Between the International and the Everyday: Geopolitics and Imaginaries of Home.

The connection between the everyday and the international has received increasing attention in critical IR in recent years. As many contributions aim to rethink the international in terms of the everyday, the mundane and the ordinary become a site of geopolitical analysis. The paper's central idea is that we, as academics and human beings, constantly face what can be called an international political sociology of the everyday in world politics: How is life in "distant" places? Who lives in these places? And, what are the people doing "over there"? By reflecting on how we obtain an idea of the everyday of certain places, this paper shifts its focus on representations or, more precisely, imaginations of home and the everyday for particular audiences. Precisely because the mundane can simultaneously be anything, everything, and nothing, it is important to turn to the practices and, in this vein, to the (geo)politics of mediating the everyday to us. In this regard, the paper provides an interpretive reading of two aesthetic texts--a film and a photographic essay--with the purpose of addressing imaginaries of home, the special senses, and venues of belonging wherein the everyday takes place, as particular sites of the international. In this way, the paper contributes to current efforts to decentralize current conceptions of the international. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]