Firmly embedded in academic practice, stylistic conventions work implicitly and explicitly to dictate the appropriate tones, structures, and mediums through which science is mediated and circulated. However, a multitude of voices have persistently critiqued the rules that determine what counts as science and the form it takes, as well as the hierarchies of legitimate knowledge they produce. If the scientific article should not hold the place of the highest and most professionally valued modality of knowledge production, what alternatives might stand in its place? Might we become authors whose writing is more pleasurable to read, for academic peers and the general public? In resisting epistemic traditions, we open up possibilities for pushing social scientific practice beyond the remit of the written word. With this emphasis on style, participants are invited to be playful, creative, and undisciplined in how they do and present international relations.

Scholars of the international find themselves implicated in a multiplicity of struggles. These struggles include the contestation of the injustices, inequalities, and ruinations sustained by global systems. They equally encompass the fight against the precarisation of working conditions in universities and infringements on academic freedom. Often read as reflecting the crises to which they are reacting, these struggles enliven spaces for utopia, as a method for collectively imagining desirable futures. So where does the mobilisation for building defences, resistances and alternative futures occur, both within and outside of the university? Whose labour goes unacknowledged, efforts ignored, and histories sidelined in discussions of these struggles, and why? When featuring the militant, precarious, marginalised or persecuted into tales of the international, does the politico-moral compass directing research shift? What responsibility of care and praxis of engagement should define how the academy relates to these movements and actors? How can academic work move beyond descriptions and distant analyses of struggles? This section invites interventions on global histories of activism and solidarity building, and different methods and ethics of engagement.