[Soodang Distinguished Speaker Colloquium #14] Practicing and Producing Culture

• Date and Time: June 3 (Fri), 2022 / 5:00 PM
• Speaker: Deepak Nair (National University of Singapore)
• Organized by: Peace & Democracy Institute, Department of Political Science and International Relations

On June 3, 2022, Korea University’s Peace & Democracy Institute and Department of Political Science and International Relations invited Professor Deepak Nair to hold the 14th Soodang Distinguished Speaker Colloquium. In Colloquium, the author published a paper, <Practicing and Producing Culture> which is about the culture and norms that countries create within the international system of ASEAN.

Abstract: Studies of ‘culture’ and ‘practice’ in International Relations (IR) mostly talk past one another despite shared intellectual origins and influences. This paper offers a bridge by foregrounding a conception of culture grounded in concrete practical activity. Drawing on William H. Sewell Jr’s definition of culture as the “semiotic dimension of human social practice,” the paper explores the potential of the culture concept in IR with a few questions: how can we use culture in a manner that is conceptually precise and analytically helpful? How might one reconcile the emic uses of essentialist and self-orientalist representations in “cultural” discourses of practitioners without naturalising these invocations and obscuring their political effects? How can culture as practice sharpen the study of power? I respond to these questions by probing a puzzle about the everyday cultural production of ASEAN’s diplomacy.