Art, parasitic critique & hacking : Discussing international political design through Jacob Remin’s ‘Harvesting the Rare Earth’

Summary, in English

How can we, as IR scholars, contribute to the daunting task of crafting a different world? In this paper, I suggest that we begin by looking towards art. Based on a reading of Jacob Remin’s art project ‘Harvesting the Rare Earth,’ I consider how the material imaginary presented in this particular work of art – bio-engineered worms that can extract rare earth minerals from e-waste – provides IR scholars with a glimpse of how the discipline can supplement its dominant focus on epistemics with more active forms of material, technological and aesthetic interventions into global political issues. To this end, I engage with a number of conceptual and methodological devices that have recently received attention in IR litterature; namely Jonathan Luke Austin’s call for the development of ‘international political design’ as a subdiscipline in IR, Michael Serres’ figure of the ‘parasite,’ and Claudia Aradau’s repurposing of ‘hacking’ as a form of methodological interference in critical security studies. Employing these analytical devices, I show how the aesthetic and material intervention performed in ‘Harvesting the Rare Earth’ not only negates or critisises the human tolls associated with rare mineral extraction in e-waste dumps in the Global South but also constitutes what I term a 'parasitic act of hacking' that can be leveraged for the ethico-political purpose of imagining and crafting alternative ways of living in and with the world. I end the paper with a discussion of the potential benefits and shortcomings of such interferences with world politics.