Taking Stock of Critical Pedagogy in International Relations: Resistance, Community and Contestation

• In Event: Reevaluating higher education in the context of curriculum, activism, help-seeking, and partnerships

Proposal

International Relations (IR) is often considered a somewhat interstitial field situated between history, law, political science, economics and multiple overlapping humanities focused on the development of social theory (Hamati-Ataya in Gofas et al. 2018). The field’s multi-disciplinary and problem-oriented origins (the construction of a set of principles underpinning ‘The International’) has proliferated a lack of ontological security for its professorship and ongoing revisions of its disciplinary canon (Dyvik et al. 2017, inter alia). These origins are historically contingent on imperial formations of power and knowledge production, and have fundamentally erased global plurality from the field’s (contemporary) auspices (Tickner & Blaney, 2017).

A desire to recognize the violence inherent in the organization of this discipline and its effects on (at the very least) foreign policy in the 20th century, and thereby salvage IR’s potential from the sinking ship of colonial modernity, has inspired a decades-long struggle to teach and think differently – IR is in a continual state of protest, ‘turning everywhere’ (Baele 2021, but also feminist scholarship such as Tickner 1998, or post-colonial scholarship such as Inayatullah & Blaney 2014). Much of this protest has resulted in these periodic renewals of interest in theory, from feminist to post-modern scholarship. However, under present conditions of global colonial academic capitalism, most of these efforts serve a dual purpose – just as they enrich the discipline by affording it greater philosophical and empirical sophistication, so it serves individual academics whose career includes the management of a new school of thought.

This case study of an academic field which has historically disprivileged education as a domain that overlaps with the study of the International can contribute to the project of taking the intersection of protest and education seriously. By studying the practices and stakes of critical pedagogy in the field of International Relations from a micro-sociological and decolonial perspective, I hope to map ways to understand contestation, resistance, struggle, defiance, and compliance in this sub-section of Higher Education. Drawing on the theoretical framework that underpins the rest of my dissertation, where bell hooks (1994) and Paolo Freire’s (1970) scholarship are important touchstones, I hope to bring theory and empirics together to find pathways toward destabilizing the coloniality of International Relations at a local and applied level, despite present conditions of coloniality.

As such, my project aims to undertake a stock taking exercise of resistance in the field in a locus away from the hegemony of the Published Discipline. Many professors have dedicated their careers to pedagogical innovation, hinging on the political affect of a public liminal space such as the classroom. To do so is to challenge competitive individualism typifying hegemonic academic subjectivities in an attempt to revitalize the classroom as a public space to help its constituents develop the capacity to act, to resist, to imagine an alternate way of understanding the international and the entrenched position of academics within it.

Unfortunately, scholarship which reports issues such as over/underrepresentation of particular schools of thought tends to focus on the Published Discipline and consequently overlook these spaces (inter alia Colgan 2016, 2017, Key & Sumner 2019, Kristensen 2018). The production of knowledge that focuses on these spaces is often (auto-)biographical and/or ethnographic in scope (Frueh et al. 2019, Inayatullah 2010). Taken together, they illustrate an important problem for protest in International Relations – the need to share practices of resistance with one another. Despite the multiple and complex contingencies on which pedagogical decisions and practices hinge, the search for an integrative account of emancipatory strategies derived from its practitioners in the field remains important, especially with an eye on the future in an increasingly competitive and casualized academic environment (Shin & Teichler, 2014).

The paper consists of the following parts: (1) an integrative review of autobiographical and other pedagogical reflections, like the recently published Pedagogical Journeys Through World Politics (2019) edited by Jamie Frueh and (2) a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with key voices in the field such as Naeem Inayatullah, Laura Sjoberg and Robbie Shilliam to put together a ‘hindsight-enriched’ horizon scan of key pedagogical concerns in and across the field.
The paper considers these in consideration of the Teaching Research & International Policy (TRIP) Survey, a large-n survey issued approximately every 2 years by the International Studies Association (ISA). The ISA constitutes the largest governing body for international relations and political science scholars, hosting annual conferences and disseminating findings via several peer reviewed journals. Its survey data is, from a purely quantitative perspective, the most comprehensive dataset of pedagogical conduct in International Relations.

I hope the paper can contribute to efforts to decolonize IR (a little bit), without necessarily concluding that we’re better off without something identifiable as International Relations. This because while IR’s baggage is heavy and for the most part unreckoned with, I think there is a need for people that specialize affairs that disrespect manmade thresholds and borders as these are increasingly tested by climate change and rising inequality. However, the training that IR students like myself receive and pass on should be a conscientious product, an outcome of sitting with the problems of the discipline and should at every turn oppose the possibility of becoming re-implicated in the reproduction of the same violences that govern the order of things internationally.
The opportunity to present my work to the CIES community would be invaluable to the progress of my doctorate, of which this paper forms a chapter. Presenting my work at CIES 2023 on hooks and Freire’s work led to major theoretical breakthroughs owing to the valuable input I received, and I am confident that being able to contribute to and benefit from the interactivity of CIES 2024, this could also be the case for this present paper.

Author

• Bart Sebastiaan Gabriel, The Graduate Institute, Geneva