ABSTRACT
This chapter goal is to challenge the shared anti-humanism in social and political sciences and begin a new conversation on what it means to be human based on research in neurosciences and Buddhist psychology. It offers a reconstructive move by proposing mindful International Relations as a means to account for a broader register of experience as well as a practice of looking deeply into how our own conditioning as well as the inner landscape of emotions operates in discerning what is valorized as relevant. The chapter returns to the idea of anti-humanism and examine how positive psychology challenges its assumptions. It discusses new evidence of the relevance of positive emotions as well as what the scientific study of mindfulness offers in terms of rethinking the role of emotions in human experience. The chapter addresses the responsibility of the researcher in the emotional communities created in academic scholarship by drawing on Buddhist psychology and feminist research ethics.
