Ben Clift’s co-authored article ‘Remembering and Forgetting IPE: Disciplinary History as Boundary Work’ (with Peter Marcus Kristensen and former PAIS legend Ben Rosamond - both at the University of Copenhagen), is the lead article in the latest issue (Vol. 29, No. 2) of Review of International Political Economy

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2020.1826341

First presented to PAIS’s IPE cluster in November 2017, where the authors received fabulously helpful and constructive comments, this work explores the disciplinary politics of IPE as a field by lifting the lid on the ‘boundary work’ that disciplinary histories in textbooks perform. The paper analyses how academic gatekeepers in positions of disciplinary influence shape perceptions about appropriate conduct within the field, what constitutes its core, and what lies outside its realm. Disciplinary history entails forgetting certain events, scholars and works that do not fit the prevailing chronology, marginalising or excluding some topics, debates and questions from the core of the field. We evidence our claims about the boundary work done in narrating IPE’s origins through bibliometric mapping and network analysis of IPE citation patterns and practices. We find that IPE is a narrower, more blinkered field than it typically presents itself to be.