Eventing the Everyday: Narratives and Common Knowledge in US Foreign Policy.

Despite the 'mainstreaming' of constructivism in IR, the 'social turn' overlooks a crucial component of social life - the ordinary interactions that form the frequent and most common opportunity for dialogue among international actors. In this paper, I argue that ordinary interactions, like the creation of an Economic Partnership Commission to enhance and deepen US-Turkish partnership shortly after 9/11, are at the core of social processes. These interactions matter because they demonstrate how actors make their relations meaningful through a common language; one that relies on a re-engagement with the relevant past events familiar to participants. The 'trade talk' between the US and Turkey in 2002 relied on re-telling the past in order to make the economic negotiations meaningful. Events are not static 'things' in need of explanation or prediction, but rather elements of meaning-making and common knowledge. Ironically, then, events are extremely significant elements of the ordinary. By emphasizing how events are used as elements of story, I demonstrate the socially productive possibilities of the everyday. This requires close attention to narratives and I develop a methodology loosely based on David Campbell's work to examine how the articulated past events that appear in the narratives told to me in my personal interviews with US and Turkish elites in 2003 are formative of common knowledge and sense-making in international relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]