“Decolonizing” International Relations Teaching and Learning

• In Event: TLC at APSA: Diversity & Inclusiveness: Restructuring the Curricula Panel

Abstract

While students around the world mobilize against white supremacy and colonial education, international relations scholars have “preserved [their] discipline as a white redoubt” (Vitalis 2015). Introductory international relations survey courses serve as key sites for the reproduction of a narrow disciplinary canon that is almost entirely silent on the ways that race and racism shape international politics, while reifying white, western scholarly elites as knowledge producers (Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Nayak and Selbin 2010; Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam 2014). This paper proposes teaching undergraduate international relations courses through anticolonial theory, pedagogies and practices. First, this approach centers pan-African and anti-colonial liberation struggles against imperialism and white supremacy. Specifically, this curriculum examines and interrogates International Relations and its canon through the scholarship and praxis of black international scholars, authors, artists, activists and political leaders, including W.E.B. Du Bois, Emperor Haile Selassie, C. L. R. James, Malcolm X, Walter Rodney, Thomas Sankara, Jamaica Kincaid, Black Lives Matter activists, and others. Second, the paper argues that “decolonizing” International Relations goes far beyond including “diverse” thinkers in required disciplinary reading lists. Drawing on Tuck and Yang (2012), I suggest ways that the task of rethinking international relations curriculum must go hand in hand with efforts to reimagine International Relations pedagogy and explicitly address the political contexts and power relations of our academic disciplines, institutions, courses, and classrooms.

Author

• Jonneke Koomen, Willamette University