How is the world composed?

How do we make visceral, real, and lived sense of the International? The World Political Compositions project draws together contributions around the concept of composition, in the aesthetic sense of the term, and the five traditional senses of human perception, in order to answer this question more creatively, affectively, and – so – ‘objectively’ than they have been before. The contributors to the project have been asked to reflect on how simple sounds, sights, touches, smells, and tastes form the core of world political phenomena in terms of their manifestation of scale, their construction of systems of signification, their working to ‘make things happen’ around us, and ultimately their standing as the main building blocks of both everyday and academic sensemaking.

On this site, visitors can be find the non-textual content of those contributions: videos, artworks, souvenirs, buildings, signs, photographs, paintings, sculptures, maps, comics, and beyond that have been identified as being especially central to the ‘composition’ of particular world political phenomena, from the ground of sensuality up to the individual, collective, and global act of sense making. Each of these collections of the fragments that are composed into meaning making wholes are grouped around the sounds, sights, touches, smells, and tastes of world politics in the menu of this sight.

In addition, a series of resources of broader relevance to the World Political Compositions project can be found herein, as well as information on how the visitor might get further involved with the project and its participants.