AM
Venue: U4072, Main Building, University of Helsinki
Interstate diplomacy continues to evolve in an increasingly complex and digital post- pandemic world. No longer confined to closed-door summit halls and gated diplomatic compounds, the diplomatic assemblage has broadened and become more visible across space and scale. However, to date, geographic literature on diplomacy has largely focused on the official sites of state power and reach while neglecting the importance of the seemingly banal sites and practices of everyday diplomatic life. Considering this gap in the literature, I aim to extend the recent interest in critical geographies of diplomacy by studying diplomacy from a bottom-up perspective that connects everyday spaces and affective atmospheres to wider diplomatic processes. I discuss how diplomatic sites and atmospheres in Turkey, China, and beyond are manipulated for geopolitical ends and the kind of disjunctures between idealised designs of diplomatic spaces and the embodied experiences of their end users.
About the speaker