Doing International Political Sociology: A workshop for doctoral students

6-7 May 2026

Carolina Miranda Futuro, doctoral assistant at the Global Studies Institute of the University of Geneva

Fabian Hofmann, doctoral candidate at ETH Zurich

Prof. Myriam Dunn Cavelty, Senior Scientist and Deputy for Research and Teaching at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) at ETH Zurich

Prof. Nora El Qadim, Professor and researcher at the University Paris 8 and CRESPPA-Labtop

Prof. Michele Weitzel, Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute of Geneva

With the aim of:

● Introducing IPS to doctoral students in Switzerland, 

● Providing a dedicated space for PhD students to explore and exchange on IPS concepts and tools, and 

● Strengthening the networks among early-career scholars working in and around IPS in Switzerland.

This atelier will combine introductory lectures on key IPS concepts and methodologies with paper-based workshops. It offers participants the opportunity to learn about IPS and apply it to their research, engaging in peer discussion. In this sense, it targets early-stage PhD students who are seeking to build a foundational literacy in IPS and to explore the ways in which its diverse and multi-purpose conceptual toolkit can generate insights across disciplinary boundaries. PhDs who explore international politics through critical security studies, praxiography, political ethnography, feminist or colonial perspectives, or other critical approaches will be able to gain significant insight from an IPS standpoint. 

At the same time, the atelier is also conceived as a space for more advanced doctoral researchers who are already familiar with IPS, providing them with extensive opportunities to deepen their expertise through close engagement with senior scholars and peers in the field. Through interactions in small classes, participants will be able to exchange with IPS scholars and deepen theoretical and methodological insights. Moreover, the second part of the atelier will revolve around targeted feedback on participants' projects, allowing more possibilities to personally exchange and critically reflect with invited scholars.

Day 1

10:00 - 11:00: Introduction / Welcome coffee

This session will begin with a social welcome, followed by a round of introductions to the participants, and then transition into an introductory session on IPS. The aim of this small lecture is to situate IPS within the IR discipline and outline its major assumptions and theoretical foundations. It will explore how IPS redefines key categories such as sovereignty, security, and the international, laying out key thematic areas and empirical terrains that structure contemporary IPS scholarship. It will trace how IPS scholars engage global phenomena through concepts like bordering, securitization, mobility, and race. This session will also quickly detail the methodological dimensions of IPS research. It will address how IPS studies transnational phenomena from a critical qualitative standpoint, and thus explain the organization of the other lectures of the day.

11:00 - 12:30: The Politics of Technology and Knowledge Production: STS and International Security - Myriam Dunn Cavelty

This session aims to explore how IPS can help investigate the entanglements between international security, knowledge, and technology. It will demonstrate how thinking about technologies politically and attuning to how they are embedded in discourses, expert practices, and infrastructures reveals an alternative way to interrogate security governance. By combining IPS and STS, this session will enable students to explore how technologies shape political orders and forms of subjectivity and vulnerability. The session will also explain how to adopt a critical methodological posture that is sensitive to the politics of knowledge that are embedded in (security) technologies and the discourses and practices that sustain them.

12:30 - 14:00: Lunch 

14:00 - 15:30: Seeing and feeling global politics: Affect and ethnography in IPS - Michelle Weitzel 

Complementing the first intervention, this session will concentrate on the ways IPS scholarship has engaged with affect as a concept and theoretical approach. It will explore how international politics can be investigated by paying attention to emotions and embodied experiences. Methodologically, it will explain how IPS has engaged with ethnography as a way to access and analyze the lived, affective, and situated dimensions of global politics. Special emphasis will be placed on how researchers attune themselves to silences, atmospheres, and everyday interactions to understand how power operates beyond formal structures and discourse.

15:30 - 16:30: Coffee Break 

16:30 - 17:30: Joint reflection of the day

This session will be co-moderated by Myriam Dunn Cavelty and Michelle Weitzel as a collaborative discussion with participants to conclude sessions, solidify main conclusions, and invite participants to reflect on how they can apply IPS in their own research, setting up main themes and interventions for the next day. 

19:00 – Dinner

Day 2

9:30 - 10:30: Interactive PhD workshop 

Participants will be asked to share a paper, proposal, or piece of their thesis prior to the atelier. In the second day workshop, they will be divided into smaller thematic/ theoretical/ methodological sessions to present their paper for a group discussion. The aim is to provide peer feedback and for students to take insights learned from the day before and attempt to apply IPS approaches to their own research. 

10:30 - 11:00: Coffee Break 

11:00 - 12:30: Interactive PhD workshop 

Continuation of the morning session.

12:30 - 13:30: Lunch 

13:30 - 14:30: Publishing in IPS journal - Nora El Qadim 

This session will provide an insight into the process, criteria, and major challenges of publishing a paper in a major peer-reviewed academic journal, like in IPS. 

14:30 - 15:00: Conclusion

Participants will be asked to share their impressions of the atelier and what they will like to see being organized by the IPS chapter in Switzerland. 

Temple des Éplatures

15