Relational Theories of Encounters and the Relational Subject

ABSTRACT

This paper reflects upon the complex relational enmeshments the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to. It does this through a critical engagement with contemporary social thought on what it means to be in relation, particularly that of radical relationism. Such an engagement is made possible by Sara Ahmed’s Strange Encounters, which unlike radical relationism, enables us to engage with power relations, the knowledge/power nexus and the role politics and ethics play in the conceptualisation of the relational subject. We begin with a brief overview of relational social theory highlighting some internal differences and Ahmed’s connection to these. The concluding sections interrogate how temporality and the theory/praxis nexus manifest themselves in these accounts of relationality.

KEYWORDS:

• Strange encounters
• radical relationism
• relationality
• relational subject

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Buys

Rebecca Buys is currently completing her PhD at Deakin University, Australia. Her research explores the experiences of family violence campaigners engaging with the 2016 Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence. Through notions of organised encounter and radical relationism, she examines the complex and complicated entanglements of processes seeking to make social change and the ways in which relations of power and the intersections of temporal modalities shape the construction of meaning in the women’s narratives of their experiences. She comes to this research with 15 years’ experience working on change making processes in government and non-government organisations, and most recently employed on migration research projects at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation.

Vince Marotta

Vince Marotta is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Deakin University, Australia. He has written and taught in the area of cultural identities, multiculturalism, cross-cultural subjectivities and social theory. His most recent publications include Theories of the Stranger: Debates on Cosmopolitanism, Identity and Cross-cultural Encounters (Routledge, 2017) and The ‘migrant experience’: an analytical discussion in the European Journal of Social Theory 23 (4): 591–610, 2020.