Art as Thought is a methods manifesto. It calls for more substantive approaches to mobilizing art in international relations theory. We argue that art's formal and material characteristics ought to be addressed as thought and as modes of political theorizing. Art is creative and critical, but too often, efforts to think about art as a site of politics have reduced artworks to illustrations of existing theories or conditions. Writing with and seeking to push further the rich field of work associated with the Aesthetic Turn in international relations theory,  we write against instrumentalizing art in the service of theory. Our manifesto calls for scholars to stop using art as the interesting anecdote that opens an essay or as the deus ex machina that provides tidy and hopeful conclusions to analyses of complex problems. Instead, we call for thinking with art. To think with art is to think with artworks themselves: the materials, forms, techniques, esthetics, and political strategies that shape them and are, in turn, shaped by them.

Marta Bashovski is Associate Professor of Politics and International Studies at Campion College at the University of Regina, Canada. Her research focuses on the politics of knowledge, narrative and aesthetics in/as political thought, and critical methodologies in international relations theory and political theory. Her work has been published in Globalizations, Global Studies Quarterly, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Theory & Event, Hybrid Pedagogy and elsewhere.

Danielle Taschereau Mamers writes and makes art in Toronto, Canada. Her research identifies critical and creative strategies for destabilizing authority structures reproduced by documents, images, and their archives. Her first book, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing: Documentation, Administration, and the Interventions of Indigenous Art (Fordham, 2024), investigates Indigenous artists’ engagements with settler documentation of Indian status in Canada. Alongside her research, Danielle is an illustrator and visual facilitator, specializing in research comics, infographics, and live illustration.