Teaching Politics to Fresh Undergrads against the Rise of Illiberalism in Brazil

• In Event: We Can Do Hard Things: Challenges and Opportunities in PSCI Education

Abstract

The radicalization of politics in contemporary Brazilian democracy is definitely part of a much broader rise of illiberalism in consolidated and consolidating democracies around the (Western) world. From benchmarks like the Brexit campaign, victory, and implementation to Trump’s presidency in the United States, signs of the neotraditionalist wave and its international network were already working their way into the country. Indeed, Brazilian society was already fertile to the growth of such threats to civilizational conquests. The academic community, especially the one working with liberal democracy as its own subject of study, has been progressively but grossly harnessed under this context, from faculty socialization to universities’ administrations, academic institutions, and the government’s education policies. Nonetheless, the undergraduate classroom seems to be the most vulnerable victim of the epistemological-ontological insecurity fed by simultaneously reinforcing processes of naturalization and relativization that constitute the discursive context of the crisis of illiberalism. Through these years, the experience of teaching politics in introductory classes of International Relations to incoming students – many deeply engaged in (or by) political discourses of the far right, where those kinds of anti-scientific argumentations are to be found in their always available social networks with its algorithmic traps – have rendered three mains challenges: the very definition of the political, of democracy and its limits; the distrust and ignorance of scientific method principles, their lack of logical and critical thinking, and; their shortcomings in thinking about (and from) moral and ethical values. From the assimilation of agonist definitions for democracy to the application of authoritarianism “litmus tests” on current public cases, from problematizing situations and demanding methodological solutions for appropriate inquiries to meeting the institutions of academic quality checks, from ranking analysis of top priorities to the recognition of humanist parameters in them, this piece shares the most effective strategies that we, as professors of IR introductory classes, have developed and refined to confront the social ordeal experienced in our classrooms, inspired and supported by recent and impacting contributions our discipline has produced all along.

Author

• Frederico Seixas Dias