Foreign Policy Worlds: Diplomatic Designs and International Relations

Catalog description

Foreign policy unfolds through carefully crafted encounters and exchanges in both domestic and diplomatic arenas. International actors leverage narratives, venues, dress, gestures, images, and soundscapes to sustain relations with others, pursue security goals, and affect the world they live in. At the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, this course engages participants in new research on White House state dinners while drawing from a range of historical and global case studies from the early modern era to the present. Diplomatic dinners provide a lens into the everyday practices, protocol-driven scenes, mediatized moments, and spectacular occasions that are constitutive of the international stage and the theater of trust, respect, competition, conflict, and hegemony. At the end of the semester, a planning memo outlining the purpose and components of a state visit offers an opportunity to put knowledge into practice.