William Callahan’s work is known for pushing methodological boundaries and pedagogic practices in new and interesting directions. This is evidenced most clearly in his film-making projects, which take seriously the idea that knowledge about the social and political world can be conveyed at different registers: through our cognitive, discursive, and narrative capacities as well as through more affective, nondiscursive, and aesthetic modes of knowing. Callahan’s work in film sits alongside other big names like Sophie Harman, Seeing Politics: Film, Visual Method, and International Relations (2019), Michael J. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (2008), and Cynthia Weber, “I Am an American”: Filming the Fear of Difference (2011), all of whom have used film in exciting and pioneering ways: not just to present findings but to do research. As such, when I heard that Callahan had published a new book, I was really keen to get my hands on it and see where his research had taken him next.

Sensible Politics is concerned with the complex interplay between thinking, feeling, and social ordering—the ways in which and through which political actors may be persuaded or compelled by rhetorical-ideological messaging but also moved and compelled by sensory engagements with visual images, sounds, and tactile encounters in their everyday lives. The need for a more sensory disposition in politics and international relations (IR) is clear. Each year when I ask my new undergraduates about their first memory of national or international politics, they don’t tell me about the overwhelming sense of excitement they felt reading Locke or Hobbes for the first time. They tell me about their first encounter with the sights and sounds of war beamed to them through television, mobile phones, or computer screens; they tell me about Beyonce’s dazzling performance of “Formation” at the 2016 Superbowl; or they tell me about the playful, carnivalesque atmosphere at their first protest march or rally. What sticks with people (and not just our students!) is what moves them. A fuller appreciation for the “affect-work” that images and artifacts do—the ways that they participate in making and remaking the social world—is one of the ways that we can move from a “senseless” political theory (see Holly Eva Ryan and Matthew Flinders, “From Senseless to Sensory Democracy: Insights from Applied and Participatory Theatre,” Politics 38(2), 2018: 133–47) to one that is more “sensory” in scope.

So just how does Callahan do this? In my view, Sensible Politics makes three particularly valuable conceptual moves that build upon existing work IR’s “aesthetic turn” (for more on this see Roland Bleiker, “The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory,” Millennium 30(3), 2001: 509–33; Alex Danchev and Debbie Lisle, “Introduction: Art, Politics, Purpose,” Review of International Studies 35(4), 2009: 775–79; Cerwyn Moore and Laura J. Shepherd, “Aesthetics and International Relations: Towards a Global Politics,” Global Society 24(3), 2010: 299–309; Aida A. Hozić, “Introduction: The Aesthetic Turn at 15 (Legacies, Limits and Prospects),” Millennium 45(2), 2017: 201–5) to take us toward a more sensory approach. The first is “binary-jamming”—a great phrase, which brought to mind graffiti and street art where the cultural practice of ad-jamming is prevalent. Ad-jamming refers to efforts to subvert, neutralize, critique, or complicate commercial marketing or state propaganda. Binary-jamming is a similar sort of practice. Its aim is to confound, subsume, and ultimately get beyond some of the teleological dialectics and “this-or-that” thinking that is evidenced in approaches to IR and visual methods. Quite often, visual researchers find themselves pressed to choose between studying an image with reference to the politics of its production or with reference to its social effects; between an ideological deconstruction of the image or a more slippery engagement with its embodied effects and affects. Sensible Politics offers a novel attempt to get beyond this need to choose between two distinct research strategies (which Callahan refers to respectively as the visibility strategy and the visuality strategy). It does so by leveraging the concept of dynamic dyads. Distinct from fixed oppositional binaries, dynamic dyads are better thought about as relational concepts that can inform one another, but in ways that are often highly contingent and differ across time and space. The dynamic dyad of visibility-visuality allows us to examine or interpret what images or visual artifacts mean—the ways that they are encoded with ideological content, the ways that they mirror or challenge dominant cultural ideas and norms. But it also encourages us to be attuned to the ways that these artifacts and images do things performatively—anticipating or evoking emotional and affective responses that enable social ordering and moments of rupture or “dissensus” (qua Jacques Rancière’s 2010 Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics) to take place.

The second conceptual move that garnered my attention was Callahan’s claim toward “medium theory,” which I understood as a double entendre. On the one hand, “medium theory” can refer to analysis directed at media—not the news media as such, but the variety of material and communicative infrastructures through which we engage with politics and that participate in the construction and making of worldviews through “the visuality strategy.” These infrastructures are incredibly diverse and include maps, walls, gardens, and cyberspace—each of which receives a dedicated chapter in Sensible Politics. On the other hand, medium theory is a type of analysis that neither aims at totalizing grand narratives nor remains stuck at the level of micropolitics where exception is the rule. A medium theory instead offers researchers the analytical freedom to trace the ways that everyday acts, objects, and engagements can and often do add up to something more. Indeed, this mezzo level is where multitudinous quotidian acts come together to help form or disrupt discourses, ideologies, and social orders, and we ignore it at our (analytical) peril.

The third conceptual advance that Sensible Politics makes is in its attention to “multisensory experience.” To date, the vast majority of works emerging from IR’s aesthetic turn have been concerned with the visual sense. However, this elevation of the visual arguably risks neglecting or obscuring the political effects and influences posed by other forms sensory engagement—whether aural, olfactory, gustatory, or tactile. As Callahan acknowledges, we don’t just encounter the social world using a single faculty or sense. And this book, in many respects, seeks to push back against the primacy of the visual. This is most apparent in Callahan’s study of gardens (chap. 10), which examines the ways that manicured outdoor spaces—complete with the sights, sounds, and textures of nature—can function as multisensory heterotopias that invert and complicate martial discourses. Callahan’s effort to capture the multisensory is certainly a move in the right direction for those of us that want to see a more rounded approach to aesthetic politics that apprehends all the senses. Nonetheless, the book’s subtitle, “Visualizing International Relations,” and the decision to frame the empirical studies around the visibility/visuality dyad in particular, mean that the opportunities for dissecting multisensory encounters are perhaps not fully exploited. As I read, I wondered whether we should be looking to set up further productive sensory dyads. Could hearing/listening or touching/feeling, for example, do the same heavy lifting as visibility/visuality?

Sensible Politics is one of those rare books that you can dip in and out of quite effectively. Each one of the chapters develops our understanding of the uneasy and radically divergent ways that visuality and visibility converge around visual artifacts and material infrastructures. But, each chapter is also incredibly empirically rich, providing a meticulous excavation of the particular sites, images, sounds, and flavors where the everyday merges with the international. And, whilst there is now a burgeoning body of scholarship on everyday politics and everyday IR inspired in good measure by the work of Cynthia Enloe (“The Mundane Matters,” International Political Sociology 5(4), 1989: 447–50), Callahan remains one of the very few scholars to date that has taken Enloe at her word, by switching his research focus from the halls of power to take notes in a brothel, a kitchen, or—as discussed toward the end of Chapter 4—an actual latrine.