Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption (Political Pedagogies) 3030564207, 9783030564209

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POLITICAL PEDAGOGIES

Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption Edited by Heather A. Smith · David J. Hornsby

Political Pedagogies

Series Editors Jamie Frueh, Bridgewater College, Bridgewater, VA, USA David J Hornsby, The Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

The purpose of the series is to create a new space for conversations between scholars of political pedagogy, and between such scholars and those looking for guidance on their teaching, and become the main recognizable authority/series/conversational space in this field. The proliferation of journals, conferences, and workshops devoted to teaching attest to the accelerating interest in the pedagogy of Political Science and International Relations over the past two decades. While research scholarship remains the dominant criterion for hiring and promotion at top tier institutions, almost all academics in these disciplines spend most of their energy teaching, and more than two-thirds do so at institutions where effective teaching is the primary factor in career success (Ishiyama et al 2010). Even those at research-intensive positions benefit from more effective classroom environments, and institutions across the world are building centers devoted to improving teaching and learning. The challenges of teaching span sub-disciplines and connect disparate scholars in a common conversation. Indeed, teaching may be the only focus that academics in these disciplines truly share. Currently, most writing about teaching politics is published in journals, and is therefore dispersed and restricted in length. This series will provide a much needed platform for longer, more engaged contributions on Political Pedagogies, as well as serve to bring teaching and research in conversation with each other.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16526

Heather A. Smith · David J. Hornsby Editors

Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption

Editors Heather A. Smith University of Northern British Columbia Prince George, BC, Canada

David J. Hornsby Carleton University Ottawa, ON, Canada

ISSN 2662-7809 ISSN 2662-7817 (electronic) Political Pedagogies ISBN 978-3-030-56420-9 ISBN 978-3-030-56421-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Joseph Salvoni/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To our family, friends and colleagues who prevailed in spite of often very difficult personal and professional circumstances arising out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Acknowledgements

Together we want to thank and acknowledge J. Andrew Grant and Queen’s University, Canada for initiating and financially supporting the Re-thinking Pedagogy in International Relations in an Era of Globalization and Disruption workshop that resulted in this volume. We would also like to acknowledge the work of OpenCanada that was a place where some of the contributors began to think about teaching during a time of disruption. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the Palgrave editorial team for their patience and faith in this project. I want to begin by acknowledging my family and the ongoing and consistent support they have shown throughout my career and for the family game nights that arose as a result of us being locked down during the pandemic. Much love to Mom, Moe, Derek, Alison, Will, Ross and Sara. As unconventional as it might seem—I’m going to acknowledge my cat, Tulip. Yup—my cat. Given that the final work of this volume was done in isolation from my Halifax human community, it was a feisty feline that gave me solace in the darker moments of the pandemic. And a shout out to Amanda Bittner’s online writing group which provided me a space to complete the final parts of the volume—the virtual high fives and online community that was created sustained me through all the picky parts. I also want to acknowledge the support of David Black and the Dalhousie Department of Political Science which was my home for my admin leave and sabbatical, during which this volume was produced. To

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our contributors—thank you for your ongoing inspiration! Finally, I want to acknowledge my co-editor—David Hornsby. Your humour, random phone calls, and unexpected texts brightened and lightened this whole process. —Heather A. Smith My partner-in-crime, Trinish Padayachee deserves particular mention as she provides a wonderful foundation of love and kindness that sustains and supplants everything else. She has made some big sacrifices for our relationship without hesitation or question. Thank you for sharing your love with me and for the constant support. Ideas never happen in a vacuum and this project is proof positive of the power of sharing, exploring and critiquing. A big thanks to all those who contributed to this edited volume and the process in general—our authors, reviewers, friends and family alike. To my co-editor and friend—Heather Smith—working on this project together has been nothing but fun. Your generous spirit, patience for the zany (and contribution to it!), and your authenticity is inspiring. May this be the first of many works together. —David J. Hornsby

Contents

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Introduction: Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption and Pandemic Heather A. Smith and David J. Hornsby

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Teaching as a Form of Disrupting International Relations David J. Hornsby and J. Andrew Grant

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Connecting Feminist Theory and Critical Pedagogies: Disrupting Assumptions About Teaching and Canon Nicole Wegner

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Disruption as Reconciliation: Lessons Learned When Students as Partners Become Students as Teachers Heather A. Smith and Yahlnaaw

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Outside the Orthodoxy? The Crisis of IR and the Challenge of Teaching Monocultures Nathan Andrews and Isaac Odoom

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Traditions, Truths, and Trolls: Critical Pedagogies in the Era of Fake News J. Marshall Beier

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Relationship of Responsibility: Indigeneity in the IR Classroom Justin de Leon Beyond the Box: Opportunities and Challenges of Interdisciplinarity in International Studies Pedagogy David R. Black

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Power and Politics in the Unexpected Kristi Heather Kenyon

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Disruption as Control in International Relations Classroom Mark A. Boyer

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Teaching Social Innovation to Address ‘Wicked Problems’: Why a Critical Analysis Is Insufficient for Preparing the Next Generation of Problem-Solvers Rebecca Tiessen Youth Anxiety and Pathological Security-Seeking in Turbulent Times Wilfrid Greaves Conclusion: Pandemic Pedagogy Heather A. Smith and David J. Hornsby

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Notes on Contributors

J. Andrew Grant is Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. He is the recipient of an Early Researcher Award from the Government of Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation for work on governance issues in natural resource sectors. Nathan Andrews is Assistant Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia. His research nonWestern approaches to International Relations theorizing and pedagogy has been published in such journals as Third World Quarterly, including a recent paper “International Relations (IR) Pedagogy and Diversity: Taking the IR Course Syllabus Seriously” in All Azimuth (2020). J. Marshall Beier is Professor of Political Science at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Beier is a 3M Teaching Fellow and the editor, author or co-editor of nine books. His current area of research is related to children, rights and security. David R. Black is Department Chair and Professor of Political Science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. An expert in international development with a focus on Africa, Dr. Black is also the Lester B. Pearson Professor of International Development. He is also the recipient of Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Award for Excellence in Teaching.

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Mark A. Boyer is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut and serves as Executive Director of the International Studies Association. Dr. Boyer has been a Pew Faculty Fellow in International Affairs (1992) and served twice as editor for ISA journals: International Studies Perspectives (2000–2004) and International Studies Review (2008–2012; co-edited with Jennifer Sterling-Folker). Wilfrid Greaves is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. His research principally examines the intersections between security theory and environmental politics with focuses on climate change, energy extraction, Indigenous peoples and the circumpolar Arctic. David J. Hornsby is Associate Vice-President (Teaching and Learning) and Professor of International Affairs at Carleton University, Ottawa. Having published in both the biological and social sciences, Dr. Hornsby researches the role of science in the international political economy, Canadian and South African foreign policies, and higher education pedagogy. Kristi Heather Kenyon is Assistant Professor at Global College of the University of Winnipeg, in Winnipeg Manitoba, Canada. Dr. Kenyon teaches in the human rights programme and has a strong interest in participatory, experiential and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning. Justin de Leon is Faculty member as a Visiting Research Fellow at University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, was a researcher at Vanderbilt’s Global Feminisms Research Collaborative, and a Lecturer and Chancellor’s Research Excellence Scholar at University of California San Diego. Isaac Odoom teaches at the Department of Political Science at the University of Alberta, Canada where he also obtained his Doctorate degree. He is a Non-Resident Research Fellow at The Centre for Asian Studies, University of Ghana, Accra. His research interests focus on Emerging Powers and Global Governance, Africa-China relations, Africa and Global Politics, International relations theory and the Political Economy of Development. Heather A. Smith is Professor, Global and International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia. She is a 3M National Teaching Fellow (2006) and recipient of the Canadian Political Science Excellence

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in Teaching Award. Dr. Smith publishes on gender and Canadian foreign policy as well as teaching International Studies. Rebecca Tiessen is Full Professor, University Chair in Teaching, Associate Director/Undergraduate Coordinator and Co-op Coordinator in the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada. Dr. Tiessen has published extensively on experiential learning with a focus on international experiential learning programmes. Nicole Wegner is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Gender and War at the University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. Her research uses feminist approaches to understanding gender and military identities. Specifically, her work explores how narratives, images, myths and symbolic representations of the military and military personnel influence domestic and foreign policies in Canada and Australia. Yahlnaaw is Skidegate Haida from the Islands of Haida Gwaii and was born and raised in Lax Kxeen (Prince Rupert, BC) on Ts’msyen territory. In September 2018, Yahlnaaw began her Master’s Degree at University of Northern British Columbia in First Nations Studies. Yahlnaaw is also a 3M Student Fellow.

Acronyms

EBL E-IR EU IDS IFS IR IRD IS ISSOTL LSE MIT NBC OER PBL PhD SAP SOTL UK UN UNBC US WUSC

Enquiry-Based Learning E-International Relations European Union International Development Studies International Futures Simulations International Relations Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement International Studies International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning London School of Economics Massachusetts Institute of Technology National Broadcasting Company Open Educational Resources Problem-Based Learning Doctor of Philosophy Students As Partners Scholarship of Teaching and Learning United Kingdom United Nations University of Northern British Columbia United States World University Service Canada

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption and Pandemic Heather A. Smith and David J. Hornsby

Introduction When we started this project, the idea that our lives would be turned upside down by a pandemic, was furthest from our mind. Now the pandemic envelopes our lives as different places and spaces adapt, address, and consider remedies for this serious matter. In higher education, the project of teaching and learning has been flipped on its head with the pivot to online learning or emergency remote teaching. Indeed, as we craft this introduction, we are still in the midst of determining just

H. A. Smith (B) University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada e-mail: [email protected] D. J. Hornsby Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_1

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when we might be able to return to our traditional face-to-face learning environments. Originally this book was conceptualized with the idea that the type of disruption facing international relations referred to such things as mass shootings, the climate crisis, a changing world order, technology and its influence on political perceptions (e.g. fake news), Brexit, Trump, rigged elections and white supremacy. These are the topics that were, and continue to greet us on a daily basis as we assess and teach the state of international affairs. Today, things are entirely different. And yet, these sites and sources of disruption haven’t gone away as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for reflection on disruption remains. The intersection of politics, power and pedagogy remain pertinent and necessary to reflect upon, and the insights of the chapters continue to be relevant, even if the majority were crafted before our respective lockdowns. The central question in this volume persists: “how do we, as International Relations scholars support our students, and indeed each other, to create classroom spaces that foster the critical curiosity and engagement required to understand and live in a world that feels dangerously disrupted?” If anything, pandemic pedagogy, as we discuss in the concluding chapter, only gives further urgency to this question and the need to reflect on our teaching practices. bell hooks famously postulated that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (hooks, 1994, p. 12). This volume takes this position seriously and advances the premise that the position and construction of learning environments in International Relations (IR) requires a fundamental re-think. Traditional IR programs tend to emphasize and focus on the delivery of discipline-relevant content. This is important but often comes at the expense of thinking through how the needs and expectations of our students and societies have changed. We are in an era of globalization, disruption, and a pandemic, and IR educators need to reflect deeply upon what attributes and proficiencies students require in order to keep abreast of the ever-changing content of the discipline. We need to think through how teaching helps constitute the discipline and the position of our students in the advancement of IR as a discipline (see Hornsby and Grant in this volume). In such a context, the volume considers innovative approaches to teaching and learning that move IR beyond the traditional orthodoxy. The intent here is to ensure that IR keeps up with the contemporary needs of students, continues to be relevant in efforts to enhance student learning, and takes advantage of

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the opportunity to advance as a discipline now and in the future. And as we muddle through ‘pivots’ online and ‘transitions’ to remote learning in the midst of a pandemic, the need for attention to student learning in IR is only made more prescient and urgent. When we approached our authors to contribute to the volume our request was simple: could you write about teaching and learning IR in an age of disruption? We didn’t give them a template or model of what constitutes disruption. Rather sought to solicit contributions from their own perspectives, enabling a diverse set of interpretations of ‘disruption’. Their contributions remind us that the idea of disruption is complex, nuanced and often, situational. From here we have noticed a number of common themes emerging.

Teaching as Disruption A central theme that resonates throughout the volume is teaching as an act of disruption. Throughout the volume, authors adopt or reflect the principles of critical pedagogy epistemology which acknowledges that students are central to the advancement of our discipline and to foster their success requires us to consider how the different ways we teach matter. Such a viewpoint is underpinned by the work of Paulo Friere (1970) which focuses directly on the question of pedagogy and empowerment. By recognising that students come to the classroom with their own experiences and understandings of the world, Friere (1970) argues that the power of pedagogy to draw out new possibilities for thinking and theorizing within a discipline becomes evident. Nicole Wegner, for example, highlights “disruption of status quo power relations in the academy” and Kristi Kenyon shows us how human rights teaching is an act of transformative disruption. David J. Hornsby and J. Andrew Grant directly challenge assumptions of the ongoing value of the sage-on-thestage model and argue now is the time to “rethink of the role of the professor in the journey of learning”. Teaching as an act of disruption is premised on an assumption, shared among contributors, that teaching is an act of politics. Our classrooms are sites of everyday practice. They are sites of the personal and the international. In the era of Trump and Brexit, having students analyze data and come to conclusions using analytical frames, as Mark Boyer argues, is a political act. Asking students to interrogate normative assumptions about social innovations as universally good (Tiessen this volume) and/or

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challenging the margins and silences in the discipline through our course design and curriculum (Andrews and Odoom this volume) are political acts. Critically interrogating the stories of our field as Marshall Beier advocates, is an act of politics which challenges assumptions of expertise and knowing. Teaching is not neutral. It is not value free. We create and recreate the discipline through our teaching. Thus, for us, our acts of disruption are intentional and purposeful. For many of us, our starting point is disruption of the discipline.

Disrupting the Discipline Through Teaching Disruption of the discipline of IR arises throughout the volume in a variety of permutations. Heather Smith and Yahlnaaw, Marshall Beier, Justin de Leon, and Nathan Andrews and Isaac Odoom embrace the idea of disruption as a means by which to upset the embedded assumptions of the white settler, Eurocentric and colonial assumptions of both International Relations as a discipline and teaching as a practice. Andrews and Odoom remind us that IR remains in significant need of ‘disruption’ as they highlight the colonial and eurocentric project that underpins IR as we know it and which translates into misrepresentations of the world. Several of the chapters are informed by both teaching and learning literature and IR literature thus sharing with the audience examples of scholarly teaching and modelling the means by which we integrate the scholarship of teaching and learning with our IR teaching (See Hornsby and Grant and Tiessen) and thus disrupting the traditional disciplinary boundaries of IR. This emphasis on scholarly teaching, that is teaching that is informed by teaching and learning literature, also disrupts arbitrary divisions between teaching and research. Not only do the chapters in this volume model the scholarship of teaching and learning, the collection models interdisciplinary, thus again, disrupting the arbitrary boundaries that are designed to regulate the discipline of International Relations. While all of the contributions are relevant to an IR classroom, chapters by Black, Tiessen and Keynon, challenge us to think in interdisciplinary ways. David Black, for example, emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinarity to creating vibrant and challenging learning spaces and encourages us to engage in a ‘process of creative disruption’. Rebecca Tiessen encourages a focus on social innovation and

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shows how critical conceptual approaches can disrupt student understandings of how the world functions and help students unpack and consider wicked problems. While disruption of International Relations is a common theme in many of the chapters, Justin de Leon, writing on Indigenous pedagogies, frames IR itself as disruption when he argues “Indigenous experiences and perspectives act as an invitation to wholeness – Indigeneity is not the disruption, IR practice is the disruption”. This sentiment is echoed by Yahlnaaw in her contributions to the Smith and Yahlnaaw chapter. Yahlnaaw, a member of the Haida nation, writes “The entire history of colonial-Indigenous relations has been about disruption - so why is disruption such an issue when it is Indigenous knowledges causing the disruption?”

Disruptions to Teaching IR The volume also includes chapters that tackle current issues that seem to disrupt our ways of teaching such as the emergence of fake news (Beier), the critique of the left-leaning bias of higher education (Wegner), and of course the impact of the pandemic (Greaves; Smith and Hornsby). Framed as such, disruption is an exogenous, negative force to be addressed or managed in our classroom. We try to tackle these exogenous disruptions because we want to ensure our students engage in higher order critical thinking and become engaged, informed, global citizens. In cases such as the pandemic our efforts turn to explicitly supporting and reflecting upon student safety. As Wilfred Greaves (this volume) writes “in an era of global disruption, the kids are not quite alright”. While trying to address the disruption of current issues external to our classrooms is a common theme, it is also evident throughout the volume that authors do not assume that there is a strict distinction between the outside and the inside of the classroom. The world is not something simply out there to be understood. Rather, disruption is deeply personal for ourselves and for our students and in some instances, we—the teachers—must embrace our own disruption and be learners. Mark Boyer captures this theme in his chapter where he argues “that disruption is control and that the most important power a scholar-teacher has is structural power, knowing yourself is perhaps the most important pedagogical tool of all. What do you do well and not so well?” Heather Smith, in her dialogue with Yahlnaaw, also speaks to a deeply personal disruption as

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she struggles with the deeply colonial assumptions that become exposed as she worked with Yahlnaaw. For all of us, the false division of personal and international, inside and outside the classroom has become violently exposed by the pandemic as we and our students struggle through this exceptional time. Dealing with disruption, engaging in disruption, being willing to have our own assumptions disrupted, can be frustrating, difficult, and deeply uncomfortable. Yet, we must not lose sight of the ways in which disruption is healing and can foster reconciliation. de Leon captures this feeling when he writes “Foregrounding Indigenous approaches and knowledge in the IR classroom is a beckoning to close the circle, to rebalance”. Yahlnaaw echos this sentiment in her final contribution to the Smith and Yahlnaaw chapter: “Instead of disruption as a means to cultural genocide as per colonization, this Indigenous driven disruption is for growth, healing, reconciliation, and relationships”. Disruption can create spaces for marginalized voices. Disruption challenges assumptions of students as passive and moves us toward students as partners. Our willingness to engage in disruption and to see ‘pedagogies as relationships’ (Beier, this volume) provides for sites of hope and radical transformation.

Moving Forward It is with this sense of hope, in the midst of a pandemic, that we share this volume. As noted above, we believe that even though the majority of these chapters were written in ‘before times’ that the volume has value for our readers. We believe that the contributions here, written by a diverse set of authors, from both inside and outside of what we traditionally define as IR, are accessible to a broad audience and that even if you don’t label yourself as teaching IR, the work of the authors will inspire and provoke. In terms of pedagogy, you are invited to engage in unlearning and relearning about your assumptions of control, assumptions about who learns and assumptions about expertise. You will be challenged to reflect on the ways in which colonialism infuses our teaching and our curriculum and asked to consider the role you/we play in the much needed disruption of our discipline. How do we create more inclusive learning spaces and learning practices? Throughout the volume you will be asked to reflect on the politics of your teaching and encouraged to see the centrality of teaching to our discipline. Practically, you will find chapters that provide insights into the model of co-learning, students as

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partners, anti-racism and Indigenous pedagogies, social innovation and the use of case studies. Finally, as argued by Nicole Wegner (this volume), we believe “[g]lobal politics is not only something we teach or learn, but a complex phenomenon within which we are actively bound”. And now more than ever we need to remain mindful of the impact of emergency learning, pay attention to our well-being and the well-being of our students and work from an ethic of care.

References Friere, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Herder and Herder. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Teaching as a Form of Disrupting International Relations David J. Hornsby and J. Andrew Grant

Introduction In the current era of globalization, we are witnessing ‘disruption’ at many different levels—within higher education, in technology, in the liberal international order, and within the field of International Relations (IR) itself.1 The high degree of integration associated with globalization has

D. J. Hornsby (B) Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] J. Andrew Grant Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] 1 The authors would like to thank Raynold W. Alorse for his research assistance as well as Queen’s University for a Teaching and Learning Enhancement Grant that funded a workshop entitled, Re-thinking Pedagogy in International Relations in an Era of Globalization and Disruption, which was hosted by the Centre for International and Defence Policy (CIDP) and the Department of Political Studies, in January 2016.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_2

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helped COVID-19 spread while governments struggle to provide a coordinated response as the pandemic disrupts households, healthcare systems, and economies around the world. Globalization’s disruptions have many consequences, but often little consideration is given to how they necessitate rethinking how we teach and what we prioritize in our teaching practices. There is increasing pressure on universities to change the way they fundamentally function. Massification of higher education is one of these pressures that impacts our teaching and appears to be a common challenge regardless of geographical location (Hornsby et al. 2013; Hornsby and Osman 2014). Massification is arguably driven by two logics: one that is based on efficiency where student numbers and subsequently class sizes are increased as a means of addressing financial imperatives associated with running universities, particularly in light of declining sources of public funding. The second pertains to a societal improvement logic— where increased participation in higher education results in addressing structural and systematic social inequalities, improving overall health and economic well-being of states (Arvanitakis 2014). But, ultimately, both logics result in universities that have unprecedented numbers of students, which fundamentally changes the nature of how teaching and learning takes place. Innovation in teaching often runs into barriers on university campuses. Universities are thousand-year-old institutions based on clear disciplinary boundaries that undergraduate students must select upon entry to a journey of specialisation that lasts until they graduate. These disciplinary boundaries are further reinforced during graduate studies. Yet, the world has changed drastically over the past few decades, and true comprehension and scholarly versatility requires a multi-disciplinary and multi-modal form of thinking that embraces innovation. Unfortunately, most universities maintain a traditional philosophy to education: the delivery of disciplinary-based content. This content is based on knowledge that is delivered in a ‘building block’ approach where disciplinary gatekeepers make decisions on what is to be taught, what is to be ignored, and how knowledge will be assessed. Yet, as Arvanitakis and Hornsby (2016, p. 8) contend, higher education is also changing in its relationship to the production of information and content: Today, like newspapers and record labels, universities and educators must accept that we are no longer the primary manufacturers and distributors of content: we compete with other content producers for both the attention

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of the public and the ear of decision-makers. These include private corporations, religious organisations, media outlets, bloggers, and online forums such as Wikipedia – in fact, it includes almost anyone who is connected to the Internet.

The change in production of information and content has ramifications for the place of the professor.2 Many colleagues continue a mode of teaching that places the themselves at the centre of the learning environment. Namely, the professor is positioned at the front of a classroom, where they deliver content driven lectures to a passive set of students who are expected to maintain attention and soak up the information. But we know that students neither learn effectively nor desire this model anymore. Research on attention spans suggests that the average person can receive information passively for up to 10 to 20 min before they lose focus, yet it is still common for traditional university lectures to be delivered in singular 3-hour slots (Gibbs 1992; Bligh 2000). This is despite numerous studies that show that students learn better through being engaged, solving problems or in contexts where they can gain and apply their experiences—so-called high impact practices (Murray and Summerlee 2007; Kuh 2008; Kolb and Fry 1975). Students today desire more flexible learning environments that are not necessarily delivered solely face-to-face but through mixed modal approaches that include online or blended pedagogical strategies. One only needs to consider surveys and studies that highlight student expectations around online learning (Canadian Digital Learning Research Association 2019) And, students learn better in environments where their experiences of the world are considered valid, where they are welcome, included, and partners in the journey of learning (Tinto 1997; Mercer-Mapstone and Abbot 2020). All these factors challenge the notion that the ‘sage-on-stage’ model can or should persist and requires a rethink of the role of the professor in the journey of learning. International events are also disrupting conventional approaches to and understanding of events that shape our everyday lives ranging from natural disasters brought on by climate change to cross-border migration, and from evolving modes of violent conflict to regional and global recessions spurred by pandemics. One only need think of how rising 2 In the interests of consistency, we employ the term ‘professor’ to denote ‘lecturer’, ‘instructor’, or ‘educator’.

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powers such as the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) are posing challenges to the traditional ways international cooperation takes place, how decisions like #Brexit result in questions around the continuation of the liberal project of interdependence through economic and political integration, how movements like the Arab Spring are connecting the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, and reshaping regional dynamics, or how social media impacts foreign policy and diplomacy (Grant 2018). Throughout his term in office, US President Donald Trump’s tweets have had an impact on the perceptions and understandings of American foreign policy and the country’s approach to international challenges. Through his sustained use of Twitter, Trump has disrupted the global norms of diplomacy and inter-state trade negotiations (Grant 2018, pp. 255–256). Though North Korea and China were some of his early targets, other states and even individuals have been subject to Trump’s ‘Twitter diplomacy’—a form of disruption that continues to reverberate across the globe. From a pedagogical perspective, how do educators of IR prepare students for navigating this constantly changing societal, economic, and environmental arena? How do we enhance student learning and educate students about international affairs when things are being disrupted and changing so rapidly? And finally, how do we ensure that we prepare the next generation of IR scholar to advance the discipline? This chapter argues that in order to address the disruptions currently facing higher education, student learning and the study of the interconnections of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’, we need to disrupt how we treat the position and place of teaching as scholars of international relations. We need to reposition the role of pedagogy as critical not only to student learning, but to the advancement of the discipline. Doing so will ensure that our undergraduate and graduate degrees prepare the next generation of scholars and international affairs practitioners to be flexible, resilient and capable of adapting to changes in the way international affairs takes place. Despite the fact that there is a robust discussion of strategies and approaches to IR pedagogy that takes place in scholarly journals like International Studies Perspectives, Politics, and PS: Political Science & Politics, we have seen little attempt to frame teaching as integral to the advancement of the discipline. To fill this gap, the chapter explores three ways in which teaching matters to the discipline. These are: 1. teaching plays an important part in constituting international affairs now and in the future;

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2. teaching is one of the ways we are most impactful as scholars; and 3. how we approach learning and the student experience matters to how our discipline moves forward. The importance of such a discussion should not be diminished, as the way we engage, interact and prepare students matters to the continued relevance of IR as a discipline and to developing a better understanding of motivations and intentions underpinning international affairs.

Teaching Constitutes International Relations Now and into the Future It is important that we think through the relationship between pedagogy and international relations, as the discipline is arguably constituted through teaching. We agree with Kehler et al. (2017) that our classrooms are not separate and distinct from the institution and society in which we are embedded. Classrooms are political spaces and often the sites of the socialization of practices and values that reproduce our disciplines. Through our teaching we can reproduce and legitimize the discipline or we can disrupt and problematize the discipline. Hence, teaching is indeed a chance to disrupt, problematize, and theorize the pedagogical contours of IR now and into the future. In other words, the way we construct our learning environment matters, as it influences how students conceptualize IR moving forward. This matters significantly to how questions and responses in IR are considered and articulated. Furthermore, the way in which teaching is approached (or should be) is a fundamental concern for all IR scholars. For example, if we teach our students to mimic or replicate the canon of IR then how do we expect the discipline to advance? But rather if we problematize how IR conceptualizes, constructs, and communicates core concepts, then the space is created for thinking more broadly about empirical and theoretical questions and puzzles in the international arena, which can lead to further conceptual and practical developments and advancements. This means that there needs to be a degree of acceptance that teaching IR is not just about transferring content but also about inculcating a set of skills that enables students to move the discipline forward. IR educators cannot predict where the discipline is going, but they can help build up

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those who may be able to apply different ways of thinking. Such thinking is motivated by a Freirean logic that casts all students as learners who come with their own experiences and understandings of the world based on where they are from. Whilst Freire (1973) held teaching as a vital tool in resolving inequality between the rich and the poor, the idea of using pedagogy to draw out different ways of thinking based on the contextual reality of our students enjoys powerful potential for advancing thinking and theorizing within the discipline. In addressing this issue, Arvanitakis and Hornsby (2016, pp. 15–19) have suggested that we should be integrating, in clear and purposeful ways, a set of proficiencies and attributes in our classrooms that our students develop over the course of their studies. Proficiencies like creativity and innovation, resilience, teamwork, and design thinking are set alongside attributes like critical thinking, problem-solving, adaptability and mistakably to name a few. Whilst most professors would argue that they already do include many of these proficiencies and attributes in their learning environments, this often happens more out of luck than by explicit design, and is often done in an ad hoc or haphazard fashion. What is necessary is to align particular proficiency and attribute development across an IR curriculum, taking a measured and purposeful approach. This will help professors in designing their courses as they will not have to develop all proficiencies or attributes in one course! By doing this we are ensuring that students are prepared to deal with the changing nature of disciplinary content and are better suited to contribute to disciplinary advancement. Another strategy known to empower students to integrate different ideas is enquiry-based learning (EBL). Summerlee and Murray (2010) define EBL as a closed loop reiterative process where students are presented with a problem scenario and are required to question the context, find information that develops understanding of the principles that lie behind the problem, and reflect on the wider implications of the problem (Ibid., p. 80). EBL is designed not to solve problems, rather, it emphasizes the process of learning, accepts complexity and fosters student engagement. Specifically: The [problem-based] scenarios are intended to motivate the students to engage in learning and understand the issues that underlie the scenario. Students research their learning issues and return to the second class to share information and integrate new knowledge into the scenario; this

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process may be repeated. The reiterative nature of the process encourages students to practice effective communication and to learn how to criticize and how to behave in academic situations, in addition to learning and assimilating content. The students are encouraged to find appropriate resources that lead to understanding, and they share information and resources with each other. (Summerlee and Murray 2010, p. 80)

Having studied the impact of EBL, Summerlee and Murray (2010) found that such an approach has positive implications on student academic performance and engagement. Indeed, students who took an EBL course were found to have averages 10% higher than those who had not taken an EBL course. Further, students were more likely to demonstrate engagement through volunteering and civic activities, and to participate in an international experience. Meaningful and authentic experiences in international settings, civic engagement, working with complexity, and incorporating diversity are critical in IR (Compaoré et al. 2021). In relating this back to constituting the discipline of IR, it is critical that students are capable of engaging in enquiry and in ways that push beyond the established thinking of disciplinary conundrums. In this light, the future of IR as a discipline rests in how we teach it and how we enable the next generation to think outside of the disciplinary box. IR requires a pedagogical stance that mixes an understanding of existing content but also fosters a set of skills so as to empower the next generation of scholars to move our theoretical understandings forward.

Teaching Is Impactful Focusing on how we teach is also of relevance when one thinks in terms of impact. Arguably, there is nothing more impactful, in terms of what we do in universities, than our teaching. Consider the fact that the number of people we engage in the classroom is far greater than the number who read or cite research publications, particularly in the present era of increasing enrolments and large classes (Remler 2014). This is not meant to suggest research is unimportant but rather to reframe teaching alongside research, as equal elements of what universities are about—a topic we engage later in this chapter. Given that universities and the pursuit of higher education maintain a social mission that revolve around addressing societal problems and promoting societal transformation, then the role of teaching is

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even clearer. Gramsci (1971) posited that education needs to be about promoting social change as it is one of the clearest ways to promote social mobility and challenge traditional power relations. As such, he argued that a true intellectual was someone who facilitated social change through pragmatic, problem-oriented, and culturally-relevant expression of ideas, feelings, and experiences of the masses. As such, teaching is a high-impact practice that should be of veritable relevance to IR as a discipline. Unfortunately, there is a common institutional culture that disengages from the aforementioned multi-faceted impact of teaching and pays little more than lip service to supporting innovative pedagogical practices that engage students and activate them in their particular discipline(s). Indeed, even Gramsci (1971, p. 35) raised concerns that the education system was disconnected, theoretical, and irrelevant to the everyday-lived experience, resulting in passivity amongst students rather than active engagement in societal problems. In order to reach a broader audience and profoundly influence the lives of students and foster social change, innovative pedagogical practices need to be supported by an institutional culture that seeks to include ‘high impact practices’ such as learning communities, collaborative assignments and projects, first-year experiences based on best practices, and capstone courses (Kuh 2008; Smith and Summerville 2017). Encouraging the adoption of active learning can do much to support the adoption of high impact practices, but there must also be incentives in place to encourage better teaching in order to transform mindsets. Everything from tenure and promotion criteria to teaching culture and the willingness to engage in conversations within a disciplinary frame are needed to situate the importance of teaching. A clear and coherent body of scholarship around teaching and learning in IR needs to be considered and treated as a core component of the work we do as IR academics. Whilst a number of venues exist for publishing the scholarship of teaching and learning in IR, a more explicit emphasis is required connecting teaching IR and conducting research on teaching IR. The United States maintains a robust community that looks to IR teaching which needs to be extended and more inclusive of international spaces and places. An additional consideration is the need to develop specific interventions within PhD programs that focus on teaching and learning in IR as a means of training the next generation of scholars. IR doctoral programs are great at focusing on research methodologies, theoretical training, and area specializations, but this is only one portion

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of what is expected of scholars in university environments. More needs to be done to develop the next set of educators that need to do more than simply transfer content. IR doctoral students and emerging scholars need to learn what is effective and what ‘works’ in terms of pedagogical strategies for student learning and then integrate IR content into these approaches. The idea of teaching IR matters as it is clearly one of the most significant ways that we, as educators, can have an impact—upon both society in general and within the discipline of IR in particular.

Students Matter to the Progression of IR Engaging in understanding teaching and learning in IR is also relevant as students matter to the progression of the discipline. As noted above, they are the future of the discipline. Shor (1992, p. 32) reminds us that students are not empty vessels; rather “they are complex, substantial human beings who arrive in class with diverse cultures, they have languages, interests, feelings, experiences and perceptions”. hooks (1994) observes that in light of this change of perception, students do not necessarily need to be filled with knowledge, but instead treated as active contributors to constructing meaning in our disciplinary environments. In this vein, students are bearers and producers of knowledge, a topic that Beier takes up in the present volume. As such, lecturers need to find ways of incorporating students into disciplinary advancement by connecting their experiences and understandings into the learning process. Often this means that we need to focus on pedagogies that encourage building relationships between faculty and students and students with other students. Felten and Lambert (2020) argue that how we include students and welcome them matters to their experience and has a material impact on their learning. That said, engaging with topics that are of consequence to students and their immediate environments in the classroom, also matters (hooks 1994, p. 15). Appreciating the space for students in the progression of IR requires us to think creatively about spaces where learning can take place outside of the traditional lecture. Brew (2006) and Fung (2017) propose that connecting undergraduate students into research and intellectual inquiry can be considered a pedagogical activity. Indeed, undergraduate students can be co-inquirers or co-researchers in helping to advance the field (Kehler et al. 2017; Weller et al. 2013). Treating research and the research process as a form of pedagogy can bridge the gap between learning,

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teaching, and research, whilst at the same time enhancing the skill set IR students obtain in the process of pursuing their degree. Connecting curriculum, learning and research fosters and empowers students in developing active, analytical and critical learning strategies which builds understanding and fosters discovery (Fung 2017, pp. 20, 26). Much of the literature surrounding engaging undergraduate students in research emphasizes the benefits to learning, but the benefits to disciplines should not be discounted, as well. Training the next generation of scholar in the study of international relations means that new ideas and ways of thinking are integrated, offering the possibility of disciplinary advancement. Healey and Jenkins (2009, p. 6) suggest there are four main ways to engage students in research and enquiry: • • • •

research-led: learning about current research in the discipline; research-oriented: developing research skills and techniques; research-based: undertaking research and inquiry; research-tutored: engaging in research discussions.

Any of these approaches offer chances for students to contribute to identifying conceptual and/or empirical insights which can advance disciplinary thinking and understandings. At the same time, students gain important skills and techniques that are applicable should they choose an academic or policy-oriented career. Given the potential for students to contribute to the advancement of the discipline through research, the same could be applied to constructing the learning environment. A Students as Partners (SaP) approach to pedagogy, curriculum development, and course design seeks to include students and gets them to apply their own experience and knowledge to how the learning environment is constructed. Healey et al. (2014, pp. 8–9) highlight four areas where SaP in teaching and learning can be realized: 1. learning, teaching, and assessment design; 2. curriculum design and pedagogic consultancy; 3. subject-based research and inquiry; and 4. the scholarship of teaching and learning

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By definition, SaP results in a form of instruction that disrupts extant structures and power-relations in post-secondary classrooms (Kehler et al. 2017). Turning traditional structures and the notion of authority in the classroom on its head arguably enables the space for new ideas and ways of conceptualizing or ‘doing’ IR to emerge. In light of these insights, it is evident that students can be viewed as partners in disciplinary advancement, as their life experiences and unorthodox approaches can shape IR’s development in conceptual and pedagogical terms. Creating a positive space and encouraging collegial relationships between students and faculty offers opportunities to spark discussions and lead to breakthroughs relating to research and teaching. This applied approach to pedagogy only has benefits to the progression of the discipline.

Conclusion The ideas presented in this chapter often require a degree of willingness by the individual to try something different, take risks, and to reflexively evaluate and modify approaches. We appreciate that the capacity to do this is not symmetrical, with some higher education environments imposing a greater “tax” on doing things differently, particularly if they do not work out the first time. There are many facets of this asymmetry. For instance, early career academics may be worried about engaging in pedagogical strategies that could impact their teaching evaluations and harm prospects for tenure and promotion. This worry can be more pronounced for professors who are female, racialized, or from other equity-seeking groups, as they already face bias in teaching evaluations. Another facet of asymmetrical capacities is that some teaching environments have less flexibility to change curriculum at the course level. Whereas some universities consider teaching to be a form of intellectual property belonging to the professor and extend attendant latitude when it comes to matters of pedagogy and curriculum, others can be more rigid in these areas. The latter environments not only restrict the ability of professors to take pedagogical risks, but for those who do so, it may result in the imposition of ‘penalties’ ranging from administrative reprimands to negative internal letters added to renewal and promotion files to being excluded from consideration

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when the course is advertised in the future.3 Even the most committed professors to innovative pedagogical approaches (e.g., EBL and SaP) and who enjoy relative freedom concerning curriculum design may still face organizational culture barriers if the deanery, department/unit heads, and curriculum committee chairs are sceptical of pedagogical risk-taking. To overcome the above barriers, it is critical that departments, faculties, institutions, and scholarly communities recognize the relevance of teaching to a discipline and offer an appropriate level of incentive or support that encourages trying new approaches. Making it normal to experiment with different pedagogies is a necessary precondition. To that end, participating in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and establishing communities of practice with other scholars can offer potential avenues for overcoming some of these impediments. SoTL creates the frame to test different pedagogical approaches in a controlled way and under the context of research. This often resonates in spaces that place research as a more valued pursuit and can help tenure and promotion committees understand the rationale for experimentation with different pedagogical approaches. Communities of practice bring together scholars under the auspices of sharing experiences, information, and understandings. Teaming up with others can assist in thinking through pedagogies and offer insights into how to promote best practices and avoid pitfalls. As our discipline is confronted with disruptions from outside and within that require us to rethink core concepts and approaches to understanding the international, we need to find ways to include, foster, and develop new ideas and ways of thinking that broaden our understanding of the discipline. Somewhat ironically, the disruptions to conventional teaching methods and university operations caused by the COVID19 pandemic has forced many professors and administrators to rethink the fundamentals of teaching and learning within institutions of higher learning. Professors have had to carry out ‘triage teaching’ and engage in ‘triage pedagogy’, such as using Microsoft Teams for seminars and Zoom for lectures as well as re-weighting certain assignments and moving away from traditional sit-down final exams, respectively. While remote conferencing platforms and technologies such as Zoom allow real-time interaction via microphones as well as anonymous ‘electronic hand up’ 3 This latter ‘penalty’ is particularly painful for professors who are members of the contingent faculty.

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functions to pose questions and conduct polls, they do require that the university has purchased the product4 and that the professor and all students have access to high-speed internet and a computer equipped with an external or internal microphone. If there is a ‘silver lining’ to be found in the aftermath of this period of ‘triage teaching’ and ‘triage pedagogy’, it would be that such a massive rethinking of fundamental aspects of teaching and learning has opened up a safe space for such innovation once the COVID-19 pandemic has passed. Even if the disruptions to the university environment are temporary, some of the changes to IR pedagogy and the pedagogy of other fields will likely be permanent in the post-COVID-19 era. Mindful that universities will have to grapple with budget shortfalls and other funding and logistical challenges, permanent pedagogical changes must be made for the ‘right reasons’ though—that is, in the interests of innovative pedagogy that improves student learning— rather than being driven primarily by financial considerations. How we teach IR matters in doing this and requires us, as scholars in the discipline, to give real consideration to how teaching is treated and valued. This chapter has sought to lay down a set of reasons why we should care about teaching more than we necessarily do already. We have also offered some ideas on how teaching IR could be framed and applied going forward. By no means do we think this is an exhaustive treatment, but rather a set of ideas that serve as a starting point for more debate and further reflection about the place of teaching and how it can by advanced in the field of International Relations.

References Arvanitakis, J. (2014). Massification and the large lecture theatre: From panic to excitement. Higher Education, 67, 735–745. Arvanitakis, J., & Hornsby, D. J. (Eds.). (2016). Universities, Citizen Scholars, and the Future of Higher Education. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan. Bligh, D. A. (2000). What’s the use of lectures? San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Brew, A. (2006). Research and teaching: Beyond the divide. Palgrave Macmillan.

4 Notably, however, many remote conferencing platforms and technologies either provide a free version of their software or do not charge a fee if their software is used for non-commercial purposes.

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Compaoré, W. R. N., Martel, S., & Grant, J. A. (2021). Reflexive pluralism in IR: Canadian contributions to worlding the Global South. International Studies Perspectives. Canadian Digital Learning Research Association. (2019). Tracking online and distance education in Canadian universities and colleges: 2018. Canadian Digital Learning Research Association. Felten, P., & Lambert, L. (2020). Relationship-Rich education: How human connections drive success in college. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness (Vol. 1). New York, NY: Bloomsbury. Fung, D. (2017). Connected curriculum for higher education. UCL Press. Retrieved January 19, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1qnw8nf. Gibbs, G. (1992). Improving the quality of student learning. Bristol: Technical and Educational Services Ltd. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks. New York: International Publishers. Grant, J. A. (2018). Agential constructivism and change in world politics. International Studies Review, 20(2), 255–263. Healey, M., Flint, A., & Harrington, K. (2014). Engagement through partnership: Students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. HE Academy. Healey, M., & Jenkins, A. (2009). Developing undergraduate research and inquiry. HE Academy. Retrieved March 18, 2020, from https://s3.eu-west2.amazonaws.com/assets.creode.advancehe-document-manager/documents/ hea/private/developingundergraduate_final_1568036694.pdf. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. Hornsby, D. J., & Osman, R. (2014). Massification in higher education: Large classes and student learning. Higher Education, 67 (6), 711–719. Hornsby, D. J., Osman, R., & De Matos Ala, J. (Eds). (2013). Teaching large classes: Interdisciplinary perspectives for quality tertiary education. Higher Education Series, SUN Press. Kehler, A., Verwoord, R., & Smith, H. (2017). We are the process: Reflections on the underestimation of power in students as partners in practice. International Journal for Students as Partners, 1(1), 1–15. Kolb, D., & Fry, R. (1975). Toward an applied theory of experiential learning. In C. Cooper (Ed.), Studies of Group Process (pp. 33–57). London: Wiley. Kuh, G. D. (2008). High-Impact educational practices: What they are, who has access to them, and why they matter. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities. Mercer-Mapstone, L., & Abbot, S. (Eds.). (2020). The power of partnership: Students, staff, and faculty revolutionizing higher education.

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Elon University Center for Engaged Learning. Retrieved March 11, 2020, from www.centerforengagedlearning.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/ 01/power_of_partnership_online_2020-01-23.pdf. Murray, J., & Summerlee, A. (2007). The impact of problem-based learning in an interdisciplinary first-year program on student learning behaviour. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 37 (3), 87–107. Remler, D. (2014). Are 90% of academic papers really never cited? reviewing the literature on academic citations. LSE Blog. Retrieved January 19, 2020, from https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/23/aca demic-papers-citation-rates-remler/. Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education: Critical teaching for social change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, H. A., & Summerville, T. (2017). Four conversations we need to have about teaching and learning in Canadian political science. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 50(1), 263–279. Summerlee, A., & Murray, J. (2010). The impact of enquiry-based learning on academic performance and student engagement. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 40(2), 78–94. Tinto, V. (1997). Classrooms as communities. Journal of Higher Education, 68(6), 599–623. Weller, S., Domarkaite, G. K., Lam, J. L. C., & Metta, L. U. (2013). StudentFaculty co-inquiry into student reading: Recognising SoTL as pedagogic practice. International Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 7 (2), 1–16.

CHAPTER 3

Connecting Feminist Theory and Critical Pedagogies: Disrupting Assumptions About Teaching and Canon Nicole Wegner

Introduction Teaching politics is inherently, unavoidably political. Pedagogical approaches to International Relations (IR) therefore have the potential to disrupt power dynamics that circulate within a classroom space. Drawing from feminist conceptualizations of power, pedagogy, and critical subjectivity, I demonstrate that IR is not an objective, neutral subject matter, but is rather materially-discursive (Barad 2006). This means that the material phenomenon that educators seek to “present” is not (and cannot be) exclusive to or distinct from their own teaching, research, and embodied relationships, which are, in turn, reproductive of global relations. I challenge epistemological assumptions about knowing and teaching IR that present instructors as objectively relaying knowledge to student recipients.

N. Wegner (B) University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_3

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By doing so, I want to challenge notions of the teaching academic as “rational, reliable and remote from other objectives and/or bodies” and conceptualize teaching IR as “affectively, historically, biologically and politically entangled in a process of always already becoming (Lennon et al. 2018, p. 627). Our own ongoing constitution as beings (in this case, as “IR professors”) is bound up in our research of IR subject material and teaching relationships with students and colleagues. Building upon Hornsby and Grant (this volume) who outline educators’ roles in the constitution of IR as a discipline and practice, this chapter endorses feminist pedagogy that emphasizes teaching as a form of building relationships and creating classrooms as “radical spaces of possibility” (hooks 1994, p. 12). I begin by reflecting upon the critique that contemporary university classrooms have become “anti-intellectual” alongside efforts to accommodate diverse needs of the contemporary undergraduate student body. This has been expressed as the left-leaning bias of social sciences in North American universities. I then proceed to explain why these critiques are founded on assumptions about the discipline of IR as a teaching subject (cast as an apolitical objective canon of competing yet equally benign theoretical material) and the student (cast as the critically thinking undifferentiated student of IR). These assumptions fail to account for the always-already materially affective politics present in the IR classroom. Using feminist pedagogy, I seek to destabilize the ways that teaching politics in a neutral fashion is conceived as desirable or possible.

Political (Partisan?) Bias in a Classroom and the Myth that Teaching IR Can Be Apolitical The criticism that the social sciences classroom has been a cauldron for identity politics, grievance politics, anti-intellectualism, diversity mania, and left indoctrination (for discussion see Weissberg 2006–07) is not new and has certainly flared in the political discourse of Trumpian and altright media communities. These critiques are rooted in the assumption that academic teachers can and should teach international relations from an apolitical or “neutral” stance. Much of the whinging that occurs among those who sneer at campus “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” as a leftist anti-intellectual project may better be understood as an emotional reaction to demographic changes in the academy. This rhetoric signals the disruption of status

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quo political relations in the academy that has privileged particular bodies and worldviews—specifically elite, white males’ historical dominance as authoritative knowledge producers (Danvers 2018). The left-bias critique reflects disruption of traditional power in the academy and the opening of university spaces to Other bodies. In short, the contemporary presence of “diversity” in academic research and in undergraduate student bodies, their needs and ‘critical’ worldviews, is threatening to bodies whom authoritative knowledge has historically “stuck” to more easily (Danvers 2018; see also Ahmed 2010). The idea that critical thinking in a classroom is hampered by the humanities and social sciences alleged left bias is reflected in demand to “present equally both sides” of political debates within the university classroom. Left bias accusations are firmed entrenched within American political pundit rhetoric; consider David Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (2006) that criticizes professors he believes indoctrinate students into left-ist political agendas rather than presenting information in a disinterested and neutral fashion. Critiques waged at “left-biased” university teachers (also consider Turning Point USA’s the “Professor Watch List” or demands to cut funding to academic disciplines that contain “postmodern neo-Marxist context”.1 ) insinuate that such a “bias” in the classroom is both problematic and avoidable. The validity of “left-bias” critiques has been refuted, largely on the argument that, “if faculties are really geared to brainwashing students into accepting the postulates of far-left ideology, the composition of western [governments] and…roaring capitalism suggests they’re doing an astoundingly bad job” (Wilson 2015). However, beyond that, I wish to question why the notion of “neutral” teaching itself has been positioned as desirable and feasible. Less polarizing critics of political bias in undergraduate education have emphasized that liberal education requires students to be taught to “think clearly about controversial issues, to form opinions and make a strong case for them, to evaluate the evidence for competing positions, to understand

1 For more, see Jordan B Peterson’s argument that women’s studies and “ethnic and racial studies” on campus should have their funding cuts and his criticism that humanities and social sciences have been “corrupted quite terribly by the postmodern doctrine”. Available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4c-jOdPTN8&t=280s (Retrieved 17 January 2020).

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alternative perspectives in their own terms and to engage with opposing views with civility and a sincerely open mind” (Ehrlich and Colby 2004, p. 36) These criteria are based on epistemological assumptions that fail to recognize the ways that academia is not unbiased but rather “lived, created and reproduced by people who have been socialized within disciplinary modes of knowledge production (Thielsch 2019, p. 4) and is an example of what Mbembe (2016) sees as a “hegemonic notion of knowledge production [that] has generated discursive scientific practices [with] interpretative frames that make it difficult to think outside these frames” (p. 33). Such frames include IR’s traditionalist assumptions about the centrality of states in global politics, the characterization of global actors as rational and self-interested, and most notably, the liberal assumptions that all humans are equal in a meritocratic globalized political economy. Critical perspectives, including post positivist, postcolonial, and feminist approaches to IR have challenged these frames, yet the connection has yet to be made fully between theoretical critical approaches in research and how such approaches might be actualized through pedagogy. Put differently, how do critical theory and critical pedagogies connect in International Relations? I argue that ‘neutral’ teaching of IR is neither desirable nor possible.

The Always-Already Political Classroom It seems obvious that a broad range of topical and theoretical approaches to IR should be part of curriculum. However, the notion that all theories and approaches to (and frankly, “opinions about”) global politics are equal or without material consequence is short-sighted. Our theories about the international go on to inform not only how we see the world, but how we (as global bodies) act, and live, within it. The complexities of International Relations cannot simply be “taught” as a cut-and-dry debate but must be explored with careful consideration. Well-meaning pedagogical approaches that take the classroom to be a place where all voices are equal in a dialogical arena fail to recognize that beginning our teaching with the assumption that all voices are equal ignores power relations at play in the classroom. The “all voices are equal” approaches assume that “all participants are allied with oppressed, subordinated voices” (Ellsworth 1989, cited in Harlap 2014, p. 275), an assumption that could not hold in all scenarios.

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Consider the widespread assignment of Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations”, documented by the Open Syllabus Project as the 28th most frequently assigned text in all disciplines, ahead of Plato’s Republic, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, or Machiavelli and Hobbes (The Open Syllabus Project 2020). Despite the recognition that as a theory it is both inaccurate and incoherent (see Musgrave 2019 for full discussion), it is still widely taught as a text in introductory IR. Cultural essentialism in this text has found contemporary resonance with far-right ethno-nationalists, including narratives from U.S. President Donald Trump (Pampinella 2019). As Anjali Dayal (2019, para. 1) questions, why and how do we teach students about influential theories we know are wrong or have potentially harmful consequences? How might one teach Clash to an introductory IR class in a way that ensures students recognize its problematic assumptions rather than reinforce potential preexisting biases about the world? And how can we expect that students will come to this material, with the same level of social, political, and emotional empowerment to untangle the deeply racist and problematic assumptions of IR’s most prominently assigned text(s)? Presuming students in the IR classroom are a “decontextualized critical ‘subject’ who applies a series of rational, cognitive processes to interrogate truth claims objectively” (Danvers 2018, p. 549) aligns with traditionalist IR’s assumption about how global actors engage with each other. As feminist and postpositivist approaches have argued, this obscures power relations and systemic oppressions that exist for global actors. From a pedagogical perspective, then, a feminist pedagogical approach must therefore be aware that power relations exist between student bodies in a classroom, and also consider the role of the teacher that is “part of the socio-material-affective phenomena being reproduced with and through” classroom encounters (Lennon et al. 2018, p. 629). I therefore draw upon feminist ways of knowing that foreground teacher subjectivity as affective and connected beings “always in the middle of becoming and completely entangled in the personal, political, and pedagogical materialities” of their classrooms, research, and worlds (Lennon et al. 2018, p. 620). The classroom is always-already political because pre-existing power disparities between bodies in the classroom are not left at the door, no matter the intentions of the instructor. Teaching politics, therefore, cannot (can never) be “neutral”, because it occurs within pre-existing discursive systems of knowledge production that dictate what is, and is

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not, legitimate ways of knowing and who are (and who are not) authoritative “knowers”. It occurs between materially-embodied, differentially powered individuals. The premise that teaching politics is political draws upon Sara Ahmed (2012)’s argument that micro-politics of power in higher education operate to exclude specific discourses and bodies, most often to the detriment of those already marginalized. Presenting “all sides” of global issues in a “neutral” fashion thereby obscures the ways that specific bodies and perspectives have been historically excluded as productive of knowledge. Diversity (in our classroom and pedagogical design) should not be about a physical ability to speak, but also the ability to be heard (Burke 2015, p. 392; see also Mayuzumi et al. 2007). Like feminist IR scholars argued throughout the late 1980s, diversifying IR theory was not enough to “add women and stir”, particularly if research agendas examining so-called personal, private, gendered perspectives were marginalized or sidelined by dominant conversations in the discipline. This means that how we do and teach IR means that issues of gender, race, sexuality should not simply be sidelined in the final weeks of the syllabus; treated as an ‘add-on’ to the ‘real’ political content. In both our research and teaching, we need to be willing to hear (not just listen to) critical perspectives.

The Classroom Within a Feminist Pedagogical Framework One of feminist IR’s theoretical contributions to the IR cannon was destabilizing the subject, locales, and dominant frames of the discipline, including the motto “the personal is political”. Carrying this into a feminist critical pedagogical approach to teaching IR, therefore requires reflection and destabilization of the subjects, locales, and dominant assumptions used about the IR classroom and the IR student. As Emily Danvers notes, pedagogical practices often take as their desirable ‘critical’ subject an unspecified body and “fail to interrogate who the student is (and is not) in relation to access to power, privilege and opportunities structures” (2018, p. 549). Students are not neutral learners; they are embedded in particular socio-political contexts (Danvers 2018, p. 550), and the same can be said of instructors. The classroom is a relational space and our pedagogies must consider these affective, political, historical relations rather than assuming that IR can be presented neutrally to students who are

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not always-already embedded and affected by the content. For example, topics involving migration, political refuge, and military intervention will resonate differently with students who have personally experienced them (or not). International politics are not things that happen “over there” but have affective and cascading effects on individuals across the globe. Returning to a discussion about teaching Huntington’s “Clash” article, Dayal reminds us that “however demonstrably false it may be, it remains popular in influential quarters, with an intuitive appeal naturalizing categories of identity for which some readers may have deep affinity; teaching it as an authoritative idea from a credentialed, influential thinker can grant it cachet” (2019, para. 7). She goes on to explain that “our students of color do not need to encounter another powerful voice calling Islam inherently bloody or questioning the equal weight of African identities, to know these ideas have consequence in the world” (2019, para. 9, emphasis added). Theory’s discursive power extends to material manifestations of its widespread use and teaching. The role of the professor is not one of neutral information-presenter. Professors are not neutral presenters nor does our IR curriculum and thematic topics constitute a type of “objective material” that can be presented. Feminists have called for researchers to situate themselves with respect to the ways that their research draws boundaries (Ackerly and True 2008) and to consider their positionality, however complex, contradictory, or compromised it might seem (Shepherd 2016). Our research contains our own biases of our own lived experiences. Professors too, must be open about the ways their teaching is biased, conditioned by expectations of how authoritative knowledge should be presented and reproduced. However, this obscures the ways that our own presentation and interpretation of IR has been filtered through our own bodily life experiences. hooks (1994) notes, “we are invited to teach information as though it does not emerge from bodies” (p. 139), which has resulted in the perception that “we are listening to neutral, objective facts…facts that are not particular to who is sharing the information” (p. 139). It is this traditionalist expectation that professors can and should be “neutral” in which criticisms about “left-bias” are rooted. hooks (1994) discusses how discourses of race, gender, and sexuality are often marginalized in postsecondary spaces because we assume that knowledge comes only from the mind. In advocating a radical feminist perspective on knowledge construction, hooks explains that “once we start talking in the classroom about the body and how we live in our

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bodies, we’re automatically challenging the way power has orchestrated in that particular institutionalized space” (p. 137). She sees the discounting of bodily knowledge, particularly from Othered bodies, as a means in which the reproduction of elitism and privileged class values is obscured in the name of “unbiased” teaching (1994, p. 140). Therefore, a component of radical feminist pedagogy is recognizing that disciplinary knowledge about IR has always been incomplete and biased towards the lived experiences of its canonical authors—individuals who for half a century have predominantly been white, Western, wealthy, and male. Presenting “all theories” or “all perspectives” equally obfuscates the inherent bias within IR knowledges, in addition to obscuring the ever-present hierarchical relations between bodies in the IR classroom.

Implications of a Critical Classroom If the purpose of higher education is to challenge “intellectual complacency and conformity” (O’Dair 2007), then teaching IR requires educators to embrace the disruptions and fluctuations that have manifest in contemporary global politics and to examine them critically, not only using specific methods, tools, and theories, but by positioning ourselves in relation (social, political, economic, and emotional) to these phenomena. Processes of learning, particularly about complex subject material in global politics, are “never straightforward and linear but are necessarily tied in with complex relations of power, difference, and subjectivity” (Gore 1993, cited in Burke 2015). Global politics is not only something we teach or learn, but a complex phenomenon within which we are actively bound. While IR as a discipline has traditionally been taught as a canon of theoretical “debates”, critical feminist pedagogy should be based upon the perception of theory as a tool to “help us understand both the nature of our contemporary predicament and the means by which we might collectively engage in resistance that would transform our current reality” (hooks 1994, p. 67). As IR disciplinary is traditionally taught through the canon of theories, therefore, a feminist critical pedagogy might take as its starting point the unsettling of this pedagogical approach. As Trinh T. Minh-ha (2013, p. 66) explains “theory is lived in the multiplicity of life experiences”, yet IR as a discipline presents its theories as removed from the embodied experiences from which it is drawn. It also has been presented as detached from the particular historical, geographical, and

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social environments from which it was articulated. While the chronological evolution of the discipline (from the Peace of Westphalia through the inter-war period) is often used heuristically, teaching IR canon often fails to recognize that the bodies that have “produced” IR theory have perpetuated what L.H.M. Ling calls “Hypermasculine-Eurocentric Whiteness (HEW) in Disciplinary IR” (Ling 2017, p. 135). Ling recounts how, despite Asian scholars’ use and access to thousands of years of political cultural history, IR as a discipline has been strongly centered in European histories and stories about the International. The dominance of theoretical attention paid to (in both research and in our teaching curriculum) to state balance-of-power techniques (see, for example, Morgenthau 1948; Waltz 1979) or theories that predict state system behaviors (Wight 1960) is a very narrow presentation of the complex and rich international environment. To this, Cynthia Weber questions whether there is any coherence among ‘us’ (IR scholars) that could unify a point of view for an entire discipline (2017, p. 47). In other words, International Relations as discipline has historically privileged the views of an elite few while claiming that our studies are truly global. Consider again, the Clash of Civilizations as common text in IR curriculum. This text is “authoritative because Huntington was a key figure in the discipline’s development…his racism isn’t even unusual within the field…racism and imperial control were core tenets of early international relations theory and deeply racist texts [have been] foundational to the discipline’s intellectual evolution (Dayal 2019, see also Vitalis 2017). As the material we teach is inherently political, presenting “all sides” casts the historical evolution of IR as apolitical while ignoring the material realities of power differential between bodies in a classroom. We are in/directly connected to the phenomenon we study in IR and teaching IR must take this into account. Therefore, a feminist pedagogical approach to teaching IR might involve intentional exploration by all members of the classroom about their embodied experiences to/with thematic topics, or as Boler (1999) calls a ‘pedagogic of discomfort’ where “the ethical goal underpinning the pedagogical space is to inhabit a more ambiguous and flexible sense of self” (p. 170, cited in Burke 2015). International Relations as a discipline requires the researcher, teacher, and student to all situate themselves in the global relationship (and corresponding responsibility) to others. Global politics are not simply phenomena “out there” that we study; it is instead intimately connected to our place in the world and our relation to others. Studying and

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teaching global politics, therefore demands more critical reflection about this relationship and our embodied place within it. Becoming flexible about our self of self (an uncomfortable process, particularly for those of us steeped in historical privilege and power) includes modelling for students through pedagogy how we can disrupt global unethical, unjust, or historically oppressive global systems and practices and move towards a global order that we wish to see. Teaching IR should therefore not be an “unbiased” presentation of what is, but should also enable learning to empower students to consider what can be. Such a critical pedagogical approach might also disrupt the contemporary shift in higher education from a “relentless promotion of employability” to a “a commitment to the public good” (Williams 2013, p. 89 cited in Burke 2015). This chapter endorses teaching IR not by laying out the politically unstable and fluctuating environment that flashes on the evening news, but instead conceptualize IR education as a means to develop thoughtful citizens “who are able to take their place in a transforming society and world” (Osman and Hornsby 2018, p. 397). It is therefore, not the case that we should employ a critical pedagogy because the world is changing and therefore our approach to teaching IR must too. Instead, it involved recognizing that IR as a discipline has always been narrow and biased towards the experiences of those who “created” the discipline—elites steeped in HEW (Ling 2017), and that it is therefore well past due to disrupt the discipline by meaningfully unsettling practices of knowledge acquisition and reproduction.

References Ackerly, B., & True, J. (2008). Reflexivity in practice: Power and ethics in feminist research on international relations. International Studies Review, 10(4), 693–707. Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Durham: Duke University Press. Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2006). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions & education. New York: Routledge. Burke, P. J. (2015). Re-imagining higher education pedagogies: Gender, emotion, and difference. Teaching in Higher Education, 20(4), 388–401. Danvers, E. (2018). Who is the critical thinker in higher education? A feminist re-thinking. Teaching in Higher Education, 23(5), 548–562.

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Dayal, A. (2019, 6 November). Essay: teaching clash of civilizations. H-Diplo ISS Forum. Published online: https://issforum.org/roundtables/11-6-teachingclash#Essay_by_Anjali_Dayal_Fordham_University. Ehrlich, T., & Colby, A. (2004). Political bias in undergraduate education. Liberal Education (Summer), 36–39. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn’t this feel empowering? Working through repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 59(3), 297–324. Gore, J. (1993). The struggle for pedagogies: Critical and feminist discourses as regimes of truth. New York: Routledge. Harlap, Y. (2014). Preparing university educators for hot moments: Theatre for education development about difference, power, and privilege. Teaching in Higher Education, 19(3), 217–228. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. London: Taylor & Francis. Lennon, S., Riley, T., & Monk, S. (2018). The uncomfortable teacher-student encounter and what comes to matter. Teaching in Higher Education, 23(5), 619–630. Ling, L. M. H. (2017). Don’t flatter yourself: World politics as we know it is changing and so must disciplinary IR. In S. L. Dyvick, J. Selby & R. Wilkinson (Eds.), What’s the Point of International Relations? (pp. 135–146). New York: Routledge. Mayuzumi, K., Motobayashi, K., Nagayama, C., & Takeuchi, M. (2007). Transforming diversity in Canadian higher education: A dialogue of Japanese women graduate students. Teaching in Higher Education, 12(5–6), 581–592. Mbembe, A. J. (2016). Decolonizing the university: New directions. Arts & Humanities in Higher Education, 15(1), 29–45. Minh-ha, T. T. (2013). De-Passage: The digital way. Duke University Press. Morgenthau, H. J. (1948). Politics Among Nations. New York: McGraw-Hill. Musgrave, P. (2019, 6 November). Introduction to the clash of civilizations in the IR classroom. H-Diplo ISS Forum. Published online: https://issforum.org/ roundtables/11-6-teaching-clash#Essay_by_Anjali_Dayal_Fordham_Univers ity. O’Dair, S. (2007). The Liberal liberal arts. Symploke, 15(1), 359–363. https:// doi.org/10.1353/sym.0.0037. Open Syllabus Project. Accessed 30 November 2020, https://opensyllabus.org/. Osman, R., & Hornsby, D. J. (2018). Possibilities towards a socially just pedagogy: New tasks and challenges. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 28(4), 397–405. https://doi.org/10.1080/10911359.2018. 1441083.

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Pampinella, S. (2019, 6 November). Essay: Teaching clash of civilizations. HDiplo ISS Forum. Published online: https://issforum.org/roundtables/11-6teaching-clash#Essay_by_Anjali_Dayal_Fordham_University. Shepherd, L. J. (2016). Research as gendered intervention: Feminist research ethics and the self in the research encounter. Critica Contemporánea. Revista de Teoría Política, 6, 1–15. Thielsch, A. (2019). Listening out and dealing with otherness. A postcolonial approach to higher education teaching. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/14740222I9832459. Vitalis, R. (2017). White world order, black power politics: The birth of American international relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Waltz, K. N. (1979). Theory of international politics. New York: McGraw Hill. Weber, C. (2017). What’s the Point of IR? Or, we’re so paranoid, we probably think this question is about us. In S. L. Dyvick, J. Selby & R. Wilkinson (Eds.), What’s the Point of International Relations? (pp. 46–56). Routledge. Weissberg, R. (2006–07). Overheated rhetoric and deception. Academic Questions (Winter), 78–82. Wight, M. (1960). Why is there no international theory? International Relations, 2(1), 35–48. Wilson, J. (2015). ‘Cultural Marxism’: A unifying theory for rightwingers who love to play the victim. The Guardian (19 January). Available: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/19/culturalmarxism-a-uniting-theory-for-rightwingers-who-love-to-play-the-victim.

CHAPTER 4

Disruption as Reconciliation: Lessons Learned When Students as Partners Become Students as Teachers Heather A. Smith and Yahlnaaw

Situating Ourselves Heather: My name is Heather Smith. I’m a Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC). I’m also the former Director of the UNBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. UNBC is situated on the traditional territory of the Lheidli T’enneh and I am a white settler on this territory. I’m of Scottish and Irish descent and have been an academic for over 25 years.

H. A. Smith (B) University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada e-mail: [email protected] Yahlnaaw University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_4

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Yahlnaaw: Jah! Xaaydaga ‘las! Yahlnaaw han.nuu dii kiiG a ga. HlG aagilda Xaayda Gwaii sda.uu hll iigiing. Lax Kxeen sda.uu hll na.uu dii gan. Way.yad.uu ‘Nizdeh Nekeyoh Hohudel’eh Baiyoh’, Lheidli T’enneh guu.uu hll naa.uu dii ga. T’aawgiiwat han.nuu Naanga kiiG a ga. Jaaskwaan han.nuu dii awG a kiiG a ga. Bruce han.nuu dii G ung.G a kiiG a ga. GiidahlG uuhl.aay han.nuu dii dawG anas kiiG a ga. Lucas han.uu di k’uuga kiiG a ga. Hey! Wonderful People! My name is Yahlnaaw. I am from Skidegate, Haida Gwaii. I was born and raised in Prince Rupert on Ts’msyen territory. I am attending post-secondary education at the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George on Lheidli T’enneh territory. I am a member of the Raven clan and my family has many crests as we are from a Chief’s family. My Grandmother’s name is T’aawgiiwat, my mother’s name is Jaaskwaan, my father’s name is Bruce, my younger sister’s name is GiidahlGuuhl.aay, and my fiancé’s name is Lucas. Heather and Yahlnaaw: We situate ourselves at the beginning of this narrative because this helps you to know where we come from, provides you with a sense of the foundation of our story, and introduces you to us in ways that may not otherwise be obvious in traditional Western and colonial academic writing practices. In the space below, you are invited to join us on our journey of complexity, messiness and disruption. It might appear ‘straightforward’ at the beginning where we begin with Heather’s reflection on ‘innovative teaching’ because these reflections provide a starting point for thinking about how a settler might engage in disrupting traditional classroom practices. And Heather then introduces to the students-as-partners model which informs our collaborative work. However, we then turn to an example of the power of this model in action in the context of programming an Indigenous speaker series where it becomes clear that Heather, while positioning herself as an ally, nonetheless functions from a place of privilege and many taken-for-granted colonial assumptions. Yahlnaaw moves from student-partner to leader and teacher in the creation of this programming and as such the ‘normal’ way of doing things is ‘disrupted’ (in the best possible way). We conclude by sharing our respective reflections on the whole process in the context of disruption and power. Ultimately, in her closing statement, Yahlnaaw invites us to understand that Indigenous driven disruption is for growth, healing, reconciliation, and relationships.

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And so It Begins Heather: For me, innovative teaching and learning practices in International Relations (IR), and other disciplines, are informed by pedagogical orientations that challenge the traditional banking model of teaching and learning in the university context because “participation and affective growth are not…brought about by lecturing students on the value of participation and good feelings” (Shor 1992, p. 29). Within the context of our own individual practices, and or in our discipline, innovative pedagogical practices are informed by principles of active learning which challenge us to think differently about stand and deliver models of delivery, which require of us to consider what it is we seek to assess when we create exams or assignments and which ask us to create classrooms not of passive students but create classrooms full of students saying, doing and creating (Healey et al., 2014). Innovative teaching also means that we assess our own practices because if we are concerned about student learning, we need to ask the students about their learning and not just the content. To focus on the content is about focusing on ‘the what’ and it is crucial that we also focus on ‘the how’ because in teacher-centered classrooms, imbued with traditions of authority, control and scholarly expertise, we are not preparing our students for the twenty-first century. “Passive curricula help prepare students for life in undemocratic institutions. Students do not practice democratic habits of co-governing their classrooms, schools or colleges. There, they learn that unilateral authority is the normal way things are done in society. They are introduced in school to the reality of management holding dominant, unelected power” (Shor 1992, p. 19). Innovation requires that we see the political not just in the content but in the course design, classroom practices, and the assumptions that guide, sometimes unconsciously, our professional practices. Through our practices we can create “silences, margins and bottom rungs” (Enloe 1996). Finally, I believe that teaching and learning, and the adoption of innovative practices, takes place both inside and outside the classroom. Classrooms do not exist in a vacuum and innovation is not isolated to the classroom, as will be seen below. One model that I’ve drawn from in terms of both course design and programming design when I was Director of the University of Northern British Columbia Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology is the students-as-partners model (See for example, Healey et al. 2014, 2016; Kehler et al. 2017; Felten et al. 2019; Mercer-Mapstone and Abbott

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2020). According to Healey et al. (2014, p. 2) “partnership is understood as a relationship in which all involved are actively engaged in and stand to gain from the process of learning and working together to foster engaged student learning and engaging learning and teaching enhancement. Partnership is essentially a way of doing things, rather than an outcome in itself”. This definition of partnership highlights the active engagement and potential benefit to both faculty and students through partnership, as well as the importance of seeing partnership as a process, rather than a product. In addition, partnership works to “counter a deficit model where staff take on the role of enablers of disempowered students…aiming instead to acknowledge differentials of power while valuing individual contributions from students and staff in a shared process of reciprocal learning and working” (Healey et al. 2014, p. 15). As my work with Angela Kehler and Roselynn Verwoord (2017), and Yahlnaaw, Roselynn Verwoord and Conan Veitch (Smith et al. 2019), suggests the adoption of this model is not simple for anyone involved and it requires that all members of the partnership be mindful in an ongoing way of the multiple sites and sources of power embedded in our post-secondary institutions. Angela, Roselynn and I focused on our relationships as researchers, but the students-as-partners model has also been used in the scholarship of teaching and learning, assessment and teaching and learning design, curriculum design and pedagogic consultancy (See Healey et al. 2016). I’ve used the model to guide my classroom practices in areas that range from student created rubrics, to student created assignments in an otherwise pre-structured class, to crowd-sourced exam questions, to student partners in curriculum design and redesign. The degree of success, from the perspective of the instructor, is largely a result of my ability to help the students understand what and how they are learning—again—not just a checklist of content. I also have to get the students to trust this process and believe it’s not all some sort of nefarious set up. Ultimately, the only way co-inquiry or partnership works is if you’re willing to open up that space and be prepared for some flux because you’re giving over ‘control’ and if you’re really engaging as a partner then it can’t be all about you— which is hard for those of us who have historically been trained to ‘run’ classes. However, creating spaces for partnership can be a glorious and magical experience for all involved (And yes, I’m aware that there are assumptions about power in the way that is written because the instructor is creating

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the space). Through this approach, we are providing space for students to really own their own learning and that enhances student engagement. Sure, there can be resistance, but resistance happens for a variety of reasons and can be addressed through a variety of techniques designed to ensure the students feel safe in the process of partnership. Instructors must be simultaneously agile and prepared. You need to be willing to toss out your preconceived notions about assignments, or course design and still prepared to ensure a rich learning experience for everyone. And most of all, as instructors we need to be prepared to engage in some unlearning (D’Costa 2006; Smith 2017). As noted above, the students-as-partners model is applicable to a range of areas in the university context from the classroom to research to administrative practices. Below, Yahlnaaw and I describe our experience with setting up a speaker series, the process of which was informed by the students-as-partners model. I believe that the learning that took place reveals the transformative potential of the model.

Students-as-Partners in Practice: Our Story Heather: One of the most powerful experiences for me in terms ‘unlearning’ which highlighted the ways in which I have been complicit in the creation of silences and margins came through my work with Yahlnaaw on a speaker series titled “Indigenous Ways of Knowing and Decolonization of our Teaching and Learning”. My intention was to adopt a studentsas-partners model and have Yahlnaaw create and manage a speaker series related to Indigenization of the curriculum. Yahlnaaw, at the time, was an undergraduate student research assistant, employed by the UNBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology. We met and I was full of ideas of all the faculty who might be part of this series and how it could be managed. Yahlnaaw: As a Skidegate Haida Indigenous person aiding in the process of Decolonizing and Indigenizing the colonial institution, I sat back and listened to Heather and all her ideas. As she spoke, I thought about “Decolonizing our Colonized Minds: Educational Systems”, a presentation done by Ed¯ osdi /Judith Thompson and myself (Ed¯osdi and Yahlnaaw 2017) where we argued that Indigenization refers to the incorporation of Indigenous ways of knowing into Western pedagogies (which was exactly what this speaker series was aimed at). I also recalled Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s (2012, p. 1) position that, “decolonization

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brings about the repatriation [I personally prefer the term ‘rematriation’] of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools.” As Ed¯ osdi and I (Ed¯osdi and Yahlnaaw 2017) state, Indigenization and Decolonization are two separate terms with their own meanings, goals, and processes – they are not words that can be used interchangeably. In my opinion, when a settler person “Indigenizes” the academy, it is almost as though the white supremacy that is still trying to dominate this modern age is simply “allowing” Indigenous knowledges to be present in academia. Tuck and Yang (2012, p. 1) discuss a term they have coined, “settler moves to innocence” which “problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.” Essentially, by settler people “allowing” the incorporation of Indigenous ways of knowing into Western academia, settler guilt is alleviated for Canada’s past genocidal acts towards Indigenous People. This is not how Indigenization or Decolonization should be done. Indigenous land (all of the land we now call Canada) is deeply connected to Indigenous ways of being and knowing (Ed¯osdi and Yahlnaaw 2017). Thus, in order to efficiently define and use the terms Decolonization and Indigenization, one must be an Indigenous person who understands the connection between language and land. This is because decolonization revolves around land and Indigenization revolves around incorporating this knowledge derived from the land into Western academia. Heather: and then I paused and listened to Yahlnaaw because I was going about it all the wrong way. I was focusing on the what, not the how. In spite of my desire to be an ally…I’d really missed a few things. After a conversation about the rich ideas that Yahlnaaw was reflecting upon, I simply asked her to take the lead on the whole design and delivery of the speaker series. Yahlnaaw: First, consistent with Indigenous practices related to relationships, Kirkness and Barnhardt (2001) discuss that the four R’s (Respect, Relevance, Reciprocity, and Responsibility) are crucial when working with Indigenous peoples. Stemming from this, in regard to finding speakers for this series, one cannot simply send an email with the context for this series and have the speaker show up on the date of the presentation (which is what usually happens with academic conference presentations). In the same regard Indigenous peoples possess a deep connection to our land and knowledges, we must also build connections

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with the people we are working with on our (Indigenous) land and within our knowledges (whether they are Indigenous or not). Shawn Wilson (2008), an Opaskwayak Cree person from Manitoba demonstrates in his work, Research is Ceremony, that building relationships with all around us is crucial. How can we efficiently work with those around us when we do not have a relationship with them? As Heather began discussing who we could invite to speak in this series, she listed faculty and other academics from within the institution. Although these people have valuable knowledge to contribute, I thought I should gear this speaker series towards Indigenous knowledge holders and Elders. Our Indigenous Elders have copious amounts of knowledge they would love to share with all those who will listen. Their knowledge goes beyond anything we currently have in textbooks and much of this Indigenous knowledge is passed down in an oral fashion. When our Elder’s pass on to the spirit world, that knowledge is taken with them if it is not passed down. I thought to myself, “Yes, the faculty here at UNBC have valuable knowledge, however, their knowledge would be preserved somewhere as they are academics within a colonial institution that values the written word. Our Indigenous Elders likely do not have their knowledge written down due to oral knowledge processes. Therefore, let us make a space for the transfer of oral knowledge that cannot be found anywhere else”. Heather: In this process there was a profound shift in assumptions about the processes I’ve used in the past. It went from students-aspartners to student as leader and teacher. I was the learner. There was a clear need for me to put aside my assumptions about how to organize something, who were the experts and what expertise I brought to the table. I had to listen in a way that was open and grounded. I had to be willing to reflect the ways in which my practices were colonial and how unintentionally I created spaces of silences. Not only did I have to ‘unlearn’ in terms of how I listened, working with Yahlnaaw also encouraged me to see spaces differently. A prime example of this different way of seeing was when she hosted one of the speakers in our university senate chambers. As she was setting up for the session she noted: “well this is a very colonial space” as she observed a series of photos of past University Chancellors, predominantly white men and a photo of Queen Elizabeth…all peering down on us, in a space that is also designed to separate the senators or speakers from the audience. That observation has stuck with me ever since because we can (and do)

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create silences, hierarchies, and margins through the configuration and design of physical space. Yahlnaaw: The speaker series was a huge success! We had Indigenous faculty from UNBC, non-Indigenous faculty from UNBC to speak in regard to being an non-Indigenous ally, Indigenous faculty from other institutions in Canada, and Indigenous knowledge holders and Elders as part of the series. On various occasions throughout this speaker series, the question of “how do non-Indigenous allies contribute towards Indigenization and Decolonization?” was asked. Upon being asked this question by an audience member, I simply stated that the reason I am here facilitating this speaker series is because of the idea a non-Indigenous ally had—Dr. Heather Smith. A prime example of what non-Indigenous allies can do to aid in Indigenization and Decolonization (without demonstrating settler moves to innocence) would be to provide spaces and resources for Indigenous peoples to incorporate their knowledges in accordance with their Indigenous worldview. I was provided a space within the colonial institution to Indigenize without having a settler person telling me what I needed to do. Instead, I was able to construct how I was doing this in regard to my Indigenous worldview. Heather: Working with Yahlnaaw, have been revelatory. The depth of coloniality in my habits and practices is really quite staggering to me and, as I’ve articulated elsewhere (Smith 2017), that realization makes me deeply uncomfortable because it is inconsistent with who I want to be as a teacher. The experience raises fundamental questions about what is embedded not only in our curriculum, but in our everyday teaching and learning practices and processes—where is the colonial and the gendered in those practices? This question applies to all IR and Political Science curriculum and indeed all disciplines and institutional contexts. However, my interest in challenging traditional hierarchies, in using the idea of students-as-partners as a guide for engagement both inside and outside the classroom, created an opportunity for very deep learning for me. A willingness to reflect on our classroom and university practices is risky and can feel perilous at times but if we are to value the student experience, the student voice, and the voice of Indigenous and racialized communities then those of us in positions of power and privilege need to actually start to listen, reflect and act based on our learning. Yahlnaaw: I have noticed throughout my four years of post-secondary education that oftentimes professors are uncomfortable incorporating

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Indigenous knowledges into their course structure due to the fact that they are not Indigenous themselves. I believe that this is definitely something professors should consider when they are incorporating Indigenous knowledges into their course structures. Throughout the knowledge I have gained from my Elders, I have learned that in many Indigenous groups, specific knowledge is to be transferred to specific people for specific reasons. Thus, some knowledges are not meant to be shared to a general classroom. However, as Heather has demonstrated by providing me the space to create and deliver this speaker series, Indigenous knowledge was woven into Western pedagogies in an appropriate manner. In regard to classrooms, professors have the ability to bring Indigenous knowledge holders and Elders into their classroom to aid in the Indigenization and Decolonization of the colonial institution.

Concluding Reflections on Our Partnership in Practice Heather: In every instance I’ve tried to put the students as partners model into practice I’ve realized how much I had to unlearn. Unlearning some of our authority requires that we be humble and that we listen—really listen to what the student partners are saying regardless of whether we are in the classroom or the boardroom. Administrators and faculty have to stop trying to claim that all they are doing is student centered because it’s not student centered if you don’t actually talk to and listen to the students about their ideas about their learning, about our institutions, or about our teaching. What started as an apparently straightforward speaker series, informed by the students-as-partners approach, became a lesson in colonialism in a Canadian institution. Working with Yahlnaaw reminded me that the practices of marginalization are not seen the same way through the settler gaze, no matter how committed we are to being an ally. Our partnership also reinforced a question I’ve posed elsewhere (Smith 2017, p. 216): “if teaching is our everyday practice – what role do we play in the creation of silences, hierarchies and margins?” I want to share three lessons learned that are broadly applicable to all of us teaching International Relations and can be related to themes of power and disruption. First, we are all accountable for the spaces we create and we can all learn from our students in a myriad of ways—if we are willing to

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listen and willing to have our own sense of ourselves disrupted. Disruption is not normatively ‘bad’. It might feel risky but that sense of risk should lead us to interrogate our own biases, attitudes and practices. It is in the discomfort of disruption that I learn the most about the insidiousness of colonialism and the normalization of colonialism in my own practices. What are you normalizing through your practices? What would happen if like Elizabeth Dauphinee (2010, p. 809), you asked yourself “what expert are you?” Second, throughout our conversation above, multiple sites of power were exposed. From the use of our own voices to tell our story to the configuration of the university Senate chambers, to course outlines, to assumptions of whose knowledge ‘counted’, it’s clear to me that power is embedded throughout our institutions. More importantly, as a middle aged, privileged, white settler, it is also clear to me that I don’t always ‘see’ those sites of power. My ability to ‘see’ power is limited by my positionality and my experiences although my ability to ‘see’ power is enhanced through open conversations with Yahlnaaw. However, I would also argue that ‘seeing’ power, being able to identify a space as colonial or gendered is different from ‘feeling’ the power which to me manifests in some sort of behavioral adaptation and an affective response that is more than a superficial acknowledgment of sites of power. As Yahlnaaw (2019, pp. 7–8) asks in her powerful and ‘disruptive’ reflections of her experiences as an Indigenous student-partner in the context of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL): “How does the taken-for-granted dominance of colonial ways of knowing and being in the ISSoTL community—that determine what counts as SoTL and how learners and teachers form relationships—create space for Indigenous people, either students or faculty, to be partners in learning and teaching?” Third, scholars outside of Canada may assume that the insights here are somehow Canadian specific. I would argue they are not. Indeed, we cannot assume universality of Indigenous ways of knowing because that is a homogenizing colonial assumption but, for all of us, there are so many opportunities to engage in disruption. Depending on our own geographical and institutional contexts our work will vary but in every classroom and institution there are silences—so what are we going to do about it? Yahlnaaw: In Haida I always say, “gud gii t’alang giida” which means, “we all share” (often in regard to food). In order to take steps closer to

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students as partners practices and working on the processes of Decolonizing and Indigenization of the academy, we require all people—Indigenous and non-Indigenous - to share and provide space and knowledge for each other. My Elders always say that we need everyone in the circle together to get to where we want to go. The silences, hierarchies, and margins within the colonial institution are just a few of the many things that requires everyone in the circle together to deconstruct and disrupt. When everything you have dedicated to your educational career has been disrupted in the way Heather and I have outlined—it is going to be uncomfortable. If you are feeling this discomfort, you are aiding in the processes of Indigenization and Decolonization. The entire history of colonial-Indigenous relations has been about disruption - so why is disruption such an issue when it is Indigenous knowledges causing the disruption? Instead of disruption as a means to cultural genocide as per colonization, this Indigenous driven disruption is for growth, healing, reconciliation, and relationships.

References D’Costa, B. (2006). Marginalized identity: New frontiers in research for IR? In B. Ackerly, M. Maria Stern, & J. True (Eds.), Feminist methodologies for International Relations (pp. 129–152). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ed¯ osdi / Thompson, J. C., & Yahlnaaw / Grant, A. (2017). Decolonizing our colonized minds. Paper presented at World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education (WIPCE), Toronto, 28 July 2017. Dauphinee, E. (2010). The ethics of autoethnography. Review of International Studies, 36(3), 799–818. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210510000690. Enloe, C. (1996). Margins, silences and bottom rungs: How to overcome the underestimation of power in the study of international relations. In S. Smith, K. Booth, & M. Zalewski (Eds.), International theory: Positivism and beyond (pp. 186–202). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Felten, P., Abbot, S., Kirkwood, J., Long, A., Lubicz-Nawrocka, T., MercerMapstone, L., et al. (2019). Reimagining the place of students in academic development. International Journal of Academic Development, 24(2), 192– 203. Healey, M., Flint, A., & Harrington, K. (2014). Engagement through partnership: Students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. Heslington: HE Academy.

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Healey, M., Flint, A., & Harrington, K. (2016). Students as partners: Reflections on a conceptual model. Teaching & Learning Inquiry, 4(2), 1–12. https:// doi.org/10.20343/teachlearninqu.4.2.3. Kehler, A., Verwoord, R., & Smith, H. (2017). We are the process: Reflections on the underestimation of power in students as partners in practice. International Journal for Students as Partners, 1(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10. 15173/ijsap.v1i1.3176. Kirkness, V. J., & Barnhardt, R. (2001). The four R’s—Respect, relevance, reciprocity, responsibility. In R. Hayoe & J. Pan (Eds.), Knowledge across cultures: A contribution to dialogue among civilizations. Hong Kong: Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong. Available at: https://www.afn.ca/uploads/files/education2/the4rs.pdf. Mercer-Mapstone, L., & Abbott, S. (2020). The power of partnership: Students, staff, and faculty revolutionizing higher education. Elon University: Center for Engaged Learning. Available at: https://www.centerforengagedlearning.org/ books/power-of-partnership/. Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education: Critical teaching for social change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, H. A. (2017). Unlearning: A messy and complex journey with Canadian foreign policy. International Journal, 72(2), 203–216. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0020702017711702. Smith, H. A., Verwoord, R., Veitch, C., & Yahlnaaw. (2019). Unpacking power hierarchies in students as partners practices. Research Report Submitted to BCcampus September 2019. Available at: https://bccampus.ca/wp-content/ uploads/2019/10/BCCampus-Research-Report-Unpacking-Power-Hierar chies-in-Students-as-Partners-Practices.pdf. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Nova Scotia: Fernwood Publishing. Yahlnaaw. (2019). T’aats’iigang: Stuffing a jar full. International Journal for Students as Partners, 3(2), 6–10. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v3i2.4081.

CHAPTER 5

Outside the Orthodoxy? The Crisis of IR and the Challenge of Teaching Monocultures Nathan Andrews and Isaac Odoom

Introduction The 21st century marks a significant crossroad for the field of International Relations (IR). In fact, IR is in a crisis of identity where it seeks to figure out what/whom it represents and for what reason(s). This current state of affairs is underpinned by both historical and contemporary practices that have entrenched the discipline as particularly Western (i.e. European and North American) and therefore not representative of the broader world, subjects and peoples it attempts to engage with (Smith 2002; Shilliam 2011; Hobson 2012; Tickner 2013; Acharya 2014; Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al. 2016; Odoom and Andrews 2017). In response

N. Andrews (B) University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] I. Odoom University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_5

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to some of these critiques, professional associations such as the International Studies Association (ISA) are making efforts to diversify centers of knowledge mobilization by organizing joint conferences in Global South locations (e.g. Argentina in 2014, Singapore in 2015, Hong Kong in 2017, Ecuador in 2018, Ghana in 2019, and one planned for Morocco in 2020 which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic). There have also been efforts by scholars (pioneered by past ISA president, Amitav Acharya) to develop a ‘Global IR’ movement, which presents the potential for the inclusion of diverse worldviews and perspectives from around the world (see Acharya 2016a, b; Deciancio 2016; Eun 2019). Despite these efforts, a prevailing criticism of mainstream IR theorizing and pedagogical practices is that it leads to a unidirectional flow of knowledge where the West is the producer and the non-West is a recipient, resulting in the perpetuation of epistemic imperialism and academic dependency (Andrews and Okpanachi 2012). These practices and their impact on the marginalization of the ‘other’ is the crux of our contribution to this volume. As we have argued elsewhere (Odoom and Andrews 2017, p. 43), this “‘closure’ of the field to ‘other’ voices, insight and world-views, which leads to what we call a ‘representational deficiency’ in the field, is neither acceptable nor progressive.” By examining some of the contours of the IR field and its lack of diversity and representation in terms of how the subject is taught or studied, we begin to see what can be gained in freeing ourselves of the parameters of designing and teaching traditional IR and move towards creating a discipline that is actually characteristic of its name and ‘pluri-versal’ instead of universal (see Mignolo 2009; Blaney and Tickner 2017; Hafiz 2020)—a practice which we believe will be good for the variety and diversity the field encompasses in ‘real’ terms. We begin the next section with a brief examination of arguments that have been made regarding why IR is quintessential to the colonial project or an examination of mainstream IR as imperialism. The bulk of our discussion explores how certain five monocultures inform how we teach IR as well as their implications for how students become ‘disciplined’ in IR canons. The last segment examines what we can do in and out of the classroom to begin sowing seeds of change that could potentially help resolve the current crisis. In order to showcase the complex nature of our individual experiences with IR, we use first names in some parts to distinguish various respective accounts.

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IR as a Colonial Project First, as a discipline, one might expect IR to be global in nature and scope both in terms of the key issues that it addresses and the fact that the field continues to expand into ‘new’ and emerging worlds. However, the spread of the discipline around the world is not reflected in the main theories, concepts and approaches. The discipline is heavily influenced and dominated by American and European history, practice, institutions and scholars in the West. This Euro-American dominance is not lost on both scholars and practitioners of IR. A growing number of IR scholars have pointed out that the field is not, in fact, very international. In essence, IR is criticized as being Western-centric (Tickner 2013; Acharya 2014, 2016a, b; Hobson and Sajed 2017) and a colonial household (Agathangelou and Ling 2004; Bayly 2014) among other critical features. Over the years, while ‘foreign’ scholars have contributed to the development of the field, the dominant doctrines in IR remain Western. Mainstream IR theory is “simply an abstraction of Western history” (Buzan 2016, p. 156; see also Hobson 2012). Many factors account for this almost exclusive Western dominance not least of it being the barriers imposed upon the intellectual production and circulation of ideas from other parts of the world. Second, not only is IR theorizing famously Euro-American-centric but also IR “often marginalizes those outside … the West” (Acharya 2014, p. 647). Standard IR textbooks, the dominant schools of thought, the ‘great debates’ and all of the discussions of methodological advances focus on Western ideas and traditions of thought and on models derived predominantly from sanitized Western experience. While the non-Western world has long been a defining presence for IR scholarship, it has consistently balked at placing non-Western thought at the heart of its debates (Shilliam 2011). In this respect, some African, American, European and Asian IR scholars alike have challenged the Western parochialism of the discipline and called for ‘broadening’ the theoretical horizon of IR to encompass wider range of histories, experiences, knowledge claims, and theoretical perspectives, particularly those outside of the West (e.g. Nkiwane 2001; Smith 2009; Hamati-Ataya 2011; Acharya 2016a, b; Eun 2018, 2019; Murray 2019). The call for “more diversity in IR theory and greater pluralism in the discipline is justified due to not only the under-representation (or marginalization) of non-Western worlds in the theoretical study of international relations, but also the intrinsic

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complexity and variety inherent in twenty-first-century global politics” (Eun 2018, p. 2; see also Harman and Brown 2013; Odoom and Andrews 2017). In this respect, the common interest that brings together scholars involved in the theorization of non-western IR emerges from their dissatisfaction with the Eurocentric underpinnings of IR constructs. In sum, they show how Western/Eurocentric theories misrepresent and therefore misunderstand much of “the rest of the world” (Acharya 2014, p. 647). The work done in this growing field generally pushes us to devote far more attention to the limits of Western-dominated IR theorizing. For example, the discipline’s primary interest in understanding mainly politics among great powers has left very little room for the study of small states’ behavior or even the actions of other presumably ‘powerless’ actors in international affairs (Compaoré 2018; Grant 2018). This poses a challenge to instructors who teach IR to ‘foreign’ students who do not come from countries that are considered great powers by limiting the range of sociopolitical realities to which the students can relate (Bertrand and Lee 2012, p. 129). Given these absences, and without critical self-reflection, it becomes easier for the existing IR paradigm to be reproduced and reinforced by the ways in which IR is researched, taught and published with implications for how the IR canons are upheld through disciplinary training and practices (see Bencherif and Vlavonou 2020).

The Challenge of Teaching Monocultures There are five monocultures described by Santos (2004) that are of relevance to this chapter—including those concerning knowledge, linearity, classifications, universalization, and capitalist productivity and efficiency— which we believe are central to an understanding of IR’s current crisis. According to Santos (2004), these five logics underscore the (re)production of non-existence. Due to space limitations, we place particular emphasis on two of the five monocultures in this chapter—that is, the monoculture of knowledge and the monoculture of classifications. The other three, however, provide useful context in many ways. First, the monoculture of linearity sees the world in linear terms where core countries come before the others. The organization of various IR textbooks and syllabi reinforces this by typically starting with classical realism, realism, liberalism, constructivism and their variants with leading characters who are white men from core (or Western) countries (Andrews 2020). This teleology is sometimes followed by feminism and ‘others’,

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which then begin to engage with alternative approaches that are seen to have come after the mainstream was established. Secondly, the monoculture of the universal and the global results in the disregard of anything that cannot be universalized, generalized across board or that does not contribute to ‘the global’. This explains why the peculiar histories of the West and the decades of ‘world’ wars earlier theorists wrote about become repeatedly taught as a universalized fact of the state of nature or the caliber of the international system/society (De Carvalho et al. 2011; Powel 2020). Thirdly, the monoculture of capitalist productivity and efficiency is exemplified in neoliberalism and the discourses and practices associated with it. Its usage in this chapter reflects the neoliberal machinery of knowledge creation and production that rewards productivity and efficiency without accounting for plurality. The fact that many IR textbooks that do not sufficiently represent the world can exist and get used by IR professors is crucial to an understanding of the unquestioned silences that underpin IR knowledge (re)production and dissemination (Agathangelou and Ling 2004). Also, the fact that such silences can go unquestioned even under the eyes of rigorous peer-review mechanisms is particularly troubling (see Jessop 2017). The application of Santos’s (2004) five monocultures in this chapter is meant to critically reflect on the purported non-existence of ‘other’ approaches to IR pedagogy, the scholarship itself, and the challenges with such thinking and ‘doing’. In particular, these monocultures facilitate the erasure of otherness in IR texts and the pedagogical choices that teachers make based on these texts. The hegemonic rationality therefore prevails where stereotypes of “the residual, the inferior, the local and the nonproductive” (Santos 2004, p. 239) become an accepted characterization of non-Western scholars and their contributions to what we teach IR students. As a disclaimer, by writing about monocultures, we do not seek to entirely remove ourselves from practices that continue to entrench this non-existence because some of them are very real and will require tremendous collaborative efforts to counteract. Rather, we are being self-reflexive about the ways we can re-imagine how we do things as IR teachers. In fact, the distance from teaching or being part of introductory or graduatelevel IR courses since I (Nathan Andrews) began working at UNBC in September 2017 in a Department of Global and International Studies has afforded me the opportunity to critically reflect on the field, including whether or not (and how) I will seek to teach ‘core IR’—however that is defined.

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Monoculture of Knowledge Logics surrounding modern science have become entrenched as sole criteria for ‘truth’. The persistent dichotomy between science and tradition (i.e. non-science or ‘nonsense’), therefore, particularize a certain knowledge from the West as central to IR and this is perpetuated in textbooks and canonical material IR students are exposed to. The friction between science (characterizing what comes out of the West) and nonscience, tradition or ‘thick descriptions’ (characterizing what comes out of the non-West) seems to have contributed to this notion of a division of labor in IR (in fact, social science scholarship in general) where the West propounds grand theories and the non-West uses them to explore case studies (see Wemheuer-Vogelaar et al. 2016). This so-called division of labor helps to partly explain why theoretical knowledge is deemed to have not emerged from non-Western countries, as it “reproduces a hierarchical imperial imaginary” (Murray 2019, p. 2) where ideas get handed down from above to people who are seen to not have the capacity or know-how to come up with their own ideas. A fuller picture of knowledge (and of humanity) is therefore denied in favor of binaries and stereotypes (Murray 2019). For instance, if we critically examine the so-called ‘great debates’ of IR, anything beyond realism, liberalism and constructivism (including their variants) are seen as polemical critiques of the mainstream and therefore not useful contributions to knowledge in their own rights. In the 7th edition of a popular IR textbook, Introduction to International Relations: Theories and Approaches, the authors decided to focus on ‘major’ IR theories and approaches (Jackson et al. 2019). Even in the segment of the book that examines ‘contemporary debates and approaches’, only IPE, constructivism and post-positivism feature in respective chapters. This is just one example of many textbooks that reproduce knowledge by Western scholars while silencing or forgetting other perspectives. A recent project undertaken to examine graduatelevel course syllabi in 15 leading IR departments in the West (including Oxford, Stanford, LSE, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, Yale etc.) and 15 leading IR departments in Africa (including Stellenbosch, Wits, University of Cape Town, University of Ghana, Cairo University, University of Ibadan etc.) is quite telling in terms of further pointing to how the major canons of IR are upheld as received wisdom that needs to be immortalized (Andrews 2020). In responding to why this is the case, an instructor in one of the schools in the U.S. noted that,

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I actually teach the IR field seminar. I’ll note that the explicit goal of this course is to introduce students to the history of IR thought in the United States, so it is heavy on white guys who wrote a while ago and light on international perspectives (there’s some discussion of European perspectives in the seminar, but I don’t talk about how IR is studied elsewhere in the world). (email communication, March 2019)

The fact that a course on the history of IR thought in the U.S. can constitute an IR field seminar underpins American (and European) centrality in the discipline (see Powel 2020). Despite the rationale provided for the exclusion of the international in a seminar on ‘international relations’, the evidence points to what is common in many IR textbooks and syllabi, which perpetuates the monoculture of knowledge by giving prominence to Western theories and histories of the discipline (De Carvalho et al. 2011), thereby (re)producing conceptions about the non-existence of alternative knowledge and perspectives both in and outside the classroom.

Monoculture of Classification Related to the former, this monoculture establishes stereotypes while creating and naturalizing hierarchies. By classifying countries as First World/Third World, Developed/Underdeveloped, and High Income/Low Income among other categories, students leave the classroom with binaries that entrench racist orthodoxies in mainstream IR (in this case even IPE) scholarship. Our own experience in the classroom and beyond as international students who trained in IR and subsequently teach undergraduate courses in IR in Canadian universities seem to confirm this. For example, classified as the poorest or ‘least developed’ continent in the world according to mainstream assumptions about modernist development, most IR courses reflect a historic disinterest in, or ignorance of, African international relations and lived reality (Smith 2009; Harman and Brown 2013; Odoom and Andrews 2017). As it is, “few other regions of the world are presented as alien, exotic, marginal and ‘different’ to the same degree in IR” (Gallagher et al. 2016, p. 443). Prominent scholars in the discipline of IR have “treated Africa as an intellectual leftover, dealt with by major approaches as an example of the failure or absence of ‘proper’ international relations” (Gallagher et al. 2016, p. 442; see also Jackson, 1993).

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In a rather shocking assertion, Hans Morgenthau stated in his seminal Politics Among Nations that Africa did not have a history before World War II; it was a “politically empty space” (Waltz 1979, pp. 72–73 cited in Lemke 2003, p. 114). Similarly, as recently as 2011, Kenneth Waltz while acknowledging that he deliberately ignored Africa in his writing further claimed that the ‘primitive’ nature of African society inhibits interstate warfare, which would have been of interest to his work (cited in Gallagher et al. 2016, p. 442). Not surprisingly, such mischaracterizations are consistent with the place of ‘Africa’ as a (mis)represented object in Western media and academic discourse (Mudimbe 1990; Andrews and Okpanachi 2012). And as Said (2003 [1978]) and others have long reminded us, categorizations and classification of the geocultural Western ‘Self’ depends on the establishment of its barbarous or backward ‘Other’ (Gallagher et al. 2016, p. 442). These (mis)characterizations and classification of the continent as well as the historical disinterest in its potential as a site of legitimate knowledge, produces intellectual deficiency because it reinforces lazy and often factually incorrect stereotypes about the African continent – legitimizing mainstream academic and media discourses that make generic pronouncements on it. As well, pedagogically, it does not encourage students to think critically when presented with such accounts (Gallagher et al. 2016). While it is indeed the case that in universities across North America there are courses that give students the opportunity to broaden their understanding of African domestic and international politics, our experience, however, shows that students’ outlook is shaped by limiting literatures and their own expectations of the ‘Third World’ as a place associated with problems of conflict, diseases, crisis and poverty. Students’ views are reinforced by major IR textbooks, such as Baylis, Smith and Owens’ (2011) The Globalization of World Politics, which emphasize these as primary issues for the African continent. Many students are accustomed to taking courses on Africa to prepare them to work for a development agency in the future, with an implicit association of Africa with disaster, poverty and underdevelopment. This, we argue, is a direct outcome of the monoculture of stereotypical classification. Research shows that educational curricula play a significant role in reproducing problematic discourses, highlighting the mutually reinforcing relation between the pedagogical and the geopolitical (Müller 2011). And as noted by Gallagher et al. (2016, p. 442), in teaching IR, “it is vital to remain attuned to the possibility for classrooms to be sites of domination

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and hegemony, as well as spaces of critical and engaged global citizenship.” Reflecting on the implications of these issues for how we study and teach Africa and the ‘Third World’, for instance, raises questions not just for scholars of global politics but also for how IR represents what is ‘normal’ and ‘different’, and how new ways of thinking about politics in ‘other’ parts of the world can challenge and enrich the field, both in terms of how it is viewed and how it is included in broader IR curricula.

What Now? Future Directions The monocultures we have explored are interrelated but we have separated them here in order to showcase how they work both individually and in conjunction to facilitate the forgetfulness of non-Western perspectives. However, the discussion of monocultures and the manner in which they are embedded as part of the pedagogical ethos of IR should not make us think of a static state of affairs. Instead, it should lead us to question our everyday practices in the classroom or elsewhere in order to discern and correct implicit and explicit biases in IR scholarship. Teaching is a powerful tool of knowledge-making and knowledge de-centering. Knowledge is power and therefore to disempower the prevalence of Western knowledge in IR, teachers need to embrace interesting ways of reading marginalized IR text alongside or in contrast to ‘key thinkers’. New or revised publications, textbooks and syllabi need to result from this endeavor. For instance, a new textbook edited by Arlene Tickner and Karen Smith, International Relations from the Global South: World of Difference (Tickner and Smith 2020), contributes to ways in which teaching IR can be better grounded in diversity. The book engages with some of the core concepts and phenomena that are fetishized in mainstream IR, including order and disorder, war and conflict, the state and sovereignty, security, globalization, foreign policy and inequality among other topics. The novelty, however, lies in both the diverse contributors assembled and the alternative perspectives they use to explore the same popular concepts we are all familiar with in IR. Let us assume that this new textbook does not receive widespread usage in undergraduate courses in Western universities because (1) it has only ‘Global South’ in its title, and (2) canonical professors remain attached to textbooks published by Oxford/Cambridge University Press and other elite university presses. Even so, students can benefit from a few readings at the beginning of the school year or semester that could

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provide a critical gaze for teaching IR in the typical manner from realism to liberalism to constructivism and so on. The point is that no single textbook is good enough to capture the diversity of the field, hence the need for additional and purposively selected readings that disrupt the pervasiveness of canonical contributions. This also means the syllabus (including course description and objectives) needs to be designed to infuse these missing aspects of the scholarship in a manner that moves beyond the monocultures discussed. These few ways forward provided here do not seek to necessarily streamline or even essentialize thinking around pedagogical practices in the field of IR. However, the current crisis persists because these practices are treated as monocultures in themselves and do not often propagate beyond individual teachers. Thus, we hope this contribution and the volume as a whole will begin to spur collaborative thinking, un-learning and re-learning about some of these directions IR pedagogy can take as well as their ramifications for the discipline at large. In conclusion, IR is somewhat ‘dear’ to our hearts but perhaps not dear enough for us to accept the status quo as given knowledge handed down by white forefathers (possibly including a few grandmothers) who have ‘scientific’ ideas about and for people whose lives they have not experienced. Needless to say, things need to change and we believe the classroom is one of the best places to begin. This is one of the main ways through which IR can become a relevant reflection of both the times we are in and the needs of the twenty-first century student who must navigate these unsettling times.

References Acharya, A. (2016a). Advancing global IR: Challenges, contentions, and contributions. International Studies Review, 18(1), 4–15. Acharya, A. (2016b). Studying the Bandung conference from a global IR perspective. Australian Journal of International Affairs, 70(4), 342–357. Acharya, A. (2014). Global international relations (IR) and regional worlds: A new agenda for international studies. International Studies Quarterly, 58(4), 647–659. Agathangelou, A. M., & Ling, L. H. (2004). The house of IR: From family power politics to the poisies of worldism. International Studies Review, 6(4), 21–49. Andrews, N. (2020). International relations (IR) pedagogy, dialogue and diversity: Taking the IR course syllabus seriously. All Azimuth, 9(2), 267–281.

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Hobson, J. M. (2012). The Eurocentric conception of world politics: Western international theory, 1760–2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobson, J. M., & Sajed, A. (2017). Navigating beyond the Eurofetishist frontier of critical IR theory: Exploring the complex landscapes of non-Western agency. International Studies Review, 19(4), 547–572. Jackson, R. H. (1993). Quasi-States: Sovereignty, international relations and the third world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, R., Sørensen, G., & Møller, J. (2019). Introduction to international relations: Theories and approaches. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Jessop, B. (2017). Varieties of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities. Higher Education, 73(6), 853–870. Lemke, D. (2003). African lessons for international relations research. World Politics, 56(1), 114–138. Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7–8), 159–181. Mudimbe, V. Y. (1990). The invention of Africa: Gnosis, philosophy and the order of knowledge. Melton, UK: BJames Currey. Müller, M. (2011). Education and the formation of geopolitical subjects. International Political Sociology, 5(1), 1–17. Murray, C. (2019). Imperial dialectics and epistemic mapping: From decolonisation to anti-Eurocentric IR. European Journal of International Relations, 1354066119873030. Nkiwane, T. (2001). Africa and international relations: Regional lessons for a global discourse. International Political Science Review, 22(3), 279–290. Odoom, I., & Andrews, N. (2017). What/who is still missing in international relations scholarship? Situating Africa as an agent in IR theorising. Third World Quarterly, 38(1), 42–60. Powel, B. (2020). Blinkered learning, blinkered theory: How histories in textbooks parochialize IR. International Studies Review, 22(4), 957–982. Said, E. W. (2003 [1978]). Orientalism. London: Penguin Books. Santos, B. D. S. (2004). The world social forum: Towards a counter-hegemonic globalisation (Part 1). In J. Sen, A. Anand, A. Escobar, & P. Waterman (Eds.), World social forum: Challenging empires (pp. 235–245). Viveka Foundation. Shilliam, R. (Ed.). (2011). International relations and non-Western thought: Imperialism, colonialism and investigations of global modernity. London: Routledge. Smith, K. (2009). Has Africa got anything to say? African contributions to the theoretical development of international relations. The Round Table, 98(402), 269–284. Smith, S. (2002). The United States and the discipline of international relations: “Hegemonic country, hegemonic discipline”. International Studies Review, 4(2), 67–85.

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CHAPTER 6

Traditions, Truths, and Trolls: Critical Pedagogies in the Era of Fake News J. Marshall Beier

Introduction Some years ago, a former student got in touch to share that a large lecture-format undergraduate introductory IR course I had taught early in my career had ‘ruined’ the evening news for him. He recalled that I had opened the first lecture with the promise that this would be the outcome if the course worked as planned, and so I confess to having taken some satisfaction from learning that at least this one student felt a little less certain of understandings of the world laid out for him in the authoritative accounts of journalists and other professional observers. Besides promoting students’ development of their critical faculties more generally, an explicit aim of the course had been to destabilize dominant narratives about global politics, not least the well-rehearsed stories carried on the credentialed voices of scholars. As far as it went, there was nothing especially remarkable about this. With critical contributions

J. M. Beier (B) McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_6

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by feminists, poststructuralists, postcolonialists, and others having come more and more into currency in recent decades, the same aims animate countless courses in IR and beyond, employing a wide range of innovative strategies that have undoubtedly complicated the evening news for large numbers of interested students. But as well-recommended as this approach may be on the strength of critical pedagogical commitments, it can elicit a certain unease in our present political rendition, liberally salted as it is with talk of ‘post-truth,’ ‘fake news,’ and the like. Among the important contributions of critical pedagogies is their unsettling of dominant narratives as well as the authority of voice of the credentialed ‘expert’ (see, for example, Friere 1970; Shor 1992; Hooks 1994; Grande 2004; Kinchloe 2008). But, as we are increasingly called to acknowledge, what many might regard as the healthy skepticism of reflexive critical scrutiny or a commitment to the contingent and constructed nature of social life has darker analogues in what at times seems the wholesale abandonment of reliable ‘truth’ or knowledge claims. Once the stock-in-trade of internet trolls, ‘alternative facts’—as US presidential counselor and erstwhile Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway blithely termed them in a January 2017 interview on NBC’s Meet the Press —now openly ‘inform’ public discourse and, in turn, move the boundaries of political possibility. Rightly alarmed at these developments, a rising chorus in the academy urgently recommends a retreat from the world of indeterminate knowledge claims wrought from myriad critical interventions of recent decades. But though the fears behind this are well-founded, renewing faith in (or perhaps longing for) stable truths is to trade one chimera for another. Moreover, it misses the point that much more at issue than truths, per se, are regulatory practices of knowledge production and validation. Critical approaches have much to offer by way of a corrective here if taken together with a collegial ‘ethos’ in teaching and learning. Before moving to sketch something of this ethos and what it entails, however, it is important to reiterate the indeterminacy of truth and knowledge claims. While this might seem a counterintuitive step amidst the understandable angst of our ‘post-truth’ moment, we should take care not to fall prey to the fallacy that, where none can be held definitively true, uncertainty implies one claim is as good as any other. Exercising deep skepticism as a pedagogical practice does not mean a given claim is necessarily ‘wrong’ or, more precisely, that it does not constitute meaningful knowledge. Rather, it signals our recognition that an irreducible

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aspect of its meaningfulness is how it serves a politics by delimiting someone’s imagined (or preferred) field of possibility and plausibility. The stories we tell our students (and each other) about IR, its subject matters, and its debates are meaningful in this way also. Like other fields and disciplines, IR is a site of intersecting stories, and this includes those told by its luminaries, expressing and expressed in theories, historical narratives, and, of course, the field’s stories about its own origins and development. Effecting disruption by critically interrogating them, exposing their respective and combined limits, remains indispensable to pedagogies that urge students to reflect on the work IR does in defining the worlds of which it speaks.

Telling Stories The stories we tell in IR are telling too of IR, revealing it as a social space more hospitable to some politics than to others. The first point I wish to make here is not that IR is about stories, but that IR is stories. In its disciplinary practices, it is a site for the (re)production and (re)circulation of stories, many of them in apparent conflict with one another—giving flesh to the ‘Great Debates’ origins story of the field itself—and yet holding a significant degree of consensus on big questions about what and whom matters and a striking lack of curiosity about other possibilities. Any who have tried it will know that teaching IR as a cacophony of stories can be a very effective way to activate students’ critical engagement, even in large lecture-format introductory undergraduate courses. Stories that might affect something of a disruption for those well-acquainted with IR’s established narrative repertoire can be particularly helpful in denaturalizing much of what might otherwise be taken as definitive accounts—issued from the lectern or laid out in the pages of textbooks—of what matters and why. One iteration of my own introductory course many years ago, for example, opened with the Great Law of Peace of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, presenting it both as an historic example of a well-functioning inter-national system that produced two centuries of political order and also a way of seeing and being in the world that makes it impossible to mark out the inter-national and domestic spheres as separate and discrete (see Bedford and Workman 1997). I did not utter the word ‘Westphalia’ in lectures or address the ‘black box’ view of the state until about two months later, by which time we had spent weeks laying out a much broader understanding of

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the possibilities of global politics. Disciplinary mainstays like the Concert of Europe look a lot different and, hopefully, quite a bit less natural from that starting point (see King 2018). And alerting students to the disproportionate emphasis placed on them in IR’s dominant stories equips them to think critically about how exclusions speak volumes if we know how to listen. This is, of course, only one possible point of entry, for just one strategy, with a specific course in mind. If, as Steve Smith (1995, p. 2) has put it, a discipline’s silences are its loudest voices, then any of IR’s many implicit erasures might be plied to similar effect. All help to place in perspective the big ontological claims about what ‘is’ in the world. Students come to recognize these as indeterminate stories also and they get a good sense of just how much we have to simply assume and harden into ontology when we opt to endorse a claim that the defining feature of our world is conflict, or cooperation, or something else—and the inherently political nature of the exercise starts to come into relief too. Following on this, a survey of the gamut of mainstream and critical theoretical approaches reveals that they too are just more stories wedded to various ontological claims. And it turns out that the specialized disciplinary language that can be alienating to many students tends to be less so when approached in this way and, just as important, when broached in an already-established microculture (in the sense of the in-course cohort) of critique. Students are by then accustomed to the game of teasing out assumptions and weighing ‘stories’ on the basis of their own critical faculties and are less reticent about questioning authoritative scholarly voices. This last point warrants special attention. The authoritative voice of the scholar can be intimidating and this may lead all too easily to silencing where students lack confidence in their facility to question the credentialed expert. Approaching sites of power and authority through and as expressive of stories renders them more amenable to critique and, consequently, a little less daunting. Authority over truth or knowledge claims is thus itself made an object of critical scrutiny in ways that work to demystify expertise. Of course, that is precisely what some find quite worrying in a ‘post-truth’ moment in which we have seen, among other things, weaponized charges of ‘fake news’ emerge as another way to efface and to silence (Nichols 2017; Sobo 2019). Against the rising din of science denial, it might well seem that we question the authoritative voices of knowledge production at our collective peril. Indeed, scholarship committed to the idea of the constructedness of social life has raised

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precisely this concern in some quarters (Kingwell 2017). In answer to this, however, I return to what I referred to as a collegial ‘ethos’ of teaching and learning, which I think can be helpful here inasmuch as it is really all about authority of voice. Most fundamentally, it bespeaks a commitment to engaging expertise not as something that is held in the manner of an instrument or resource but, rather, as multiple, dynamic, overlapping, and intersecting practices made meaningful through conversation between bearers and producers of knowledge. Equally important, it is not the exclusive preserve of an elite cadre. A collegial ethos of teaching and learning recognizes students as already knowledge bearers and producers in their own right and sets as a first task the building of the sorts of relationships that allow us to move teaching from knowledge dissemination toward knowledge exchange and more participatory practices of knowledge production (see Beier and Raha 2020).

Broadening the Collegium Something we can usefully draw on in thinking about this is a more collegial view of research participants as bearers of important stories— an outlook inspired in part by the ethnographic turn taken by a growing number of IR scholars and in emergent best practices in research ethics that position research participants more as collaborators than ‘informants.’ This makes a number of demands on us on the research side of our professional lives. First, it means making a commitment to conversation. Conversation cannot be compelled by the researcher in the field any more than it can be in the faculty lounge. It has to be a mutual endeavor. Perhaps more importantly, it cannot be ended unilaterally in the field any more than it can be in the faculty lounge. We could never—or, at least, not easily—terminate a discussion with a colleague in the academy by saying we choose not to answer. Similarly, if we take seriously the collegiality of relationships built with research participants, that means the work does not end with publication. Relationships entail responsibilities, and among those is the research colleague’s quite reasonable expectation that a conversation has been started and may therefore continue. And this starts to get at a way of approaching the relationship between the academy and the community that moves us beyond the ‘ivory tower.’ Seen in this light, the academy is not apart from the community but is an integral part of it as a site of knowledge production which not only can

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be but very often already is collaborative with community members— indeed, which, in many instances, simply could not function without those collaborations. Drawing from the same kinds of commitments, thinking critically about the acting subject(s) of teaching and learning means recognizing that pedagogy is also about conversation—about exchange between bearers and producers of knowledge in interaction. An appealing aspect of this way of approaching what we do is that not only is the boundary between teacher and student disturbed but so too is the distinction between teaching and research. Critical pedagogical commitments alert us to the importance of recognizing students as already bearers of knowledge who bring experiences and perspectives (Shor 1992) relevant to the things we take up in our courses and in our research. They are, among other things, the foremost experts on their own daily lives, and those lives can intersect areas of inquiry central to the full range of fields and disciplines. Their family backgrounds might give rise to some insight of interest to the sociologist; their personal experiences of the healthcare system could have acquainted them with an issue of current concern in public policy, or voice and subjecthood, or rights; they might have read something we have not which speaks directly to our own work. They are also endowed with a full measure of the creative capacity for insight that is requisite to the production of new knowledge. But despite these assets, the power relations in the classroom and the academy more generally signal whose voice is authoritative in ways that, even if unintentionally, may diminish, subordinate, and ultimately silence other voices. In many cases, even the physical spaces work against efforts to adopt a more collegial approach to teaching and learning—the architecture of the lecture theatre is only the most conspicuous example. The disciplined regulation of knowledge production is itself, to borrow from Michel Foucault (1977, p. 146), “an art of rank.” We can begin to challenge that, though, by moving toward what I will now more specifically term an ethos of collegial co-discovery: a reaffirmation of the academy as a site of knowledge production, but also a repudiation, if I may put it that way, of the ivory tower in favour of a much broader understanding of collegiality that resists rigid boundaries between teaching and learning, between research and pedagogy, and between academy and community. And this starts to get at what might be an effective answer to our post-truth moment. We could demur from disrupting authoritative voices and hegemonic ideas, and in some people’s

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view that is precisely what ought to be done. But, for others, this would be to forget power and what we know about how it operates in dominant knowledge practices to silence some voices, and invalidate some stories, in ways that might have less to do with ‘truth’ than with privilege. Without destabilizing authoritative voices and the knowledge claims they endorse, could we, for example, take the story of the Great Law of Peace as seriously as the story about the Concert of Europe? Could we recognize the authority of voice of a child’s account of her own lived experience as being meaningful in the context of international human rights regimes (see Beier 2019)? Could she even be imagined as apposite to what IR’s own dominant stories about itself and its subject matters have to say about what (and who) counts and should or should not be enclosed by the disciplinary boundaries those particular stories call into being? These things start to hint at some of what is ultimately at stake here and why retreating to the Archimedean anchor of the authoritative credentialed voice is no answer. Instead, I am inclined to invest more in the idea of a collegial ethos that takes students as fully a part of the collegium—as colleagues with a claim to conversational relationships with us, modelled on the relationships we have with faculty colleagues. Importantly, something else we expect in the faculty lounge, in our collegial interactions, is push-back. In the conversations between at least ostensibly equal credentialed voices, we expect to be taken to task. In fact, we hope for it, not only there but at conferences, from journal reviewers, and so forth. It is an indispensable part of the academic mode of knowledge production. And it is a skill set that can be promoted in teaching at all levels, no matter the substantive content of a course. Presenting this to students as an ‘ethos’ relying on mutual respect among colleagues helps in building a safe space where insight can flourish because risks can be taken in the sharing of thoughts still not fully formed, in the way we might hope to be able to do in our most productive relationships in the faculty lounge. What comes with this is a shared sense of an ethic of skepticism but also of responsibility, which is amenable to promoting the competencies needed to seek, weigh, and apply evidence so that we can take on the fake news and conspiracy theories because students feel more a part of the production of knowledge in a way that gets them to really appreciate that, while every heretical idea is worth thinking about, not all of them fly.

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Relationships, Rights, Responsibilities In our present time of disruption, then, a first critical response is to make our own disruption of an increasingly recurrent assumption that, while seemingly ubiquitous, is nevertheless culturally-specific and peculiar to our moment: the fallback position of presumed unqualified entitlement to one’s opinion. This ontology of rights, perhaps owing something to liberal sensibilities, is all too often the final point of appeal—and, even on others’ behalf, of excuse—in holding to a position on otherwise weak or tenuous support. It is a rights claim asserted not in connection with responsibility as much as in defiance of it. This is a standard of validation on which the trade in fake news and conspiracy theories vitally depends—a disruption of responsibility where all ideas are held in false equivalency with opinion, and where the latter can be made to stand simply by premising validity on nothing more than the right to opine. It is also a practice that the collegial ethos to which I refer can help to ameliorate inasmuch as it is anathema to conversation and therefore contrary to the norms of collaborative membership in a community of codiscovery. This keeps the accent where it ought to be: on the reciprocal and collective responsibility of all participants in knowledge practices. Another significant advantage of a more inclusive collegial practice is the work it does in keeping a check on the ever-present danger and consequences of reifying binary standards of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ knowledge claims. This aids in sustaining affirmation of knowledge itself as a social practice, which is essential lest the power and authority of expertise comes to reassert itself as arbiter, thereby allowing knowledge claims to settle and stabilize into ontology once more. If we are right to be concerned about the ways in which charges of ‘fake news’ and the like can be weaponized as an expedient to refuse or silence unpopular or inconvenient voices, and I believe we are, then we should take care not to legitimize those strategies by practicing them ourselves. Acknowledging that there may be understandable reticence about dignifying some positions and that we should never countenance claims that are, for example, racist, xenophobic, or otherwise hateful, there can be value in the exploration of standpoints or propositions that might simply seem outlandish. Reflecting on conspiracy theories as a form of playfulness, EJ Sobo (2019) urges us to see their value as thought experiments through which power and authority can be problematized and critical thinking skills are sharpened.

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We can productively embrace this, therefore, as an amenability to alternative possibilities and, thus, as a critical pedagogy in its own right so long as the crucial aspect of responsibility is kept foregrounded. There is value, then, in eschewing the rigid binary of ‘conspiracy theory’ (bad) and ‘reality’ (good), in favour of an unmasking of power instead. Knowledge practices—including but not limited to university research, teaching, and learning—are always social practices constitutive of political worlds and possibilities, and this means that power is always at work in and through them. Calls to decolonize scholarly knowledge production (Smith, p. 1999) and the university itself (Bhambra et al. 2018) necessitate different pedagogies as well. Indigenization of curricula is necessary and overdue (Smith and Summerville 2017), and not only in the immediate environs of ongoing settler colonialism but everywhere talk and inquiry turn to political histories, geographies, and philosophies. This includes acknowledging how indispensable something like the Great Law of Peace is to a fuller understanding of the worlds of possibility that exceed the boundaries of our disciplined ways of thinking about and teaching on world politics. It means engaging it as sui generis international theory, not merely something that might inform our theorizing. This demands attentiveness to voices not traditionally heard in IR. But an academy in which the sufficiency of my voice in the introductory IR course—the voice of the credentialed expert (whether averred or presumed) and of a settler on Indigenous land—might still be positioned as authoritative and allowed to go unchallenged would be one which is itself irredeemably expressive of advanced colonialism. Before they are anything else, pedagogies are relationships and relationships entail responsibilities. What we choose to make of these will have much to do not only with how we are positioned in the power relations of the classroom, but with how we are implicated in relations of power that sustain (global) hierarchies as well. Stories matter and so too does the extent to which we abide others as legitimately storytellers with potentially meaningful stories to tell. One further critical lesson we can take from the Great Law of Peace in this context resides in what it reveals—and what we might do well to learn—about how different knowledge practices or regimes can have very different arrangements for the determination of the meaningfulness or validity of knowledge claims. Like the knowns of other orally-held literary traditions, what is known about the Great Law is not unregulated knowledge. Rather, its performance is subject to community scrutiny in

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ways that evince much in the way of the best of what we might aspire to as collegiality in academic knowledge practices. It is thus a salutary reminder of the indispensable role of responsibility and how it functions to regulate authority. Of course, regulatory practices must also be held up to critical scrutiny inasmuch as they are themselves both knowledge and determinate of possibility in practices. But that is not the same thing as dispensing with them altogether. Struggles around claims to expertise are essentially struggles around the regulation of knowledge and authority of voice. In asking our students to think critically about this, making it a central theme of an introductory course in IR and something about which we sustain affirmation thereafter, a space is created within which to seriously engage with the contributions of a much wider field of experts and a more expansive world of possibilities. Exposing the politics of authority over knowledge and how power circulates in both disciplinary and wider academic convention is an indispensable first move, but it is in a broader collegium of responsible subjects in knowledge practices that the real potential for disruption resides. Explicitly inclusive of students as bearers and producers of knowledge while holding responsibility visibly simultaneous with voice, an ethos of collegial co-discovery places subjecthood in knowledge practices centrally at issue in all stories. And, in so doing, it sets up preconditions for students’ discovery of themselves as actively engaged in complicating not only the evening news but the ‘fake’ news too. Acknowledgements Research for this chapter was supported by an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

References Bedford, D., & Workman, T. (1997). The Great Law of Peace: Alternative internation(al) practices and the Iroquoian Confederacy. Alternatives, 22(1), 87– 111. https://doi.org/10.1177/030437549702200104. Beier, J. M. (2019). Implementing children’s right to be heard: Local attenuations of a global commitment. Journal of Human Rights, 18(2), 215–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2018.1515620. Beier, J. M., & Raha, S. (2020). Cultivating an ethos: Collegial co-discovery in a children and youth university. Children’s Geographies, 18(1), 44–57. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1584270.

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Bhambra, G. K., Gebrial, D., & Ni¸sancıo˘glu, K. (Eds.). (2018). Decolonizing the university. Pluto Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books. Friere, P. (1970).Pedagogy of the oppressed. Herder and Herder. Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Rowman & Littlefield. Hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge. Kinchloe, J. (2008). Critical pedagogy. Peter Lang. King, H. (2018). Discourses of conquest and resistance: International relations and anishinaabe diplomacy. In R. B. Persaud & A. Sajed (Eds.), Race, Gender, and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives (pp. 135– 154). Routledge. Kingwell, M. (2017, December 9). No, postmodernism at universities isn’t a vile, cancerous doctrine. Globe and Mail. Accessed 11 December 2017. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/no-postmoder nism-at-universities-isnt-a-vile-cancerous-doctrine/article37272519/. Nichols, T. (2017). How America lost faith in expertise: And why that’s a giant problem. Foreign Affairs, 96(2), 60–73. Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education: Critical teaching for social change. University of Chicago Press. Smith, H., & Summerville, T. (2017). Four conversations we need to have about teaching and learning in Canadian political science. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 50(1), 263–279. https://doi.org/10.1017/S00084239 17000178. Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies. Zed Books. Smith, S. (1995). The self-images of a discipline: A genealogy of international relations theory. In K. Booth & S. Smith (Eds.), International relations theory today (pp. 1–37). Pennsylvania State University Press. Sobo, E. J. (2019, July 31). Playing with conspiracy theories. Anthropology News. doi: https://doi.org/10.1111/AN.1236.

CHAPTER 7

Relationship of Responsibility: Indigeneity in the IR Classroom Justin de Leon

Introduction We acknowledge our presence on the traditional homelands of Native peoples including the Haudenosauneega, Miami, Peoria, and particularly the Pokégnek Bodéwadmik / Pokagon Potawatomi, who have been using this land for education for thousands of years, and continue to do so. Land Acknowledgment, University of Notre Dame.

Land acknowledgments have become common in many conference and university proceedings in Canada and the United States. This practice of recognizing the lands—often unceded—of Native American or First Nations peoples at the beginning of conferences, talks, or panels, however, is not a widespread protocol throughout International Relations (IR) spaces in North America. It would not be surprising to attend

J. de Leon (B) Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_7

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an entire IR conference without encountering one, particularly in the United States. Land acknowledgements ground individuals in location, time, and socio-political context, though, at their worst, they can also act as tokenizing gestures further shelving important conversations and diffusing complicity. In this manner, land acknowledgements can act as a set of evasions, or “move[s] to innocence” whose purpose is to “reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity” (Tuck and Yang 2012, p. 1). Land acknowledgements, at their best, can also point to a set of relationships, or relationships of responsibility. Upon arrival into a new country, the traveler must be aware of the set of laws of that land, laws that bound and influence behavior. Transgressions are enforced by policing and legal systems—you can go to jail. Likewise, when I walk the University of Notre Dame campus, there are sets of expected behaviors and codes of conduct that guide my actions and influence who and how I see myself—codes that, if transgressed, can lead to social ostracization or punitive measures. These are everyday examples of relationships of responsibility. The encountering of land acknowledgments points each of us to sets of behaviors, values, and responsibilities tied to Indigenous peoples. If unaware of those responsibilities, land acknowledgements are an invitation (or reminder) to explore those responsibilities and values. It is the difference between saying, “Hey, we’re on the territory of the Mississaugas or the Anishinaabek and the Haudenosaunee” and “We’re on the territory of the Anishinaabek and the Haudenosaunee and here’s what it compels me to do” (King 2019). Land acknowledgments point to a world of reciprocity and responsibility. Historical and contemporary practices of science (and the attendant research and classroom pedagogy) have patiently and unflinchingly been constructing a system of cognitive imperialism and hegemonic episteme (Smith 2012; Battiste 2013; Kovach 2005). Science is regularly marshalled to hail into place racialized “Others,” constructing conditions that enable and reify a colonial epistemic and physical dominance. This is at the heart of the construction of what Mark Rifkin (2013) refers to as a “settler colonial common sense,” a common sense that depends on flattening difference and oversimplified understandings of the Indigenous Other. This renders Indigenous peoples, paradoxically, as “overresearched yet, ironically, made invisible” (Tuck 2009, pp. 411–412). Vine Deloria (1969, p. 5) explains the cognitive basis of this erasure,

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There is no subject on earth so easily understood as that of the American Indian. Each summer, work camps disgorge teenagers on various reservations. Within one month’s time the youngsters acquire a knowledge of Indians that would astound a college professor. Easy knowledge about Indians is a historical tradition.

A discussion on Native American, First Nations, or Indigenous approach to pedagogy in the IR classroom must, therefore, assert forcefully that there is no singular Indigenous approach,1 neither to IR practice nor classroom pedagogy. A complex rendering should lay the foundation for a reconstruction of an entire world and worldview.2 Moreover, the foregrounding of indigeneity offers a generative space to critically analyze various understandings of disruption. With this in mind, this chapter suggests an Indigenous approach to pedagogy premised on two broad concepts foundational to Indigenous worldviews: relations and responsibility.

Why I Write/Right I am neither First Nations nor Native American. I am a Settler, much like the majority of IR scholars and (more than likely) a significant portion of you, the readers. My family comes from the Indigenous Igorot and Aeta regions of the Philippines, relocating to the United States at a particular moment of American imperialism. I am a racialized, colonized body in the US, yet simultaneously, I write this on Native territory, further reproducing colonial violences of dislocation and dispossession. This makes me both a product and producer of colonialism. This is not an attempt of absolution or “move to innocence” (Tuck and Yang 2012), but rather, to motion to complex paradoxes created by colonialism. It also foregrounds the fact that we are all complicit in generating and reinforcing settler colonial structures, no matter hue or social location. The following draws largely from years of ethnographic research within a Lakota community in South Dakota. 1 I use the terms Native American, First Nations, and Indigenous interchangeably, though there are real distinctions in the terms. For more on terminology see Shaw (2008, pp. 13–14) and Beier (2005, p. 9). 2 La Paperson (2017, p. 11) asserts that resisting colonialism requires reconstructions of the “Native” world, while de Leon (2020) describes the Lakota tipi as a reconstruction of an entire worldview.

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Am I the right person to write this, probably not. There are dozens of Indigenous scholars who are exemplary pedagogues. Unfortunately, there are so few IR engagements of Indigenous frameworks, experiences, and knowledges, let alone Native and First Nations scholars doing this important work. Why is this? For starters, Indigenous experiences and insights are incongruent with foundational principles that undergird IR theorizing and teaching—they disrupt, as Smith and Yahlnaaw (this volume) suggest. In 2016, the American Political Science Association held a special Reflections Symposium that provocatively asked, “Why Does Political Science Hate American Indians?” To this, Kennan Ferguson (2016, p. 1029) replied, This lack arises not from mere ignorance but from a deliberate avoidance of Native claims within mainland U.S. political science. Indigenous patterns of thought overtly oppose many of the values that United States presumes: the legitimacy of majoritarian democracy, the primacy of sovereignty, the rule of law, and especially American exceptionalism.

Formations of political thought that fall outside of the state system are cast as incommensurable and are, therefore, erased or ignored (Cordova 2007; Shaw 2008; Beier 2005, 2013). The excesses of colonialism were brought forward by practices of scholarly research (Smith 2012). Moreover, “core aspects of various subdisciplines of political science have been built around the subjugation of different peoples” (Ferguson 2016, p. 1029). IR itself is deeply implicated in the violent system of (settler) colonialism. The reluctance of IR, and Western thought more broadly, to come to terms with this history further relegates engagements of Indigenous thought and experiences to an afterthought. Why are there so few Native and First Nations scholars in IR? Just a short time ago I was conducting field research and I met a young Native woman who (nearly) single-handedly stood up to county and state intrusions and mobilized her entire community to become involved in their local sovereignty movement. I recognized her promise and asked if she’d ever thought of completing a Ph.D. with a focus in IR (or social-justice or sovereignty, more broadly). In response, she mentioned her community told her the most helpful thing she could study would be law. This is a common narrative in Native country—community need is so great

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and immediate that, rightfully, young students are drawn to law, education, and even history. This is to say, there are many sites of Indigenous revitalization and resistance and IR is not always at the top of that list. Embracing this incommensurability and increasing attention to Indigenous peoples, however, provides a significant opportunity for IR. Incommensurability stems from interruptions that erode the foundations of how human power relations are conceived (Tuck and Yang 2012). These discontinuities provide additional (and often more significant) opportunities for solidarity than mere focus on commonalities. While increase attention to Indigenous peoples, experiences, and knowledges would not only quicken decolonial processes, they also provide new tools to dislodge otherwise sedimented social problems. Righting this omission must be based upon the realization that Indigenous peoples’ experiences reflect global emergent struggles. Shaw (2008, p. 5) asserts, Indigenous peoples provide a microcosm in which one can see elements of struggles faced by a large percentage of the world’s population, struggles that tend to appear very marginally in discourse and practices of contemporary political theory.

The study of Indigenous peoples offers a new spatial imaginary premised on collective futures. Indigenous communities are uniquely located to challenge and offer new ways of researching and teaching IR. For those invested in decolonial futures and righting colonial violences, IR is a space where political arrangements can be explored, contested, and made and remade, making it a significant site of intervention.

Indigeneity in IR Classroom For those approaching teaching Indigenous (and marginalized) perspectives in IR classrooms, we must never forget the history of erasure and violence IR theory and, more broadly, the Western scientific project has perpetrated throughout the world. The question we must all forcefully ask ourselves is, “Am I creating space or taking space?” (Kovach 2005, p. 26)—not just literally, as in creating levels of student interest that demand departmental conversations on hiring Indigenous-oriented IR scholars, but also creating epistemic, analytic, and pedagogical space by

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bringing Indigenous knowledges and practices into the syllabus and classroom. To rephrase the words of the Black woman warrior poet Audre Lorde (2007 [1984], pp. 43–44), Where the words of [Indigenous peoples] are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, ‘I can’t possibly teach [Native] writing – their experience is so different from mine.’ Yet how many years have you spent teaching [Thucydides] and [Morganthau] and [Mearsheimer]? Or another, ‘She’s a [Settler] and what could she possibly have to say to me?’ […] And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.3

This is not to dismiss the real danger of appropriation, nor is it a call for Settlers to take up the banner of Indigenous-oriented IR en masse at the continued erasure of Indigenous peoples, but it is to suggest that focusing on Indigenous-oriented knowledge and experiences is good for IR beyond a mere performative, “doing-the-right-thing” inclusionary action, but it also allows for the field to maintain analytic relevance and dynamism amidst changing political landscapes, as well as providing a generative platform for decolonial solidarity. Put simply, “divide and conquer must become define and empower” (Lorde 2007, 1984, p. 112).

Translated to IR Pedagogy There is no one size-fits-all approach to Indigenous pedagogy in the IR classroom, nor any classroom for that matter. This chapter does, however, suggest two broad characteristics that can describe an Indigenous pedagogy for the IR classroom. Those are relations and responsibility. 3 Original quotation reads, “Where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, ‘I can’t possibly teach Black women’s writing – their experience is so different from mine.’ Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, ‘She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?’ […] And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other” (Lorde 2007 [1984], pp. 43–44).

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Relations Indigenous worldviews place emphasis on relationships, not only intrapersonal (inward) and interpersonal (between people), but also with relations with animals, nature, as well as intergenerational relations (with ancestors and future generations). Relationships produced respect and care. Vine Deloria (1969, p. 121) explains, “Remember, Indians had a religion that produced a society in which there were no locks on doors, no orphanages, no need for oaths, and no hungry people. Indian religion taught that sharing one’s goods with another human being was the highest form of behavior.” Relations are premised on an interconnected worldview. Take for instance, the Lakota concept of Mitakuye Oyasin, meaning “we are all related” or “all my relations,” a value at the center of Lakota spiritual, cultural, and political affairs. This spiritual reality that all are interconnected comes from the Lakota belief in multiple aspects to the soul. Specifically, the Nagila, representing the cosmic energy that binds all, the entire universe (Brown and Cousins 2001). Along with the Niya, Nagi, and Sicum, these multiple dimensions of the soul inform how the Lakota constitute relations with people, the environment, and all reality.4 There are similar concepts and practices found in Native Hawaiian traditions. The Kanaka Maoli term Aya translates to “the power and life force and interconnectedness between deities, ancestral forces, humans and other animals” (Kauanui, 2016), while the traditional practice of Aloha called for the touching of placing foreheads, symbolizing the interconnectedness of breathing the same air. Being a “good relative” is the highest compliment and a central principle of Lakota and Dakota life.5 Ella C. Deloria (1998, p. 25) explains, “The ultimate aim of Dakota life, stripped of accessories, was quite simple: One must obey kinship rules; one must be a good relative.” A good member of the community is the recognition of responsibilities for every

4 The Niya is similar to a life breath that infuses all living beings with life, the Nagi which is most akin to the idea of a ghost is an “an individualized, mirror image of the physical form” (Brown and Cousins 2001, p. 89), and the Sicum is the power and essence of that particular being. 5 The larger Oceti Sakowin nation is comprised of Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota bands.

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member of society, to live in kinship and balance with all.6 This system is not just for biological family members, often including outsiders and nonfamily members brought into or adopted into the community (Deloria 1998). This kinship system, however, is not to be over-romanticized or viewed as utopian communities free from conflict. Every family, and every group of individuals for that matter, is a collection of unique personalities, strengths, and differences. These combinations make for concord and discord—every family comes with good and bad. What stays constant throughout, however, is long-term commitment to a framework of interconnectedness, shared commitments and values, and a genuine sense of love and care. These deep-seated foundations of relations and kinship create a basis of Indigenous political and cultural practice. How could this girding principle shape how IR is taught in the classroom? What would the lens of interconnectedness or familial kinship shape how students come to understand international behavior? Responsibility Relations are put into practice through responsibilities, upholding commitments through a set of committed actions and behaviors. This includes responsibilities to land, the spirit world, and community. Land Indigenous knowledge is founded in land and place (Simpson 2004; Causevic et al. 2020). So much so that a land-based knowledge system was at the center of systematic settler efforts of eradication and erasure. For instance, the 1887 US Dawes Act divided Native reservations into individual land allotments, dividing traditional lands and introducing personal land ownership. This has been the legal basis for large-scale land dispossession by non-Native parties and state and federal entities. The legal system of land ownership disrupted land-based knowing and cultural practices, cutting Indigenous peoples off from their central source of knowledge and identity. This marginalization happened through “the

6 Definitions of community, tribal belonging, and identity are complex and heavily contested. Membership itself, can reinscribe logics of violence and insecurity (see Stern 2005).

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violent separation of Indigenous peoples from our sources of knowledge and strength – the land” (Wildcat et al. 2014, p. II). For Indigenous communities, land acts as a “system of reciprocal social relations and ethical practices” (Wildcat et al. 2014, p. II). Reciprocal practices prevented over-foraging of natural resources, encouraged ecological balance, and maintained systems of kinship and the sacred relationship between the earth and people (Deloria 1992; Aldern and Goode 2014). For instance, the Huna Tlingit used Glaucous-winged Gull eggs as a part of their traditional diet. During the breeding season, the Tlingit only took eggs from a nest if there were less than three eggs. As “indeterminate layers,” the Tlingit knew incubation only began once the clutch reached three eggs, otherwise, they continued to lay eggs until they reached that threshold (Hunn et al. 2002). This traditional practice contributed to balance with the natural world, providing productive examples of sustainable relations and responsibilities. Foregrounding land-based practices and knowledge not only empowers Indigenous communities but it also recovers Indigenous identity (Wilson 2008). Taking Indigenous knowledge and political practice seriously must include a “regain[ing] control over national territories, and they must be self-determining particularly when it comes to the land” (Simpson 2004, p. 379). Indigenous political practice and the teaching thereof requires emphasizing land-based practices, as well as responsibilities to the natural world (Simpson 2014; Wildcat et al. 2014). Spirit World A spiritual relationship and responsibility to a higher power is a central conviction to many Indigenous peoples. Praying to one’s ancestors in the spirit world and having them as a part of daily life ensures connection to past and present, values, traditions, and identity (Marshall 2007). How the spirit world impacts everyday life can be seen through traditional Lakota approaches to art and language. Traditionally, the Lakota had no word for art. Instead, all life was imbued with inner-meanings and spirituality. Artistry was not about self-expression, rather, a way to reflect spiritual realities around them, and often regarding the natural world. This was also the case for the Inuit. James A. Houston, a Canadian artist who worked for the recognition of Inuit art, explains, “Like most other hunting societies, they [the Inuit] have thought of the whole act of living in harmony with nature as their art. The small object that they carve or

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decorate are to them insignificant reflections of their total art of living” (Brown and Cousins 2001, p. 61). In order to receive visions from the Creator, the Lakota would carry out ceremonies to open themselves to spiritual revelations. These visions revealed important spiritual and healing powers and, more often than not, came in the form of animals “messengers.” Each person who received a vision had a responsibility to bring these messages into the material world. One way to do this was to depict these animal messengers on to tipis, shields, and other cultural items. Creative expression was less about the self-expression and more about the responsibility to bring the spiritual qualities from the Creator into the material world. This responsibility is also reflected in the Lakota language. The Lakota language has a spiritual perception and orientation embedded in its very structure. In English, every word has a referent—the word mom refers to the personage of a mother. In Lakota, however, not only is there a word and referent, but there is also a spiritual orientation integrated into the language. The word for mother in Lakota is ina—both a word and a referent—though in Lakota it literally translates to “one who brings breath into the world.” Lakota words indicate the spiritual qualities of that word and referent, thereby informing behavior. Another example is the Lakota word for White man, wasicu—a word and a referent. Literally translated, it means “he who takes the best part of the meat.” The responsibility to recognize and express the spiritual qualities of the world, through art and creative expressions of visions or recognizing the spiritual life of the world around you, has always been central to the Lakota and for many Indigenous peoples. Community Responsibility to community is central to Native and First Nations ways of life, not only because of the hyper-marginalization of Indigenous peoples and the need for survival, but also because of the kinship social values previously discussed. It is a recognition that knowledge is generated through dialectic processes of mutuality, not just through land and the spirit world, but also through other people. Knowledge is not only constructed in community, but should also be folded back into and circulated within those communities. “As Anishinàbekwe (Algonquin woman), everything I do and everything I write is driven by the need to give voice and power back to my community using the gifts I have been given by kije-manidò (the great spirit),” explains Mallory Whiteduck (2013, p. 73).

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A responsibility to community, or “communitism” (Weaver 1997), ensures mechanisms of accountability, invites true collaboration, and guides outcomes and efforts in accordance to community values and interests (Teuton 2008). “We’re not renegades that are dropped into territories and determine what the most radical and transformative educational experiences we think would be relevant for them,” explains Simpson and Coulthard (2014), “It’s done in a spirit of reciprocity, with community engagement and input.” Using one’s gifts to contribute to and build upon knowledge, as well as a commitment to fold back that knowledge back into community, informs why a responsibility to community is integral to Indigenous ways of knowing (Whiteduck 2013).

Concluding Thoughts Land acknowledgements urges us to recognize upon who’s land we learn, teach, and live. It is an important first step in recognizing (and redressing) the grievous harms of the past, it is the first step in becoming more human. Once this acknowledgment is established, the necessary next steps must include the foregrounding of a relational framework of responsibility. To assess the role of Indigeneity in the IR classroom, where best to start than the land on which we learn and teach? The original treaties with Native and First Nations peoples negotiated for sharing of these lands were done so on a Nation-to-Nation basis—the very definition of international. The next step would be to view these land acknowledgements as representing relationships of responsibility, and breaking down the meaning and practice of each of those concepts. Relationships premised on kinship-models point to responsibilities that dislodge the primacy of the nation-state to include a much wider set of actors and protagonists, including land, the spirit world, and community. Attempting to put forward a singular Indigenous pedagogy would merely erase the multitude of uniqueness and complexity that distinguish Native and First Nations approaches to knowledge and teaching. Instead, this chapter provides a necessary foundation—one premised on relationships and responsibilities—to motivate Indigenous-inspired classroom pedagogy in the IR classroom. Indigenous IR theory and pedagogy can alter how IR is performed and taught, as well as provide a moment to reflect upon disciplinary disruptions. The core of human social and political relations throughout

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time have gravitated around the lodestones of relationships and responsibilities. As such, Indigenous experiences and perspectives act as an invitation to wholeness. When viewed historically, indigeneity has not been the disruption, rather contemporary IR practice has been the disruption. Foregrounding Indigenous approaches and knowledge in the IR classroom is a beckoning to close the circle, to rebalance. Acknowledgements Special thanks to the University of Notre Dame Visiting Research Fellowship at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, from which this chapter was written.

References Aldern, J. D., & Goode, R. W. (2014). The stories hold water: Learning and burning in North Fork Mono homelands. Decolonize: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 26–51. Battiste, M. (2013). Displacing cognitive imperialism. In M. Battiste (Ed.), Decolonizing education. Saskatoon: Purich Publishing. Beier, J. M. (2005). International relations in uncommon places. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Beier, J. M. (2013). Beyond hegemonic state(ment)s of nature: Indigenous knowledge and non-state possibilities in international relations. In G. Chowdhry & S. Nair (Eds.), Power, postcolonialism and international relations. London: Routledge. Brown, J. E., & Cousins, E. (2001). Teaching spirits: Understanding Native American religious traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Causevic, A., Kavita, P., Zwick-Maitreyi, M., Persephone Hooper, L., Siko, B., & Sengupta, A. (2020). Centering knowledge from the margins: Our embodied practices of epistemic resistance and revolution. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 22(1), 6–25. Cordova, V. F. (2007). How it is: The Native American philosophy of V.F. Cordova. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. De Leon, J. (2020). Lakota experiences of (in)security: Cosmology and ontological security. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 22(1), 33–62. Deloria, V., Jr. (1969). Custer died for your sins: An Indian manifesto. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Deloria, V., Jr. (1992). Spiritual management: Prospects for restoration on tribal lands. Restoration & Management Notes, 10(1), 48–58. Deloria, E. C. (1998). Speaking of Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Ferguson, K. (2016). Why does political science hate American Indians? Perspectives on Politics, 14(4), 1029–1038. Hunn E. S., Johnson, D. R., Russell, P. N., & Thornton, T. F. (2002). A study of traditional use of birds’ eggs by the Tlingit. Technical Report National Park Service. Cooperative Agreement No. 1443 CA-9000–95–0019. Subagreement 1, Modification 3. University of Washington. Kauanui, J. K. (2016, April 13). Indigenous Studies distinguished speaker series. University of California San Diego. King, H. (2019, January 18). ‘I regret it’: Hayden King on writing Ryerson University’s territorial acknowledgement. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio. Accessed March 11, 2019. Kovach, M. (2005). Emerging from the margins: Indigenous methodologies. In L. Brown & S. Strega (Eds.), Research as resistance. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press. la paperson. (2017). A third university is possible. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lorde, A. (2007 [1984]). Sister outsider: Essays & speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg: Crossing Press. Marshall, J. M. (2007). The day the world ended at Little Bighorn. New York: Penguin Books. Rifkin, M. (2013). Settler common sense. Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3–4), 322– 340. Shaw, K. (2008). Indigeneity and political theory. London: Routledge. Simpson, L. (2004). Anticolonial strategies for the recovery and maintenance of Indigenous knowledge. American Indian Quarterly, 28(3/4), 373–384. Simpson, L. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), 1–25. Simpson, L., & Coulthard, G. (2014). Leanne Simpson and Glen Coulthard on Dechinta Bush University, Indigenous land based education and embodied resurgence. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society Blog. Smith, H., & Yahlnaaw. (2020). Disruption as reconciliation: Lessons learned when students as partners become students as teachers. In Teaching IR in a time of disruption. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies. London: Zed Books. Stern, M. (2005). Naming security—Constructing identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Teuton, C. B. (2008). Theorizing American Indian literature: Applying oral concepts to written traditions. In C. S. Womack, D. H. Justice, & C. B. Teuton (Eds.), Reasoning together. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–427.

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Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1–40. Weaver, J. (1997). That the people might live. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Whiteduck, M. (2013). ‘But it’s our story. Read it.’: Stories my grandfather told me and writing for continuance. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(1), 72–92. Wildcat, M., McDonald, M., Irlbacher-Fox, S., & Coulthard, G. (2014). Learning from the land: Indigenous land based pedagogy and decolonization. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3), I–XV. Wilson, S. (2008). Research is ceremony: Indigenous research methods. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

CHAPTER 8

Beyond the Box: Opportunities and Challenges of Interdisciplinarity in International Studies Pedagogy David R. Black

Introduction Like many in the academic trenches of International Studies (IS), my approach to pedagogy and curriculum has evolved much less by design than by (usually happy) circumstance, reflecting evolving research interests, pressing departmental requirements, and their intersection with my various teaching roles. This journey has led me from a pretty conventional training in International Relations (IR), taught in relatively liberal (though more ‘British’, and therefore historical and interpretive) programs, to being consistently engaged in interdisciplinary initiatives and approaches. Through this process, I have developed a deep appreciation for the importance and value, but also the challenges of interdisciplinarity

D. R. Black (B) Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_8

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in International Studies, as reflected in the linked domains of teaching and research. In what follows, I will talk about why interdisciplinarity is important, what challenges it presents, and what some of the implications are for the practices of those incorporating it. There has been a surge in scholarship on the history, status, and manifestations of interdisciplinarity in the development of International Studies/International Relations1 as a field of study (e.g., Ashworth 2009; Aalto et al. 2011; James 2011; Grenier 2015; Aalto 2015), but much less attention to its manifestations in international relations pedagogy. Indeed, there is some evidence that the field as a whole has been much narrower and more “disciplinary” in the way it presents itself in the classroom—ironically, the place where its reach and impact is almost certainly greatest (see Hagmann and Biersteker 2014). This “disciplining” tendency does a serious disservice to our students. To concretize the rewards and challenges of interdisciplinarity in IS pedagogy, I will briefly reflect on two of my own course-based experiences. Taken together, they underscore the importance of curriculum/course content, as well as the composition of course members in creating interdisciplinary encounters and conversations. Focusing on unconventional subjects and ways of knowing effectively disrupts historically dominant accounts of the field, and highlights indirect and subterranean sources of power and influence, thereby deepening understanding of the ways in which hierarchical relations are constituted, sustained, and challenged in both the teaching and practice of IS.

Interdisciplinarity and the ‘Critical Turn’ It is important to recall that the origins of IS were multi-disciplinary, drawing on the study of history, law, politics, philosophy, and ethics, among others, in efforts to make some sense of and respond appropriately to the horrors of the First World War (Burchill and Linklater 2009, pp. 6–9). In contrast, during the decades following World War II and the apparent but illusory stasis of the Cold War era, the field narrowed

1 I am using the terminology of ‘international studies’ to denote the broad array of scholarly foci and orientations encompassed in academic associations like the International Studies Association, and ‘International Relations’ to denote the self-conscious subfield that has usually (though not exclusively) been sited within the academic subject of Political Science.

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both theoretically and methodologically. In the North American ‘heartland’, it became a sub-field of Political Science—a field of study that was in the throes of the narrowing and disciplining moment of the “behavioral revolution.” Yet this trend never went unchallenged in IS, notably by the ‘traditionalists’ associated with the English School (Linklater and Suganami 2006). In Canada, where I was trained in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many younger scholars reacted against the positivist preoccupations of the “neo-neo” moment, pitting the narrow problem-solving2 foci of neorealism and neoliberalism against each other (e.g., Baldwin 1993), by gravitating towards the “neo-gramscian” tradition pioneered by Robert Cox (e.g., Cox with Sinclair 1996). This critical approach offered a nuanced, historicized, and normatively engaged approach to understanding the process by which hegemonic ‘world orders’ were constituted, sustained, and supplanted. It also provided early fuel for the turn towards a more truly globalized field, beyond the Western ethnocentrism in which it was embedded (see Cox 1997). It is this tradition within which I continue to locate my core scholarly commitments, even as my scholarship and pedagogy have explored an eclectic range of approaches (see Black 2015, pp. 15–35). Simply stated, those who were influenced by the Coxian tradition and the many other critical approaches that it engaged with and helped make space for could not help but become attuned to insights from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, history, sociology, and political economy. Moreover, this tradition had the effect of broadening what was understood to be ‘the political’, notably as it relates to the domains of (popular) culture and civil society, and ‘the international’, including the importance of transnational dynamics and the complex interplay of local, regional, national and social forces with them. Finally, it led inevitably to an interrogation of who was empowered and disempowered by the world-as-it-is, and a concern with how and by whom normatively preferable worlds might be brought into being. Applied to pedagogy, it was concerned with the role of what and how we teach in either reinforcing or disrupting status quo-oriented ways of thinking and acting in the world.

2 Cox’s famous distinction between problem-solving and critical theory juxtaposes theories that take the existing world order as given and seek to understand how to operate within it, thereby reflecting an implicitly conservative bias, and critical theories that seek to understand how the dominant world order came to be, and what possibilities for change exist within it (Cox 1981, pp. 126–155).

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These perspectives and commitments have had an enduring impact on what I teach and how I teach it.

The Importance of Interdisciplinarity While my disciplinary home has been Political Science, I have been closely involved with two main commitments or ‘projects’ that have taught me about the growing necessity and the exceptional rewards of interdisciplinary program and course design. These are a longstanding involvement with Dalhousie’s department of International Development Studies (IDS); and a close involvement in the conceptualization, design, and launch of the university’s College of Sustainability (https://www. dal.ca/faculty/sustainability.html), dedicated to fostering knowledge and praxis concerning the challenge of global sustainability. In both cases, a close understanding of IR is necessary to their subject matter, but in neither case is it sufficient. Moreover, both projects demand attention to an understanding of the international from the perspective of those countries, communities, and identities that have been historically confined to its margins (see Loxley 2004)—a perspective which mainstream international relations has traditionally neglected. There are at least three main reasons why a pre-meditated focus on interdisciplinarity has become increasingly important in IS pedagogy. First, it is clear that many of the most urgent issues we study and teach about require interdisciplinary understandings and ‘skill sets’. Whether it is the pursuit of durable peace settlements and post-conflict ‘peacebuilding’; the politics of environmental challenges at inter-linked local, regional and global levels; issues humanitarian relief; causes, consequences of mass migration; or issues of global food security, we need ‘ways of knowing’ from a range of disciplines: anthropology, history, political science, sociology, economics, biology, climatology, ethics, literature, etc. As I revise this chapter, I am self-isolating as a result of the global spread of the COVID-19 virus. IS scholars and teachers will be wrestling with the repercussions of this unprecedented global health pandemic, both enabled by and dramatically disrupting processes of global integration. They cannot do so without the benefit of insights from public health scholars, cultural anthropologists, social psychologists, and many others. Second, and closely related, is that while it is impossible for students (and scholars) to master the range of ways of knowing that these and similar challenges require in the course of most undergraduate and

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graduate programs, students need to develop an appreciation of the requirements for literacy in a variety of fields of study. More broadly, they must develop the collaborative, cooperative and mutually respectful techniques and orientations needed to understand and address these challenges. At least, they need to develop ‘empathetic understanding’ for a range of disciplinary approaches beyond their own primary field(s) of study. This requires them to learn to interpret each other’s intellectual vocabularies, and to engage in a systematic and sustained way with students, and teachers, from different academic disciplines. For teachers, it requires a continuously listening disposition, to try to ensure that students are able to engage with unfamiliar ideas, and adjust when they are not. Finally, and not least, an interdisciplinary classroom, as reflected in topics, sources, techniques and participants, is generally an exciting and stimulating classroom. New and/or unanticipated insights are routinely brought into the discussion, enabling a richer understanding of the issues and challenges at hand, and the prospect of regular destabilization of apparently-settled interpretations. Indeed, it has been my experience that students are intuitively drawn to such spaces, both because they increase the sense of relevance they feel toward their subjects, and because they enjoy the dynamic interactions that interdisciplinarity fosters. In short, there are important reasons why interdisciplinarity has become firmly established within at least some corners of IS pedagogy. Its resonance with students and researchers at every stage of their intellectual trajectories is becoming steadily more compelling as it becomes ever more evident that the issues that seize our attention can only be adequately addressed with an array of disciplinary outlooks. Yet interdisciplinarity also has important hazards and limitations that lead to a dynamic tension with more traditional or ‘pure’ disciplinary ways of knowing.

Challenges: On Becoming ‘Un-Expert’ A constructive and productive interdisciplinary curriculum and classroom takes time and patience. It takes extra time to begin to understand the perspectives of disciplines other than our own; to try to ensure that class members are fully on board; and to make sense of new theoretical, methodological, and epistemological points of departure. Above all, successful interdisciplinary pedagogy requires the self-assurance and humility to acknowledge our own limitations and the potential for big gains in understanding through a kind of radical openness to learning

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from others—whether students or instructors. It requires that we recognize each other’s expertise and in doing so, model ‘un-expertness’. This is a challenge for many scholars, who are typically trained to project self-assurance and authority. In an interdisciplinary classroom, there is a chronic risk of superficiality and/or disorientation. Students can get lost in the process of navigating between the various approaches and interpretations they are being exposed to, especially when it comes time to design a major research project like an honors thesis or Major Research Paper. Conversely, it is generally the strongest students who thrive disproportionately in interdisciplinary contexts, because of their ability to readily grasp the significance of the different orientations that distinct disciplinary starting points bring to the subject matter. In these circumstances, it is tempting as an instructor to focus one’s attention on these exceptional students, thereby exacerbating the marginalization of those who are struggling. Because of this, a good interdisciplinary curriculum and classroom depends on a strong grounding in the disciplines. In pedagogy as in research, “disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity depend on each other” (Aalto 2015, p. 256). Ideally, these disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches will be combined from the beginning of a class, in ways that are transparent and explicit with students about the differences, complementarities, and potential contradictions between distinct disciplinary traditions. Interdisciplinarity also requires that course/program designers and instructors adopt a kind of radical open-mindedness that is often trained out of us as we are enjoined to develop signature ‘niches’ and foster scholarly identities and reputations. In practice, this requires that instructors have the self-assurance to be willing to be exposed as ‘unexpert’. Especially at the graduate level, students will bring insights from their own backgrounds that can readily exceed those of instructors, but will typically lack the breadth of knowledge and experience that allows for the full exploration of disciplinary overlaps and connections. The classroom must therefore become a place of co-learning, ideally drawing on the insights and experiences of all class members. These challenges are closely related to another: the ways in which interdisciplinary classrooms both reflect and enable power differentials and disparities between class members. An interdisciplinary context can potentially diminish these differentials or magnify them, depending on the ways in which they are recognized, acknowledged and approached. For example, virtually every topic in an interdisciplinary course or curriculum

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will play to the strengths of those students with previous training in the most relevant disciplines, while effectively marginalizing those without this background. Similarly, in classrooms addressing complex inter- and transnational challenges across colonial-postcolonial divides, there is a complicated balance of power between those who come from centers of wealth and privilege, and those from situations of relative poverty and insecurity. In these contexts, course instructors must become closely attuned to the varied backgrounds of class members and the resulting learning resources and deficits they bring to the classroom. They need to be both reassuring and nimble, recognizing and drawing on the particular strengths of all class members while reassuring those who feel marginalized by particular discussions that their feelings are entirely normal and reasonable and that their turn as ‘expert’ will come. At the same time, they must work to narrow the gaps in understanding and highlight the distinctive insights that being un-expert can bring. It stands to reason from these requirements that not everyone can, will, or should be engaged in the design and delivery of interdisciplinary teaching. Indeed, as implied above, we need ‘paradigm maintainers’ and those providing a firm disciplinary foundation for interdisciplinary inquiry to succeed. Nevertheless, within departments and programs, the basic requirement is that all members learn to at least tolerate, and ideally to respect, welcome, and engage with alternative perspectives, including insights from different disciplinary traditions.

Some Implications A number of key implications follow from the opportunities and challenges outlined above. First, careful thought needs to be given to the disciplinary building blocks that are required within and beyond the core discipline of an offering, whether it takes the form of a course or a program. In other words, what is the required core that should underpin and complement an interdisciplinary offering? In the case of interdisciplinary IS programs, it is also generally desirable to combine the IS major with a discipline-based second field to ensure that interdisciplinary teaching is supported by discipline-based points of reference.3 3 This (and several other of the implications to follow) reflect the model used by the Dalhousie College of Sustainability and its Environment, Sustainability and Society degree program, which must be taken in combination with a second major field.

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Ideally, interdisciplinary IS programs should pursue, where possible, co-teaching models in which co-instructors from different disciplines share the classroom on the same broad topic. This is a challenge, both logistically and professionally, and will not always be feasible—but offers some exceptional learning opportunities when and where it is done effectively. Similarly, group based projects, simulating the interdisciplinary teams that are increasingly the norm in addressing ‘real world’ issues and problems, should be built into curricula alongside more traditional, individual assignments. An important implication is that these types of curriculum design and teaching innovations frequently require a lot of extra time and work, and a commitment to collaboration that (as noted above) we are often socialized to eschew. Even where such innovations succeed, sometimes spectacularly, through the efforts of an initial cadre of ‘true believers’ and first adopters, they can be hard to sustain as participants revert to more traditional modes of instruction and as interdisciplinary offerings are confronted with the challenge of renewal in the face of competing professional incentives, such as those related to tenure and promotion.4 In the end however, we are going to have to learn to overcome the intellectual, social, professional, and bureaucratic hurdles that confront more systematic and fulsome interdisciplinarity—in part because it is what our subject requires and, increasingly, because it is what our students expect if not demand.

Two Personal Examples I will illustrate these points with reference to two personal examples— one each at the graduate and the undergraduate level. Both happened largely by happy accident, but illustrate the potential of interdisciplinary approaches within our field. One highlights the potential impact of the composition as well as the content of the class; the other highlights the potential associated with innovative subject matter. The first concerns a graduate seminar inherited from my former colleague Tim Shaw—well known as an iconoclast and serial interdisciplinarian in the International Relations community—which I went on to teach for nearly 20 years. Though originating in Political Science, 4 Ironically, this challenge of sustaining innovative pedagogical practices has become a key challenge for the Dalhousie College of Sustainability.

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“Approaches to Development” has always been a course that welcomed and indeed positively encouraged participation by students from a range of programs and disciplines. These have included a moveable feast of class members from Development Economics, Resource and Environmental Studies, Public Administration, History, and the university’s Interdisciplinary PhD program. Most reliably, throughout my involvement with the course it has drawn roughly equal numbers of students from the MA in International Development Studies program (who themselves come from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds), and the graduate program in Political Science. Often, it has also involved a substantial presence of students from diverse national, regional, and cultural backgrounds. As with all classes, but perhaps more than most given its shifting composition, the class dynamic has varied from year to year. At times, the core division between Political Science and IDS students has been polarized around issues of epistemology and methodology, as particular theoretical orientations (post-structural, materialist, realist, etc.) have predominated in each grouping. At others the class composition has encompassed more subtle divisions, based among other things on the degree and sources of cynicism, and levels of optimism/urgency concerning the need for transformative global change. The topics addressed throughout the course vary in the degree to which they are ‘rooted’ in one or another (inter-) disciplinary tradition. Notwithstanding these varying dynamics, however, the class has always been enriched by the combination of perspectives that are brought to bear by its students.5 There is, routinely, a predictable and challenging initial phase of getting everyone ‘up to speed’ with a common baseline of knowledge and a common vocabulary. Once this baseline is established, however, it becomes possible to recognize and exploit the varying perspectives and insights that an interdisciplinary-by-design seminar is able to draw on. This is especially pertinent in the interdisciplinary field of development studies, but could be applied in a range of other IS subjects as well.

5 In order to maximize the ability to draw on these diverse backgrounds and strengths, it is of course vital that they be known. There are many ways to do this, but I always begin by asking students to provide, on a cue card, some basic information concerning their backgrounds, particular interests in relation to the subject matter, and experiences related to it.

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Approaches to Development emerged and evolved in this way primarily because of its originator’s inclusive and idiosyncratic approach—an approach which I have happily embraced—but it has come to occupy a prominent place in the curriculum of two programs, supplemented by perspectives from an eclectic range of others. It models the kind of integrative, bridge-building course (in terms of disciplinary backgrounds, subject matter, and academic literatures) that we should be building into to our curricula in a deliberate and systematic manner. The second example concerns a course taught at the senior undergraduate (3rd and 4th year) level on “Sport and Politics”. As an outgrowth of my own research interests, I developed this course some 20 years ago. Until recently it was, to the best of my knowledge, the only one of its type in Canada (I now know of two others). I understand the situation in the UK and US to be similar.6 The reasons why Political Science and its sub-field of IR has been (uniquely among the social sciences) so neglectful of the socio-politicaleconomic importance of sport is itself an interesting point of discussion and debate.7 The happy side effect from the perspective of designing a course of this type, however, was that I was compelled to draw on literatures from a range of other fields, including sociology, history, geography, cultural studies, management, tourism, urban planning, and gender studies, as well as what I could find in Political Science. These literatures, and the subject matter itself, have provided a novel and illuminating window on core issues in international relations, political economy, and political science, at multiple levels of analysis. These include: traditional, public, and “network” diplomacy8 ; sanctions; globalization; transnational civil society; dependency; postcolonialism; identity; the politics of accumulation at urban, regional, and transnational levels; and the ‘deep politics’ of gender, race, and sexuality. By approaching these themes and issues in ways that are at once highly familiar—indeed ubiquitous—through the medium of sport, yet also intellectually unconventional, I have found that the course routinely 6 Among the nearly 60 specialist groups convened by the British Political Studies Association, there is one devoted to Sport and Politics, but its members feel very much at the margins of the field. See https://www.psa.ac.uk/psa-communities/specialist-groups/ sport-and-politics. 7 For one effort to explain this history of neglect, see Black (2008, pp. 468–469). 8 On these distinctions, see Cooper et al. (2013).

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stimulates excellent and illuminating discussion. Because its subject has typically been viewed by the mainstream of the field as marginal to its core concerns, it retains the element of surprise. These discussions often engage and stimulate different ‘voices’ among class members, innovative collaborative presentations, and a deeper understanding of core issues and debates in international relations and political science. It is, moreover, a class that highlights and requires that particular attention be paid to the constitution and evolution of distinct identities of gender, sexuality, and race. Again, this course emerged as a by-product my idiosyncratic research interests. It is very much to the credit of my department that they not only tolerated but welcomed this deviant offering,9 at a time when ‘serious’ analysis of sport was even more marginal in the field and in wider public debates than it has become. What it illustrates, however, is the need to think strategically about integrating a cluster of unconventional, inherently interdisciplinary, ‘bridging courses’ into IS curricula. Indeed, I have no doubt that such courses have emerged on a variety of topics, and in a range of programs. The point is that by exploiting this approach, we implicitly and explicitly encourage students to expand their cross- and interdisciplinary ‘literacy’, and to approach longstanding and fundamental IS theories, themes, issues and debates through new windows.

In Sum In an excellent collection on critical approaches to Canadian Foreign Policy (Beier and Wylie 2010)—an idiosyncratic sub-field of traditional IR—several authors (notably Smith 2010 and Wylie 2010) write about the importance and challenges of becoming “undisciplined” in relation to the subject. To be sure, this critical project is an essential step, both in apprehending diverse interpretive alternatives and identifying the confining assumptions of the inherited canon. At the same time, however, we need to become more systematically ‘inter-disciplined’, as we confront global challenges that cannot be dealt with in any other way, and as we work with a generation of students for whom such an outlook is both essential and increasingly common-sensical. As critical as this project is in our scholarship moreover, it is even more so in the classroom, among 9 “Deviant” as reflected in its almost complete absence from the curricula and texts of international studies/international relations programs globally.

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the generation of students who must make sense of and act on the disruptively-wicked challenges we have bequeathed them. Such disruptive challenges require disruptive pedagogical orientations and techniques in response. In the tradition of Coxian analysis, they require us to think in systematic ways about the critical imperative of understanding and enabling normatively preferable changes in the way world orders are imagined and constituted. The analysis above highlights a number of ways in which interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches can enable this process of creative disruption. They require, for example, that we disrupt the privileged position of the authoritative disciplinary expertprofessor, and that we as instructors accept and embrace the inevitability that we will be engaging with issues on which we are un-expert. In this sense, we must be able to live with the diminished power and authority this implies—and particularly in the context of graduate teaching, accept that there are will be issues on which our students are more expert than we are. Related to this is that we need to embrace and model processes of co-learning, in what we teach and how we teach it. Successful interdisciplinary classrooms require both formal and informal cooperative and collaborative learning, since the problems we are dealing with require the combination of multiple ways of knowing. Thus, we need to accept/embrace a higher degree of equity in the class context, in ways that disrupt the hierarchical knower-learner relationship. Moreover, insofar as interdisciplinary pedagogy involves a focus on topics (like sport or other forms of popular culture) that have been viewed as “un-serious” (or even deviant) by the mainstream of our field, we disrupt the hierarchy of subject matters in international relations. We are able to show that “core” issues and concerns of IS can be more fully understood and taught through unconventional windows, and that the subject matter of our field can and should be stretched to encompass formal and informal practices that lie beyond the historic core of what “matters” in our classrooms and publications alike. Finally, to take interdisciplinarity seriously is to require the disruption of traditional measures professional pedagogical success. In some cases, it is to be willing to share the credit we gain for popular and successful classes. It is also to be willing to invest the extra time required to construct courses for which conventional teaching supports (such as texts or well established course syllabi) may be absent, or to ensure that those who lack

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the usual prerequisites for a particular topic do not feel at sea and alienated by the discussion. In the short term, it imposes opportunity costs on those who undertake the additional demands of interdisciplinary teaching, but in the long term, it will require university tenure and promotion processes to disrupt and rethink the standards by which we assess career advancement. The good news is that such disruptions are becoming more and more common, and therefore less and less likely to encounter resistance. As noted previously, the challenge is not to upend or displace the mainstream, but to position it in creative tension with unconventional, interdisciplinary methods and subjects.

References Aalto, P. (2015). Interdisciplinary international relations in practice. International Relations, 29(2), 255–259. Aalto, P., Harle, V., & Moisio, S. (Eds.). (2011). International studies: Interdisciplinary approaches. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ashworth, L. M. (2009). Interdisciplinarity and international relations. European Political Science, 8, 16–25. Baldwin, D. A. (Ed.). (1993). Neorealism and neoliberalism: The contemporary debate. New York: Columbia University Press. Beier, M., & Wylie, L. (Eds.). (2010). Canadian foreign policy in critical perspective. Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press. Black, D. (2008). Dreaming big: The pursuit of second order games a strategic response to globalisation. Sport in Society, 11(4), 467–479. Black, D. (2015). Canada and Africa in the new millennium: The politics of consistent inconsistency. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Burchill, S., & Linklater, A. (2009). Introduction. In S. Burchill et al., Theories of international relations (4th ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cooper, A. F. (2013). The Oxford handbook of modern diplomacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cox, R. (1981). Social forces, states, and world orders: Beyond international relations theory. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 10(2), 126– 155. Cox, R. (Ed.). (1997). The new realism: Perspectives on multilateralism and world order. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Cox, R. with Sinclair, T. (1996). Approaches to world order. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grenier, F. (2015). An eclectic fox: IR from restrictive discipline to hybrid and pluralist field. International Relations, 29(2), 250–254.

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Hagmann, J., & Biersteker, T. J. (2014). Beyond the published discipline: Toward a critical pedagogy of international studies. European Journal of International Relations, 20(2), 291–315. James, P. (2011). Symposium on interdisciplinary approaches to international studies: History, psychology, technology studies, and neuroeconomics. International Studies Perspectives, 12(2), 89–93. Linklater, A., & Suganami, H. (2006). The English School of international relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loxley, J. (2004). What is distinctive about International Development Studies? Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 25(1), 25–38. Smith, H. (2010). The disciplining nature of Canadian foreign policy. In J. M. Beier & L. Wylie (Eds.), Canadian foreign policy in critical perspective (pp. 3– 14). Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press. Wylie, L. (2010). Critical conclusions about Canadian foreign policy. In J. M. Beier & L. Wylie (Eds.), Canadian foreign policy in critical perspective (pp. 187–197). Toronto, ON: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Power and Politics in the Unexpected Kristi Heather Kenyon

Introduction Although I was trained as political scientist with specializations in International Relations (IR) and Comparative Politics, since 2016 I have taught in an interdisciplinary undergraduate human rights program. Teaching human rights is inherently normative and political. It requires recognition of a common humanity rather than vilification of the ‘other,’ hope for an improved future rather than retrograde reflections on the ‘good old days,’ and belief in the possibility of enforcement and change. Teaching human rights is dark as well as hopeful. Many of the key advances are borne of horrific suffering, and the cries of ‘never again’ are too often drowned out by repeated abuses. Although human rights are a response to over-reaches of state power, they do not exist outside of the inequities and biases of our world. Although human rights are intended to be universal, they can be viewed as representing particular interests or particular cultures. How can we meaningfully teach human rights in these unusual and disruptive times? How can we do so in ways that affirm human rights but

K. H. Kenyon (B) Global College, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, MB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_9

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also unsettle the foundations of power on which dominant forms of their articulation and codification sit? My physical and interdisciplinary location, paired with a research focus on civil society, has enabled me to see some (but certainly not all) of the power structures embedded in the ways in which human rights is taught, particularly within International Relations. Intellectually my teaching is influenced by constructivism’s emphasis on the ways in which ideas shape our reality and Feminist International Relations’ examination of power in the discipline and practice of International Relations. I am further influenced by Comparative Politics’ focus on learning through comparison and methodological exploration of how the ways in which we ask and seek to answer questions influence our findings and reflect our worldview. My teaching is also fundamentally shaped by an earlier career as a human rights practitioner in South East Asia and Southern Africa, and by my present physical location in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. I live and work on Treaty 1 Territory which is the traditional territory of Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation. Winnipeg is a city that is both deeply committed to human rights and profoundly troubled by ongoing structures and practices of inequality. It is home to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, and the country’s first municipal Human Rights Committee (on which I sit). It also hosts Western Canada’s only undergraduate human rights program (in which I teach) and Canada’s first Master’s in Human Rights (at the University of Manitoba). The city has the continent’s largest urban Indigenous population (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2017) and welcomes the largest number of refugees per capita of any city in Canada (Government of Manitoba 2014). Human rights are neither abstract nor distant to my students. They come to university from remote fly-in only reserve communities, comfortable suburban neighborhoods, inner city schools, farming communities, and refugee camps. They come to learn amid busy complex lives: sometimes after a full day’s work or sandwiched between part-time jobs, sometimes bringing their children, sometimes in minus 40 degree Celsius weather, and sometimes studying in their third or fourth language. These factors are strengths which bring enormous richness to our classroom conversations, buttressing them with diverse life experiences and consequent insights. The enjoyment and violation of human rights are embedded in the land on which we sit, the language in which we study,

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the communities from which we come (and the names of the streets and monuments that mark them), the stories of our families (whether immigrant, refugee, Indigenous, or international student), and, the water that we drink.1 Students in human rights classes are not a random selection of undergraduates—whether they take my courses as requirements for their human rights majors or as electives—they are there deliberately. Often students study human rights as a way to make sense of the world. Sometimes they take my courses to better understand a new country, or to contextualize the experiences of their families. Sometimes they study human rights because they are angry at rising intolerance, or because they think they disagree with human rights or ‘political correctness.’ My students all have a reason to be there, not always shared, and often quite personal. I seek to offer them a ‘proper’ human rights education but also one that is inclusive of and speaks to their own experiences and hopes all the while unsettling some of their assumptions and expectations.

Teaching Human Rights in International Relations: Affirming Rather Than Challenging Power? To invoke a culture is also to invoke a shared language; as far as the human rights culture is concerned, the language is decidedly legal. As ‘declarations’ the international charters are exemplars both of language and of law. Whether hard or soft law, it is inevitably an expression of particular ideas about society, while not necessarily embracing its total reality. Far from being simply rules for social behavior, law is part of a distinctive manner of imagining the real (Geertz 1983, p. 173). (Hastrup 2001)

When ‘human rights’ is positioned within the field of International Relations its location often reflects rather than challenges structures of power. While issues pertaining to human rights arise in many areas of the field, including the study of armed conflict, broadened conceptions of security (i.e. human security) and justifications for intervention (Responsibility to Protect), human rights are usually directly addressed in the classroom in 1 Winnipeg’s water comes from the Shoal Lake 40 Nation a community that has been under a boil water advisory since 1997.

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the context of international organizations with a particular emphasis on the United Nations (UN) and its treaty bodies. They are typically taught with a focus on codified legal protections such as human rights treaties and their respective enforcement mechanisms. The approach to human rights described above presents critically important facets of the international legal human rights infrastructure. Understanding these components is essential to a full grasp of the contemporary human rights context. However, too often these facets of human rights are presented as complete rather than partial representations of the topic. A legal and UN-focused approach to human rights depicts and reinforces particular structures of power and expertise. Placing human rights squarely within international law, and within intergovernmental organizations, privileges the knowledge of lawyers and diplomats and distances expertise from lived experience. The codification of human rights is often misinterpreted as the creation of rights, rendering human rights, in Hastrup’s words “bizarre creations that are declared rather than lived” (2003, pp. 16–17). Documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the legally-binding international covenants on civil and political, and economic, social and cultural rights are key victories in the codification of human rights. However, over-reliance on these conventions and treaties in the teaching of human rights can mean that the expected experts on the topic are those who know these documents best, and are most familiar with their legal interpretation and drafting histories. Such a construction of expertise can come to exclude those with other forms of human rights knowledge and can lead to the discounting of interpretations of human rights that are at odds with these codifications. Although human rights can rightfully be understood as important human-centered limitations on state sovereignty, teaching human rights within the context of IR can paradoxically be impersonal and state-centric. UN human rights treaties are signed and ratified by states and require a specific numbers of parties to come into effect. States consequently play a key role in what gets articulated and recognized as rights. Powerful states often have a disproportionate role—influencing which rights get codified, and which treaties and rights get taken seriously. Codified human rights consequently often reflect geopolitical power and reinforce ideas of center and periphery. The strongest example of this is the emphasis on civil and political rights (such as the right to vote and to a fair trial) which

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receive more attention in the Global North and West and the much shallower recognition and international enforcement of socio-economic rights (such as the right to health, education and housing). A state-oriented structure means it is less likely that voices and concerns of minority and trans-national populations are heard.2 Functionally, many human rights structures and the disciplinary form of their instruction serve to limit and, indeed, discipline what ‘counts’ as human rights, who is an expert, and how human rights are articulated in ways that are meaningfully heard. It places most people, and certainly most undergraduate students, outside of the sphere of human rights expertise. Even the positioning of human rights as universal—an important, inclusive claim—can conceal and privilege the particular roots of codified human rights in a specific time, place, and culture. Human rights in their current codified expression are not acultural and ahistorical, having been strongly shaped by the UN system and its origins in post World War II Europe. If human rights are intended to be an emancipatory set of ideas that challenge state power and disrupt strongly rooted ideas of inequality, how can the teaching of human rights itself be an act of challenging and disrupting? If human rights are, as the Vienna Declaration pronounced “universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated” (UN General Assembly 1993) how can a fulsome study of human rights value diverse forms of expertise—including varied disciplinary training (doctors, social workers, cultural practitioners, environmental scientists) alongside knowledge based in lived experience? How can we find ways to root human rights, not only in distant conventions, but also in our classrooms and neighborhoods? If equality is central to human rights how can we recognize students as experts in their own right, drawing on their own first-hand experience? The questions outlined above are not simple. They are at odds with much of my own formal academic training and force me to tread new waters and continually re-assess my approach to teaching with input from my students and colleagues. I present these ideas as the beginning

2 The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is one important counter-example, however, the time elapsed between the international covenants on civil and political rights, and economic, social and cultural rights and UNDRIP, the insufficiency of existing mechanisms in addressing Indigenous rights, and the opposition of governments all reinforce the point made here.

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of a conversation. I focus on three strategies: (1) unsettling expertise, (2) unexpected ‘texts’ and, (3) disruptive comparisons. I understand unsettling and disrupting as related phenomena. Unsettling consists of provoking the questioning of accepted norms, practices and narratives by introducing unexpected alternatives to foundational ideas. Disrupting is a process whereby such foundations are more directly and broadly challenged, interrogated and possibly dismantled.

Unsettling Expertise Where after all do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person: The neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seek equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. (Eleanor Roosevelt, Remarks at the United Nations, March 27, 1958)

If human rights must have meaning “in small places, close to home” and “the realization of human rights is much too important to be left to lawyers alone” (Bah as cited in Vuasi 2006) how can we as instructors diversify human rights expertise in our classrooms? As Enloe notes, “[w]ho is taken seriously and by whom?” are not “minor questions” (Enloe 2013, p. 7). I use three approaches to unsettle expertise in my teaching: (1) thinking critically about power and perspective in my syllabus, (2) facilitating interaction with human rights practitioners, and (3) learning from unexpected experts through practical exercises. Assigned readings communicate importance and expertise to students. As others have noted (de Haan 2018), one important strategy in diversifying expertise is examining representation within readings. Do assigned readings include both women and men, and are various parts of the world represented? On an interdisciplinary topic like human rights I aim also to pay attention to the ways in which I am recognizing disciplinary expertise and training. Amid readings by legal scholars I include historians, cultural practitioners, anthropologists, environmentalists and public health scholars. To highlight the ways in which human rights are often positioned as acultural, I assign readings which root human rights in

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contexts beyond Europe (for example: Watson 2001; Cobbah 1987; Sen 1997; Kenyon 2019). Ackerly argues that, “[i]f we want to learn what to do about injustice and how to do it, we should learn from those who are doing something about it” (2018, p. 1). I seek to bring practitioner voices into the classroom and, where possible, to bring my students to practitioners. Locally this has included visits to health clinics, museums and legislatures, and guest lectures from curators, student activists, refugee lawyers, and directors of women’s centers. Beyond the city’s boundaries my classes have visited the Shoal Lake 40 reserve on the Manitoba/Ontario border and their community-run Canadian Museum of Human Rights Violations and a wide variety of health facilities and community organizations in Botswana. These visits showcase gaps between rights ‘in print’ and rights ‘in practice’ but also highlight the journey from ‘declared’ to ‘lived.’ Such visits facilitate organic comparisons between ‘official’ human rights texts and the perspectives of those working directly for improved conditions in their communities. These experiences often prompt questions about who drafts human rights documents, whose voices are absent in dominant human rights narratives and whose histories are omitted from textbooks. Closer to home, the major assignment in my fourth year Human Rights Capstone seminar is to conduct interviews with a student and a community member on their perspective of human rights. For the past two years we have paired with a class at Roosevelt University in Chicago, with both groups conducting interviews in their cities and sharing anonymized transcripts. Students ask interview participants questions such as: How would you define human rights? Who violates human rights? and Who is responsible for protecting human rights? The interviews aim to address questions that are familiar to fourth year human rights students but seek answers from unexpected sources—their friends and neighbors. These interviews, which subsequently form the basis for student research papers, unsettle expertise in two ways. First, the assignment is structured to recognize ‘ordinary people’ as having legitimate perspectives on human rights and to take these perspectives seriously by using this data in academic writing. As Cynthia Enloe argues “[t]o be taken seriously is a major reward that can be bestowed on a person” (Enloe 2013, p. 4) and a powerful act of recognition. Second, by conducting interviews themselves, students speak in class as experts on their own interviews. They are able to present first-hand an experience

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that is unique to them (rather than a text read by the class as whole).3 Students often experience this assignment as empowering and, as a result, are more likely to take themselves seriously and to recognize and value their own human rights expertise.

Unexpected ‘Texts’ “If monuments are about remembering, who or what gets ‘forgotten’ in the public discourse can be just as significant” (Dresser 2007, p. 165). A second strategy is to present students with unexpected ‘texts.’ The study of human rights, and the social sciences more generally, relies overwhelmingly on the analysis of words in formal academic and legal documents. By providing students with opportunities to apply academic tools of analysis to unexpected materials, I seek to rejuvenate a practice that may have become routine. This can include: (1) assigning atypical readings, (2) analyzing non-text visual or audio materials, (3) examining familiar landmarks using academic tools. Taking unexpected ‘texts’ seriously underscores the transferability of students’ academic training and highlights the omnipresence of human rights issues in our daily lives. Atypical readings can include creative writing, public messaging, and social media outputs. Creative writing can be useful in bringing to the fore some of the human dimensions of human rights as it is often emotionallyrich and provides deep personal context. I have assigned children’s books, young adult fiction, novels, poetry, and play scripts to help provide input into cultural and socio-economic context and illustrate the ways in which human rights are interconnected. Public messaging can be analyzed for its assumptions and implied theoretical underpinnings, while twitter can provide immediate commentary of current human rights events. The latter two examples can offer useful assignments, whereby students locate messages or tweets with specific themes which can then be analyzed with reference to academic theory. Even a textbook can be an atypical reading if the task is to analyze it as a text—for example examining the ways in which an ‘Introduction to Political Science’ textbook addresses women’s rights. Non-text materials such as music, dance performances, film, monuments, museums and television advertisements stretch student’s analytical

3 See Kenyon (2017) for a step by step description of a similar assignment.

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tools and force them to consider the impact of different forms of communication. Especially where assigned ‘texts’ resonate in popular culture these assignments often bring topics to life by sparking conversations beyond the classroom between students and their friends and family. Applying analytical tools to materials with which students already have an existing relationship can be particularly powerful. A central assignment in one of my courses involves analyzing a chosen monument in the city and the ways in which it presents or obscures the city’s human rights history. I use this assignment to bring human rights home and examine how the spaces within which we move are shaped and named by particular historical narratives. This assignment can “unpack” and overlay new meaning on familiar places (Buffington and Waldner 2011) that students will continue to revisit. Students have defined monuments broadly, in addition to statues, examining gravestones, murals, museum exhibits, and currency (the $10 bill featuring Viola Desmond4 and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights). This broadened perspective facilitated a discussion of the power to create monuments—what political, financial and other resources are needed for particular people or groups to be commemorated and how power is reflected in the materials and location of these commemorations. I also encourage students to write on ‘the most important missing monument’ to examine the forgotten narratives in our city’s streets. In the past year this assignment dovetailed with a city-initiated conversation on monuments, to which students were able to contribute. This dialogue and others like it across Canada and the globe, provides a useful forum through which to examine the power of representation and to discuss how to address absent, conflicting and privileged narratives.

Disruptive Comparisons “I began to question this seductively powerful adjective, normal, the twin brother of natural” (Enloe 2013, p. 3). One of my teaching objectives is to find ways to “make the familiar strange” (Mannay 2010) and allow students to question things they may 4 Viola Desmond was an African-Nova Scotian woman who challenged segregationist policy in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1946 by refusing to leave a section of a theatre reserved for white patrons. She was convicted of a tax violation (for the one cent difference in theatre fares) and received a posthumous pardon in 2010.

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take for granted as “normal” and “natural.” I often find comparison a useful tool to enable students (and myself) to look upon the local environment with new eyes. It can be easy, for example, to assume that historical events were inevitable, or that current laws or human rights protections are the best, or only way to secure critical liberties. Comparisons, both expected and unexpected, can force students to explain facets of society that are so familiar to them they are almost unnoticeable. They can reveal unspoken assumptions. Comparison can also prompt an examination of contrasts between ‘official’ or ‘accepted’ narratives with respect to Canada’s human rights record and diverse lived realities. How do we explain, for example, someone begging for food outside of a gleaming skyscraper or the many Indigenous communities who live under longterm boil water advisories in a country with one of the largest fresh water supplies in the world? I incorporate comparison into my classes in several ways—ranging from single in-class activities, to experiential field courses framed around comparative work. In-class activities can include case studies or document analyses which place Canada in comparative perspective. At its core, examining Canada in comparative perspective makes clear that our local and national context is not given but rather a reality that requires explanation. Invoking comparison in these activities can help broaden discussion and increase the level of critical analysis. For example, when teaching the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms it can be useful to preface the discussion with a small group activity where students analyze constitutional human rights provisions from other countries. Without such contextualization, in my experience, students often see the Charter with relatively uncritical eyes. They have a difficult time identifying what else could have been included (or omitted). When first presented with South Africa’s inclusion of health care and Ecuador’s protection of environmental rights, for example, students tend to raise a broader variety of questions and examine not only what the Charter is but what could be. This exercise further facilitates conversation about why key rights are included or excluded, a discussion which can prompt questions of funding, power, priorities, party politics and timing. Similarly, contextualizing women’s representation in the House of Commons with Rwanda’s success at breaching the 50% mark, or Indigenous representation with reference to New Zealand’s system of reserved Maori seats, can broach new conversations about the realm of possible actions and broaden perspectives about where in the world we look for innovation.

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Comparison can also be implied through terminology and categorization. The classification of states using labels like “third world” “first world” “developing country,” etc. implies comparison because it indicates which states are peers and, therefore, appropriate comparators. Circulating news stories that refer to Canada using unexpected language such as “Third World” (Gerster and Hessey 2019) and “apartheid” (Forani and Dehaas 2019) can prompt conversations about inequality within Canada, as well as critical analysis about the ways countries are categorized and labelled. What does it mean to divide up the world in particular ways? How do we feel about these divisions? How do we feel about these labels? What can doing this differently illuminate? A related strategy can be to assign materials that unexpectedly reframe other countries that Canadians may see as peers (such as Bratman’s “Development’s Paradox: Is Washington DC a Third World City?” or SAIH Norway’s “Africa for Norway” mock charity single). This geographic distance allows for greater emotional distance which can, in some instances, provide for more open discussion. The class can then return to the local context to examine whether key observations apply at home. These activities span thirty to sixty minutes of class time, but their impact is often longer lasting. They offer students a new way of thinking about the material they study, and students typically reference these activities throughout term as they draw on comparison to ‘think outside the box.’ At the other end of the spectrum, I have designed entire courses around comparative content. I developed a course titled “Health and Human Rights in Social Context” which was taught in downtown and North End Winnipeg, on the Shoal Lake 40 Reserve and in Gaborone, Maun, D’Kar and Ghanzi, Botswana. While the expected comparators for Canada might be the United States, Australia or European nations, comparison has pedagogical utility beyond the confines of comparative methods that focus on leverage and explanatory power. This unexpected comparison (between Canada and Botswana) drew on my long-term research and practitioner networks in Botswana. I aimed to disrupt narratives that suggest that learning between Global North and South is unidirectional, to blur boundaries between the health and social sciences, and to challenge the common perception that Global Health only happens ‘over there.’ Although the two components of the course were not mirror images of each other, I deliberately sought to parallel content in key areas. In both settings we visited formal health facilities and community groups addressing social, legal, cultural and environmental aspects of

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health. In both countries we spent time in urban, rural and Indigenous communities. The composition of the class also incorporated interdisciplinary comparison—deliberately seeking students from the sciences, social sciences, humanities and law. This interdisciplinary composition meant students learned to draw on and respect varied expertise among their classmates. Even within a course premised on unexpected comparisons there were surprises. Among my almost entirely Canadian class more students had spent time in Africa that on an Indigenous reserve. This unsettled my own ideas about distance—suggesting that our three hour drive to Shoal Lake 40 was, for some students, a bigger and more transformational journey that the two days’ worth of flights to Gaborone. On return students found the process of engaging with their personal networks about their time in Botswana to be a learning experience in itself. Some were praised for their ‘good work,’ showcasing the assumption that Canadian students only go to Africa to give, never to receive. Others found that their suggestions that Canada adopt some of Botswana’s health innovations (such as a national network of accessible confidential HIV testing centers) were not well received by friends and family. These re-entry experiences prompted fruitful discussions on power and perceptions in our debriefing classes. Why are some comparisons comfortable and others disconcerting? How is comparing health care in Canada to that in Botswana different from more common Canada—US comparisons? How can we challenge or perpetuate stereotypes in the ways in which we speak about our learning experiences? Experiential learning can continue long after the ‘experience’ itself is over and can have a ripple effect through personal networks as questions such as those above are examined directly and implicitly in informal conversation.

Conclusions Teaching is always political. It is grounded in the belief that ideas and facts matter, and that knowledge can spur and support positive change. Human rights are a normative project founded on mutual recognition and equality, but their codification, articulation, and instruction is not immune from the powerful forces that shape our realities and inform dominant discourses. In these unusual and divisive times human rights teaching can be an opportunity for transformative disruption. Revealing, unsettling and disrupting some of the powerful foundations of human

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rights and international relations can dispel complacency and spark critical reflection on familiar terrain. It can enable instructors and students to learn from each other and also help us to see ourselves as agents of change. As instructors we can recognize the diverse expertise within and beyond our classrooms and interrogate the ways that we are embedded in the issues and power structures that we study through engagement with unexpected and unsettling materials. We can use our classrooms as powerful and positive places of disruption where we challenge, subvert and upend narratives that marginalize critical voices in order to open space for broader and more meaningful human rights engagement.

References Ackerly, B. A. (2018). Just responsibility: A human rights theory of global justice. New York: Oxford University Press. Bratman, E. (2011). Development’s paradox: Is Washington DC a third world city? Third World Quarterly, 32(9), 1541–1556. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 01436597.2011.620349. Buffington, M. L., & Waldner, E. (2011). Human rights, collective memory, and counter memory: Unpacking the meaning of monument avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, 29, 92–106. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. (2017, October 25). Winnipeg’s Indigenous population highest in Canada, but growth rate is slowing. https://www.cbc.ca/ news/canada/manitoba/aboriginal-population-statistics-canada-1.4371222. Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Part 1 of the Constitution Act, 1982, Schedule B to the Canada Act 1982 (UK), c 11. Cobbah, J. A. M. (1987). African values and the human rights debate: An African perspective. Human Rights Quarterly, 19(3), 309–331. De Haan, L. (2018, February 21). IR and diversity: 17 ways to find more diverse experts. Medium International Affairs. Blog.https://medium.com/ international-affairs-blog/ir-and-diversity-17-ways-to-find-more-diverse-exp erts-b9b5a922cbde. Dresser, M. (2007). Set in stone? Statues and slavery in London. History Workshop Journal, 64(1), 162–199. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbm032. Enloe, C. (2013). Seriously! Investigating crashes and crises as if women mattered. Berkeley: University of California Press. Forani, J., & Dehaas, J. (2019, July 22). Angus calls Indigenous water quality issues ‘Apartheid’. CTV News. https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/angus-callsongoing-indigenous-water-quality-issues-apartheid-1.4518207.

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Gerster, J., & Hessey, K. (2019, September 28). Why some First Nations still don’t have clean drinking water — despite Trudeau’s promise. Global News. https://globalnews.ca/news/5887716/first-nations-boil-water-advisories/. Government of Manitoba. (2014) Manitoba immigration facts: 2014 statistical report. https://www.immigratemanitoba.com/wp-content/uploads/ 2015/09/MIF-2014_E_Web_Programmed.pdf. Hastrup, K. (2001). Human rights, anthropology of. In N. J. Smelser (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Hastrup, K. (2003). Representing the common good: The limits of legal language. In R.A. Wilson and J. P. Mitchell (Eds.), Human rights in global perspective: Anthropological studies of rights, claims and entitlements (pp. 16–32). Routledge. Kenyon, K. H. (2017). Bringing the field into the classroom: Methods and experiential learning in the ‘politics of development.’ Politics, 37 (1), 97–112. Kenyon, K. H. (2019). Viewing international concepts through local eyes: Activist understandings of human rights in Botswana and South Africa. The International Journal of Human Rights, 23(9), 1395–1421. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13642987.2019.1607276. Mannay, D. (2010). Making the familiar strange: Can visual research methods render the familiar setting more perceptible? Qualitative Research, 10(1), 91– 111. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794109348684. [SAIH Norway]. (2012, November 16). Africa for Norway – New charity single out now! [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= oJLqyuxm96k. Sen, A. (1997). Human rights and Asian values: What Lee Kuan Yew and Le Peng don’t understand about Asia. The New Republic, 217, 2–3. UN General Assembly. (1948).“Universal declaration of human rights” (217 [III] A). Paris. Retrieved from https://www.un.org/en/universal-declar ation-human-rights/. UN General Assembly. (1993, July 12). Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action. A/CONF.157/23. https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b39ec. html. Vuasi, M. (2006, March 17). Ghana: Human rights is too important to be left to lawyers alone – Judge. https://allafrica.com/stories/200603200621.html. Watson, I. (2001). One Indigenous perspective on human rights. Indigenous human rights, Sydney Institute of Criminology Monograph Series,14, 21–40. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2482886.

CHAPTER 10

Disruption as Control in International Relations Classroom Mark A. Boyer

Introduction Most college and university professors are control freaks. Whether we focus on our predilections for methodological dogma in our research, the ways we try to maintain order in our classrooms, or the great resistance we have toward change in the academy (of almost any sort), most of us have a compulsive streak that recurrently urges us toward the predictable, and in many ways, the “easy” method of classroom instruction. The thought of losing control of your classroom is a fear-inducing sensation that should be avoided at all costs. We all likely remember an unsettling feeling in our gut when particular class sessions did not go well. The material prepared “ended early”; the students wouldn’t talk when invited into a discussion; no one had done the readings that were essential to understanding the topic of the day; or some other scenario led to us to ask the question: was it me or were the students really off today?

M. A. Boyer (B) University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_10

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Whatever the answer to that question, I would be willing to wager that the modal reaction among college faculty when faced with such a lousy in-class experience is to revert to a more predictable, and even more controlled, form of instruction. And for many in that group, that would mean lecture even more. But pedagogical reactions that urge us toward imposing more rigid classroom control have serious (and in my view, negative) implications for the types of learning that can take place in the contemporary international relations classroom. By contrast, as I will argue throughout this essay, we should react to bad classroom experiences by deceptively losing even more overt control in the classroom and covertly asserting control by upending the ways students interact with the material under study. The result, I argue, is better learning outcomes for your students, even if those outcomes may not be easily measurable in a traditional, fact-focused assessment manner. Building from these ideas, it is also worth noting that what I discuss below is rooted in constructivism. But rather than a version of constructivism that most often comes to mind for international relations scholars, my work in the classroom proceeds from the more foundational concepts that have grounded the field of educational psychology for several generations of scholar-teachers. In this sense, constructivist pedagogy focuses on the degree to which students build their own knowledge through their lived experiences, including those experiences within the classroom structure (Fosnot 1989; Brown and King 2000; Holt-Reynolds 2000; Brophy 2002; Richardson 2003). And those lived experiences include the structured environments presented in classrooms. The reader should understand the following sections with that approach to learning theory in mind. Moreover, this approach to pedagogy should also be understood as giving analytical power to the students, even if they sometimes get the analysis wrong. Getting it wrong, however, is part of the constructivist learning environment and transfers power back to the instructor to shape, facilitate and lead students through these analytical exercises. As a result, the power dynamic in the classroom is less traditional, and thus less hierarchical, but still heavily relies on the structural power of the teacher to create and maintain the appropriate learning environment for students. In various contexts, I’ve argued in favor of the pedagogical value of “failure” or “getting the wrong answer” quite consciously. In most classroom settings, I eventually bring the students into this secret goal, even if later in the course progression. Along these lines, in one talk I have

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given numerous times to honors students and parent groups over the last few years, I talk about how we as a society define failure and that these high achievers need to get ready to fail as they enter university life. As a sports fan, I often use sports metaphors in the classroom and the idea of batting average from American baseball is an excellent one to rely on for illustration here. For honors students, most often, they have gone through primary and secondary school without a lot of failure, at least in academics. But in baseball, a Hall of Fame hitter generally holds a .300 batting average, which means he fails as a hitter 70% of the time. But that 30% (.300 means 30% in baseball statistics language) success rate is truly phenomenal when facing major league fastballs, sliders, and the like. Thus, getting students to consciously recognize that failure is normal, healthy and that they should embrace it and learn from it is a crucial variable in getting them to begin to build their own learning experience.

What Do You Want Your Students to Learn? Every college professor decides either implicitly or explicitly what s/he wants students to learn from the semester’s course. Some of us are very explicit in developing learning goals and objectives. We place them in our syllabi and perhaps even spend some time telling students what they will learn during the first session of the semester. Others of us are more intuitive about this topic, but we nonetheless have some sense, enunciated or not, of where we are going in the weeks ahead. For me, my classroom goals have evolved tremendously from the start of my career. As a newly minted junior faculty member, I worried far too much about factual absorption. But over the first decade of my career, partly as a result of time spent actually studying pedagogy, I came to the conclusion that my learning goals for virtually every course I teach are the following: • To get students to examine and question the fundamental assumptions of their personal worldviews and how they shape their reactions to socio-political phenomena around the world; • To develop strong analytical and critical thinking skills, based on the first objective; • To be able to read major journalistic outlets after they leave my class and be able to grapple with and understand the complexity of global affairs.

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These may seem like lofty and perhaps amorphous teaching goals, but each of my courses is structured to serve them. But that structure necessitates a large degree of apparent educational chaos so that by the end of the semester the students are empowered (at least partly) to pursue those goals in the world beyond my classroom. As a result, if others take my premise of “losing control to gain control” as valid, then it is essential to develop your own goals and objectives so that losing control is undertaken within a structure that serves those goals. In other words, you might be giving up control of the “interior” of the classroom space on a daily basis, but you are doing so in an environment that you have structured to serve your chosen educational outcomes. You are also at face value ceding power to your students to be thinkers, while asserting your own power to help develop analytical skills in the process. But as I have had to explain to colleagues over the years who have commented about my noisy classrooms, ceding power is not truly “losing” power or classroom control. Rather, it is about re-centering the learning environment on the student, allowing them to engage in the kind of activities they will most likely confront after graduation. They will become decision-makers; they will need to be more self-directed and selfdisciplined (in many instances); and they will need to sift through large amounts of information and data to find the pieces they need to do their jobs or to make recommendations to their superiors about prescribed action. By structuring the classroom to allow them to “practice” those skills, you are still directing their learning and giving them the valueadded of how you do those type of activities when you get to a place where you have become an authority figure. For some faculty, the overt ceding of classroom control (or if you prefer, the re-centering of the classroom) disrupts what they know and pushes them into uncomfortable places. In my experience, that discomfort is a tremendous intellectual opportunity for me and forces me to think more, and faster, than if I merely stood up and delivered a normal lecture. In essence, lecturing is easy; disrupting in educationally productive ways is a real intellectual challenge. In this context, it is crucial that the instructor lay out the contract with the student from the first day of class. This includes discussion of the pedagogical approach in the syllabus, but also requires some focus on the first day. Perhaps most importantly, though, is the instructor’s willingness and ability to demonstrate disruption as control on that first day and

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again repeatedly over the first weeks of the course. This sets the behavioral boundaries for the course (e.g., participation is essential; students must be alert and prepared; and this might be a “different” course) and helps to build a community of learning that is new to many students. On that score, I am still struck every semester how many students are experiencing active learning (not to mention my approach to it) for the first time. In fact, during one recent semester, I had a student come up to me at the end of class simply to tell me “this isn’t what I expected an environmental course would be like.” I think it was a compliment, but as we talked, it was also clear that the mix of case-based learning and simulation was new for her (a fourth-year student). With this framing, in the next brief sections, I’ll lay out how three different active-learning approaches can be used to serve “disruption as control.”

Case Method Starting in medical schools and refined in business schools and other practitioner environments, case method teaching is focused on teaching for decision-making (Learned 1987) and embraces constructivist pedagogy (Brown and King 2000). Fundamentally, it requires that the students collectively create the knowledge that they gain from classroom experience. In my own case method international relations applications, I have used published cases (Harvard Kennedy School, Pew and others), journalistic articles, raw quantitative data and, most recently, video. In all instances, it is essential that the material be as descriptive and nonanalytical as possible. The more analysis contained in the case material, the more “answers” the students are given and the less they have to think through for themselves. Viewing the case method as an essentially constructivist pedagogy means that much of the facilitator’s role is to lead the deconstruction of the case material so that the students can “rebuild” it in the learning process. For example, early in a case-centric semester, I start case discussions by leading students through the rather rote exercise of delineating the case actors and their stakes in the situation at hand. This provides students the component parts of the case so that they can observe and then analyze the array of social forces at work. After the first two or three cases, I can then jump into high order analysis at the start of a session, because they are accustomed to the initial deconstruction, even if

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we don’t explicitly do it during the class session. As a result, case method teaching builds analytically throughout the semester. Partly for this reason, the case method, at its core, requires instructor patience with the evolution of the student analysis and an ability to overtly let go of control in the classroom. When I began as a case teacher, I would enter a class session with copious notes. I quickly discarded that type of preparation in favor of a list of five to eight macro-structuring questions (see Golich 2000). These questions shape the direction (and substance) of the discussion, but can’t be relied upon to determine the path. No two case discussions on the same material evolve in the same way. Sometimes students don’t get to the point the way you think (or hope) they will. Sometimes they don’t get to the point at all, but usually they do. And this is where disruption is important. The case facilitator must be ready to change course; ask a different question of the class; call for a vote on a particular topic to gauge student thinking about some aspect of the case; put a student on the spot who you think has something to say but is unwilling to do so; and all this is the frame for a free-flowing discussion with an end-goal educational outcome in sight. As a result, case method teaching is not for the faint of heart or for those who don’t want to be pushed to the limits of their intellectual flexibility and adaptability. At a personal level, I find nothing that I do as a teacher more exhausting physically and intellectually than running a case. You must be “on” every second of the discussion to find ways to disrupt, challenge, bring the quiet ones into the fray, and all the while stay attuned to controlling the flow so that the overall goal for the day is achieved.1 In essence, while you have ceded power and control of the analysis to the student, the instructor retains the power to shape, push and pull that analysis throughout the session.

Simulation I had the very good fortune to work with Jon Wilkenfeld in the earliest days of Project ICONS (www.icons.umd.edu) at the University of Maryland in the 1980s. Jon remains a pioneer in simulation methods, especially 1 There are many good case resources starting with those at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Some specific examples of case method applications include Waalkes (2003) and Deibel (2002). For one assessment of case method teaching can be found in Krain (2010).

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as they employ computer-assisted techniques, and that mentorship shaped my use of simulation in teaching and research for the past 30 years. Most broadly, simulation in the classroom encompasses a range of techniques: • role-playing games (or human simulations ) with a quite limited scope in substance and time. These types of simulations center on the student as decision-maker and can be designed for settings from a single class to multiple class sessions. Probably the best-known roleplaying simulation is Model UN, which is run at many universities. Much simpler, single classroom role playing games can be structured around a narrow topic, like land preservation or fishing rights negotiations, and can be tailored to fit your course goals (Boyer and Smith 2015) • human–machine simulations like, ICONS, use technology to develop pedagogical structures that are difficult to create within a single university setting. These distributed, multi-university simulations allow for greater complexity, generally occupy more time during the semester, and require a different type of preparation for students and faculty. In my context, I taught a negotiation and bargaining course for many years where the first half of the semester focused on international negotiation and bargaining, while the second half centered on students in the role of country foreign policy decision-makers engaged in a multi-country, multi-university simulation that provides students with a small flavor of the real world complexity of multilateral negotiation. Over the years, I have heard from students that this simulation was indeed one of their most frustrating experiences of their university careers. My response has always been (mostly in my head), “then I achieved my educational goals” by giving them a real sense of global complexity. • machine-centric simulations like Barry Hughes International Futures Simulation (IFS) (https://pardee.du.edu/) can be employed in a variety of classroom settings. IFS is an complex and nuanced computer simulation that allows students to model country and regional projections across a wide range of variables from demography to the environment through politics and much more. Once students learn to manipulate the model, they can gain an understanding of how difficult socio-political change can be. For instance, they can create models to answer questions like: how might policymakers slow population growth in the Global South? Then the

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instructor can help them work through the follow-on questions of: should they try to achieve that goal when considering the social, political and ethical considerations that come along with such a policy change? As these brief examples suggest, similar to case method teaching (and in my mind complementary to it), simulation places the student directly in the role of the decision-maker. But a defining characteristic of simulation as pedagogy is that the student’s decision-making is bounded by the structures created by the simulation designer (Boyer and Smith 2015). Such bounding might be the result of a variable set of rules for decision-making across several scenarios (see Boyer et al. 2006) or a specific institutional setting like the UN Security Council (Chasek 2005; Crossley-Frolick 2010) or the EU (Zeff 2003; Switky 2004) or some other construct that serves the course goals. But within those bounds, students are generally given fairly wide latitude and the outcomes might well diverge from what we faculty view as realistic. Those divergences are where post-simulation debriefing is vital for effective pedagogy. The disruptive aspect of simulation methods centers on the ways students interact both with temporal factors and system complexity. Simulations are simplifications of reality and thus only provide a stylized version of decision-making in the real-world. But for many students, simulations are one of the first times that they have been asked to make “important” decisions in an environment constrained by time pressure, complex and cross-cutting forces, and imperfect information. As a result, student comfort is often disrupted through simulation pedagogy and a significant degree of frustration sets in by the end of the exercise. From my perspective, frustration is a perfect teaching outcome (as I mentioned above), as it allows the facilitator to unpack the reasons for those feelings and how they relate to the actual constraints felt in our socio-political world. As a result, frustration should be sought, not avoided in the active learning classroom. Perhaps this is a product of my own perverse pedagogical leanings, but I have actually stopped a simulation that was getting too quickly to agreement and, in my mind, unrealistically so. That stoppage often leads to further frustration for the students, but the educational opportunities are greater when the simulation remains truer to the actual constructs than to the students’ often idealistic predilections.

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Problem-Based Learning (PBL) In many respects, the case method and simulation are both subsets of problem-based learning (PBL) approaches. But problem-based learning encompasses a broader swath of techniques that don’t fall within either of those contexts. In particular, PBL allows the teacher to build learning environments for very specific goals to cultivate analytical skills (see Burch 2000; Walker et al. 2015). For instance, I long struggled with teaching graduate research methods in ways that worked for a diverse group of students (ranging from those with quick conceptual minds to those more comfortable with concrete, and largely empirical, material). But about 20 years ago, I decided to teach research design in my conflict class by centering a three-hour session around building an actual research design. Splitting the students into three small groups, each was charged with: • Defining a research question; • Identifying the crucial variables involved; • Selecting and defending a particular methodological approach to the project. They were given an hour to do so, bouncing off of the readings for the day. Then, the remainder of that day’s seminar was “shredding” each research design. While this was a relatively artificial process and suffered from lack of full information about the potential research project, the students were able to get a window on the peer review process at work, gain a better understanding of what works (or not) in research design and, as with other forms of PBL, gain a better grasp of the complexity of the academic research environment. In this context and many others, PBL provides an enormously flexible methodology for designing pedagogy focusing on building critical thinking and analytical skills amongst the students involved in the process. PBL is also disruptive in that cedes control to the students for a period of time and forces them to move out of their roles as passive absorbers of knowledge. It is further disruptive in the ways that students often fumble through the initial parts of the PBL process. This reinforces the argument for a contract with the students from the first day and remains a reflection of the fact that most of our colleagues still rely on passive classroom techniques that are comfortable, if not, creative but also ask little

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of the students other than to show up (I will continue to resist calling such approaches pedagogy!). As any active learning, disruptive course progresses, however, the discomfort gradually disappears as the students become acclimated to their responsibilities in this learning environment.

Conclusion Remarks One of my pedagogical mentors urged only the use of active methods in the classroom. Don’t revert to lecture, as you are providing your students with a “baloney sandwich,” that is, active learning sandwiched in the middle of lectures where the instructor tells the students what to think. I must admit to not following this advice, but that is mostly because I find myself teaching almost exclusively in interdisciplinary environmental programs over the past decade. As a result, I find that I need to provide some informational “leveling” amongst students who come into my classes with very different curricular backgrounds. Nonetheless, most of my classes are about two-thirds active learning-centric and focus directly on disrupting the ways students think, work and interact with one another intellectually. Although I won’t develop this point too much further here, the student interaction piece is another important component in disruptive pedagogy, especially in the context of requiring group work. In the end, I urge every scholar-teacher to ponder how s/he might best cultivate structural power within the learning environment. What can you do to shape your classroom approach, assignments and course objectives that place your desired frame around student learning? To begin that structuring, try to determine in your own mind what you really want students to learn. Then you can think about how particular methods, pieces of topical substance and your own pedagogical strengths and weaknesses can be used to be best achieve those learning outcomes. Hence, while I argue that disruption is control and that the most important power a scholar-teacher has is structural power, knowing yourself is perhaps the most important pedagogical tool of all. What do you do well and not so well? In many ways, it is the same topic we force our students to consider in varying ways, but it is even more important that we make good self-assessments to maximize learning potential. Parallel to the “know thyself” pedagogical approach, we all should recognize that some approaches work well in some settings and not in others. I have had numerous discussions with faculty in recent years who

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teach in the southern American states where they can get into “trouble” by speaking too critically about Trump. We can also think of our colleagues struggling with academic freedom in countries like Turkey or Hungary and beyond and know that we are able to be disruptive in ways that are not possible outside of our more academic privileged world. That said, I would argue that in those settings, the classroom teacher should think less about the heated politics of a situation and more about getting students to look at data in objective fashion. I heard one colleague teaching in the Global South tell me not long ago that asks her students to find multiple journalistic reports of the same event. Then she asks them to attempt to assess the “truth” across the multiple sources. Such an approach doesn’t argue for a particular perspective, but does push students to construct their own understanding of world events and the forces that shape them. As I stated earlier, disruption is more about pushing at the edges of understanding to expand the student analytical frames than it is about up-ending their worldviews. Those edges are where the learning can take place if the teacher teases out the desired learning outcomes.

References Boyer, M. A., & Smith, E. (2015). Developing your own in-class simulations: Design advice and a “Commons” simulation example. In J. Ishyama, I. Miller, & E. Simon (Eds.), Handbook of teaching and learning in political science and international relations (pp. 315–326). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Boyer, M. A., Trumbore, P., & Fricke, D. (2006). Teaching IPE theory from the pit: A simple classroom simulation. International Studies Perspectives, 7 (1), 67–76. Brophy, J. (Ed.) (2002). Social constructivist teaching: Affordances and constraints. Oxford: Elsevier Science, Ltd. Brown, S. W., & King, F. B. (2000). Constructivist pedagogy and how we learn: Educational psychology meets International Studies. International Studies Perspectives, 1(3), 245–254. Burch, K. (2000). A Primer on problem-based learning for International Relations courses. International Studies Perspectives, 1(1), 30–44. Chasek, P. S. (2005). Power politics, diplomacy and role playing: Simulating the UN Security Council’s response to terrorism. International Studies Perspectives, 6, 1–19.

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Crossley-Frolick, K. (2010). Beyond model UN: Simulating multi-level, multiactor diplomacy using the millennium development goals. International Studies Perspectives., 11, 184–201. Deibel, T. L. (2002). Teaching foreign policy with memoirs. International Studies Perspectives, 3(2), 128–138. Fosnot, C. T. (1989). Enquiring teachers, enquiring learners: A constructivist approach to teaching. New York: Teachers College Press. Golich, V. L. (2000). The ABCs of case teaching. International Studies Perspectives, 1(1), 11–30. Holt-Reynolds, D. (2000). What does the teacher do? Constructivist pedagogies and prospective teachers’ beliefs about the role of a teacher. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16(1), 21–32. Krain, M. (2010). The effects of different types of case learning on student engagement. International Studies Perspectives, 11(3), 291–308. Learned, E. P. (1987). Reflections of a case teacher. In C. R. Christiansen & A. J. Hansen (Eds.), Teaching and the case method. Boston: Harvard Business School. Richardson, V. (2003). Constructivist pedagogy. Teachers College Record, 105(9), 1623–1640. Switky, B. (2004). The importance of voting in international organizations: Simulating the case of the European Union. International Studies Perspectives, 5(1), 40–49. Waalkes, S. (2003). Using film clips as cases to teach the rise and “decline” of the state. International Studies Perspectives, 4(2), 156–174. Walker, A., Leary, H., Hmelo-Silver, C. E., & Ertmer, P. A. (Eds.). (2015). Essential readings in problem-based learning. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Zeff, E. E. (2003). Negotiating in the European Council: A model European Union format for individual classes. International Studies Perspectives, 4(3), 265–274.

CHAPTER 11

Teaching Social Innovation to Address ‘Wicked Problems’: Why a Critical Analysis Is Insufficient for Preparing the Next Generation of Problem-Solvers Rebecca Tiessen

Introduction Teaching students to analyze and unpack the world’s ‘wicked problems’ (Rittel and Webber 1973) is central to international relations, international development and global studies. Curricula in these fields cover ‘wicked problems’ such as fragile states, conflict, climate change, poverty, inequality, etc. In-depth critical analyses and deconstructive frameworks help students understand the complexity of the most pressing problems in the world for student learning.

R. Tiessen (B) University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_11

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The concept of ‘wicked problems’ was introduced in 1973 by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber as a guiding framework for theory and practice in policy sciences. Wicked problems are difficult to address, require large sums of money, lasting solutions and interconnected approaches including interdisciplinary training and/or cross-disciplinary team work (Kolko 2012). The challenges associated with wicked problems generally refer to these four factors: “incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems” (Kolko 2012, p. 1). In addition, addressing wicked problems requires behavior change in order to achieve lasting results and measurable impacts. Solutions to ‘wicked problems’ and contemporary social, political and environmental issues require social innovations and state-of-theart training models that can prepare students for their careers, and for careers that have positive societal impacts. Preparing the next generation of leaders and thinkers for solving complex, global challenges therefore requires new strategies and approaches for classroom-based and experiential learning in social innovation. Building on some early reflections on pedagogy and social innovation outlined in a blog (Tiessen 2019: Blog 5 https://rebeccatiessen.weebly.com/blog), this chapter expands the analysis to build on the themes of politics and disruption in pedagogy and specifically on the transgression of pedagogical practice. In this chapter, I argue that deconstructive analyses dominate teaching approaches in international relations, international development and global studies. Opportunities for students to learn problem solving and create solutions to ‘wicked problems’ are few; however, focusing exclusively on building solutions is similarly insufficient. By employing an example of teaching social innovation in an International Development and Global Studies course, I consider how critical analyses and solution-oriented learning can be combined to maximize educational benefits for students. Social innovation training often serves as an alternative to deconstructive analysis, focusing on problem-solving and solution-oriented pedagogy and activities that are designed to better prepare students for diverse careers that require the tools needed for addressing ‘wicked problems’. Universities are increasingly adopting social innovation programs, and courses to prepare the next generation. However, striking the right balance between critical analysis and problem solving is crucial for pedagogical design. In this chapter I provide an overview of my experience teaching a social innovation course and the lessons learned in bridging the

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critical and constructive components of social innovation course design. I consider the limitations of social innovation pedagogy and conclude with some thoughts on how to strike a balance between deconstructive/critical analysis and social innovation/problem solving as a pedagogical strategy for preparing the next generation of leaders, thinkers, and practitioners in international relations, international development and global studies who will take on the ‘wicked problems’ of the world they inherit. These reflections are inspired by—and build on feminist pedagogy and feminist international relations scholars including bell hooks (1994) and her work on “teaching to transgress” and the pursuit of education that inspires “active feminist engagement aimed at transforming both ourselves and our communities” (Parisi et al. 2013, p. 412).

Social Innovation: Popularity and Possibilities for Addressing Wicked Problems Globally, post-secondary education institutions are “developing programming and services directed towards enabling a culture of social entrepreneurship and catalyzing social innovation” (Scaled Purpose 2015, p. 3). Diverse strategies are employed across institutions including comprehensive social innovation programs, social innovation certificates, offices of social innovation, and integration of social innovation learning within selected courses. Social innovation programs can be found across North America, Europe, China, South Africa and elsewhere. Social innovation, when integrated into curriculum, focuses predominantly on the following four core strategies: (1) The promotion of “systemic and sustainable approaches to improving society through positive social change”; (2) The development of “qualities for positive change in students”; (3) The enhancement of “employability skills and twenty-first century skills, while working towards a more sophisticated set of competencies; and (4) The promotion of a learning model that is “more critical and socially impactful” than traditional post-secondary education (Rivers et al. 2015, p. 3). Within these strategies is an emphasis on skills-development, including soft skills and critical thinking capacities. However, combining critical thinking with social innovation skills development can be challenging when the emphasis in social innovation rests primarily on invention, entrepreneurship and problem solving. In order to teach critically informed problem solving, students must also learn core principles to

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guide social innovation targeting ‘wicked problems’. The following core principals are developed from my own experience teaching social innovation and reflect shared priorities with the partner organization for this course—the World University Service of Canada (WUSC). I return to these principles later in this chapter when elaborating on the course assignment. The principles guiding critically informed social innovation are: 1. Contextual relevance: Social innovations need to be relevant to the communities impacted. Innovations in one cultural context may not work in other contexts. To understand whether the social innovation is relevant to the context, consultation is essential. Key considerations for the consultation process include: Whose knowledge is counted? What have others tried to do in that context and why/how have previous efforts been unsuccessful? Does the social innovation reflect the social, political and environmental needs of the community impacted? What are the potential barriers and who are the potential gatekeepers who may prevent social innovation success? 2. Inclusivity: Social innovations need to be inclusive in the consultation process, incorporating the voices of diverse groups. A feminist intersectional approach is a useful guide for ensuring that underrepresented or marginalized groups are included in the design and consultation process. An inclusive approach also draws on participatory action research methodologies to ensure beneficiary communities are active participants in the change process. 3. Sustainability: Social innovations must ensure the sustainability of the initiative begins with a participatory and inclusive process. A social innovation will only be sustained when the impacted communities feel ownership of the intervention. Strategies to ensure ownership include early consultation processes, active engagement throughout the project design, support for skills-building and capacity development to ensure communities do not rely on external support when problems arise or technologies break down, etc. A social innovation should also have lasting impacts that do not cause more harm or new problems such as environmental degradation and should not lead to long-term dependency on donors. 4. Qualitative and Quantitative Evaluation: Social innovations emphasize the qualitative outcomes including the quality of life improvements resulting from the project. Evaluating the impact

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of a social innovation requires more than quantitative metrics to measure the extent of the impact. Qualitative analysis documenting the nature of the impact is also important for monitoring and evaluating social innovations. 5. Scale: A social innovation must also be commensurate with the scale of the challenges people are facing and has the potential to be scaled up in order to serve the broadest community possible. In addition to these principles, students must also recognize the importance of trial and error and the need to ‘fail fast’ when failures are encountered. Failing fast means recognizing the failure or limitations of a social innovation and moving on to new ideas as quickly as possible. Embracing failure is important for acknowledging that not all ideas work out, including pedagogical ideas prepared by instructors. Important lessons and learning come from the inevitable failures we encounter and preparing students for failure is an important life skill. Modelling ‘failing fast’ in the classroom can be a core skill transferred to students. In the context of social innovation, students need to also think of ‘failing fast’ in the context of achieving a broader societal goal and social change rather than being hung up on the invention of the idea or innovation. The second consideration is the importance of marketing ideas to the right audiences to get the support, resources and finances to make the social innovation move forward. These guiding principles require the development of a range of skills, drawing on the combined lessons from critical analysis and problem-solving strategies.

Case Study: Teaching Social Innovation Through the University of Ottawa Ventures Program The case study presented here is based on a course that was developed in fall 2018 for second year students in the Faculty of Social Sciences and in the School of International Development and Global Studies at University of Ottawa. The social innovation training students received in this course is part of a larger University of Ottawa program called the Ventures Program. The Ventures program provides support for educational and pedagogical development related to social innovation training in first and second year courses. The social innovation training is designed to foster

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entrepreneurial thinking and a passion for creating solutions to societal problems. The social innovation projects that are employed in these courses are also meant to help build stronger university/community partnerships. To qualify for the initiative, professors submitted proposals for how they would incorporate social innovation into their first and second year courses and identified community partners that could help facilitate project development. Students are presented with societal challenges in the course lectures and are coached on strategies they can use to address these problems. Emphasis on working in teams was also central to the learning outcomes. Each course was given the support and guidance of the social innovator/entrepreneur in residence who provided guest lectures to help students visualize changes and to learn examples of how social innovation and entrepreneurship work. Emphasis was placed on creativity and students were encouraged to go beyond traditional course assignments in the design of their social innovation projects. The social innovation program also fosters opportunities for hands-on learning and entrepreneurial thinking to address social issues. Students were expected to develop transferable skills that will make them workforce-ready and to gain capacities they need to address complex societal challenges. In my course, we used project proposal applications and project pitches as the main outputs to demonstrate this learning. Project proposal writing allows students to develop a range of skills that are useful for careers in international development and related fields. These skills include: researching a societal problem, documenting existing knowledge on the issue(s), and proposing a solution based on extensive research. Students were required to prepare budgets and design the strategy for conducting the research or project proposed. For this course, the new focus on social innovation was an easy transition and benefited from the knowledge and support of the Social Innovator/Entrepreneur in Residence who came to the class on two occasions to share his personal experiences of social innovation design.

Learning from Past Practice: Critical and Deconstructive Analysis As background information in the course, we covered a range of social innovation proposals and examined them through a critical lens. Societal problems are called “complex” for good reason. There are no easy solutions to poverty, social inequality, conflict or environmental disasters. The

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difficulty of addressing these challenges is exacerbated by lack of cultural understanding. The allure of quick fixes is, however, prevalent. Three examples of simplistic ideas resulting in problematic social innovations were used to shed light on some of the challenges of social innovation models: Playpumps, Soccket balls and the Lucky Iron Fish. We covered these examples in the course to give students some context and to better reflect on the principles highlighted earlier in this chapter. I provide a brief introduction to these three examples here and highlight some of the critical analyses of these initiatives. Example 1: Playpumps The Playpump is an example of a solution to lack of access to clean water in low-income, rural communities in the Global South. Playpumps, an invention of the Case Foundation, are designed to serve the dual purpose of fun and entertainment for children: a merry-go-round or playground-style machine and to pump water out of the ground. The idea behind this invention was to ‘harness the energy of children’, giving them something they could play with while serving the water needs of their communities. The Playpumps were met with excitement from influential people including Laura Bush (former U.S. First Lady) and Steve Case (co-founder of AOL). The excitement for this invention, however, diminished when evaluations of the project showed that the Playpumps were more expensive than a regular water pump (approximately four times the cost); the technology frequently broke and was difficult to fix; and the amount of time required to turn the Playpump in order to produce enough water for the community exceeded the number of hours there are in a day (Stellar 2020). Andrew Chambers, from the Guardian, for example, reported that “kids would have to ‘play’ for 27 hours a day to meet the target of delivering water to 2,500 people per pump” (Chambers 2009). Based on these evaluations, it is safe to say that the initial Playpumps failed. Part of social innovation, however, is learning from failure and the Case Foundation ended the program and changed the way they addressed water access in the targeted communities by providing running water in schools. The revised program grew out of consultations with local governments and resulted in effective and appropriate technologies that ensured children had access to drinking water while also ensuring students could focus on learning instead of pumping water (Stellar 2020).

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Example 2: Soccket Balls A second example—also one that attempted to ‘harness the energy’ of children in the Global South—is the Soccket ball invention. The Soccket ball is a soccer ball that has a mechanism that turns kinetic energy into electric power that can be used as a reading light at night to help children study after dark (Collins 2014). Soccket balls generate their power after the balls are kicked around in soccer games for approximately 30 minutes per day (Collins 2014). A device can then be attached to the ball at night serving as a source of light for up to three hours. The idea came from a class project completed by Harvard University students in 2008. Like the PlayPumps, Soccket Balls were endorsed by influential people and celebrities including Bill Clinton and Bill Gates (Collins 2014). The challenges that emerged over time included the failure of the electronics, and the lack of replacement materials, training and knowledge to repair them (Collins 2014). Among the criticisms of the Soccket ball was the failure to consult with communities to understand what the communities needed. Of course, if electricity is needed in communities, it makes sense to consider ways for all family members in the community to benefit from electrical supply. As one reporter noted from an interview with a community member in Pueblo, Mexico where Soccket balls had been administered: “For the $60 it cost a charity to provide her family with one Soccket ball, she said she could have had her home hooked up to the electric grid, and that could have provided light for her whole family for years to come” (Collins 2014, p. 1). Example 3: Lucky Iron Fish The third example used in the course is the Lucky Iron Fish—an innovation that began with the research of a university of Guelph epidemiology student who travelled to Cambodia in 2008 and learned about the high rates of anemia in the country. Anemia is commonly associated with iron deficiency. The solution that eventually arose from his research was the introduction of a small iron fish that would be placed in the cooking pot. Through trial and error, the traditionally lucky fish-shaped cast-iron ingot grew in popularity and many households adopted the technology to improve iron supply in their food (Carruthers 2018). Additional research in Cambodia, however, has uncovered that iron deficiency is not the significant cause of anemia in the country. Rather,

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as Dr. Wieringa, from France’s Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement (IRD), and his research team learned from blood samples of more than 2,000 women aged 15–39 across the country, there was almost no iron deficiency in Cambodia. “The majority of anemia in Cambodia is related to genetic defects, such as Haemoglobinpathy E, where smaller than normal red blood cells are present” (Carruthers 2018, p. 1). The Lucky Iron Fish may serve some benefits to certain groups including pregnant women who often have lower levels of iron and the small percentage of people who do have low iron levels. But the Lucky Iron Fish is not the social innovation it claims to be and it is certainly not the panacea for anemia in the country. The Lucky Iron Fish example shares similarities to those of the Soccket ball and the Playpump: all these solutions have come under fire for their limitations, and in some cases, failure. These innovations also reinforce the need to consider the principles of good practice highlighted earlier in this paper, particularly the need for contextual relevance and inclusivity in the design of solutions. These examples also remind us that solutions need to make sense for the communities, be sustainable over the long-run, and be designed with community-based capacity-building in mind so the beneficiaries of these technologies have the skills and knowledge needed to maintain them. Furthermore, small-scale innovations often act as temporary solutions to much broader societal issues that require much more carefully planned support. For example, if lack of electricity is a problem preventing children from having enough light to do their homework, then infrastructure for electricity supply should be the goal. Without sufficient consultation and background research, social innovation failures are more likely to occur. The lack of consultation that happens in many social innovations can be understood in terms of the arrogance of problem solvers who may consider their knowledge superior to those for whom they are coming up with solutions. Addressing that arrogance is central to the critical analysis needed when thinking through solutions to other people’s problems. To analyze these case studies, we employ post-colonial arguments such as “white savior complex”, drawing on critiques of Kipling’s (1899) “White Man’s Burden” and critical race theory; analyses of feminist epistemology and questioning who are considered knowledge-holders (Harding 2008); Orientialism and “Othering” (Said 1978); and hierarchies of gender inequality and intersectional realities (hooks 1991). Students are challenged to consider the ethics on ‘harnessing children’s energy’ in the Global South as a solution to poverty and inequality. We also consider

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broader societal impacts of technologies targeted at able-bodied children (who are able to kick a soccer ball) and the ableism that is perpetuated through this innovation; or ways that gender inequalities are sustained or reproduced when technologies such as soccer balls tend to benefit boys (who may be more likely to play soccer and/or have the time to do so compared to girls). In many communities in the Global South girls play major roles contributing to household activities such as childcare, cooking or cleaning. These examples and the theoretical analyses informing our critiques serve as valuable starting points for considering politics and disruption. Students are guided through the process of disrupting problematic and racist narratives of ‘the helpless other’ and persistent biases that reinforce patriarchal structures. The examples allowed the students to consider the broad sets of issues that they may confront in preparing social innovation projects and allowed them to make linkages to theoretical frameworks and critical analysis. However, deconstructing the problems of previous social innovations will not adequately prepare students for the kinds of work they will face in their own careers after graduation, nor does a critical analysis facilitate the problem-solving skills development required to design new strategies or to create innovations. To link the critical analyses with solution-oriented work, students were given an assignment to complete a project proposal application to address a societal issue in line with ‘wicked problems’ covered in the course.

Translating Lessons Learned into a Course Activity: Designing Project Proposals Keeping in mind the lessons-learned from failed or problematic social innovations and the principles of social innovation (provided above), students were asked to think creatively about a range of problems they would tackle and to design a project proposal that addresses one of the following: 1. A challenge to achieving internationalization and global competency or sustainable development on the University of Ottawa campus. 2. A challenge to achieving sustainable development in the Ottawa community.

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3. A challenge to achieving sustainable development in another community in another part of the world. The social innovation project proposals required working in teams with a minimum of three and maximum of four students per group. Students were briefed on the five components of the written project proposal as well as the guidelines for preparing a presentation of their project to a panel of judges (using the three-minute elevator pitch technique). The components included a title page, overview summary of the proposal, literature review, methods, and budget. The students were reminded that the purpose of the social innovation project is to engage students in research, new mindsets, new skillsets and new toolsets that can facilitate the next generation of scholars and practitioners engaged in solutions to global development issues. They were also reminded that creativity is encouraged and exact figures for budget allocations were not going to be verified. The process of preparing a budget was one of the most stressful aspects of the project for students since they had rarely been given opportunities to create detailed budgets beforehand. The students were also graded on an oral presentation of the proposal that comprised a three-minute presentation that was practiced in tutorials and presented at the Social Innovation Fair— an event that included visual and oral presentations of social innovation projects from more than 500 students from the University of Ottawa faculties of Arts and Social Sciences. Presentations were made to a panel of judges who came from the business community and who asked questions and awarded prizes to the best social innovations. For the students in my course, three prizes were awarded. Below are the brief descriptions of the social innovations that the students prepared for the prize-winning projects: • “In a New Light”—a project that uses art to end the stigma surrounding widowhood in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and addresses the barriers widows face by changing attitudes and behaviors in society. • “Developing Sustainable Literacy to Combat Food Insecurity in Havana, Cuba”—a project to introduce educational reform in order to create environmentally conscious youth.

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• “Safe Work & Living Wage”—a project to reduce poverty and inequality by ensuring safe work conditions and living wages for garment industry workers in developing countries. All of the student projects demonstrated creativity and innovation, and each proposal was a pleasure to read and evaluate. Throughout the design of the proposals, several lessons were learned. One lesson learned was the need for students to spend more time consulting widely on their ideas. Several draft proposals were examples of initiatives that were currently in place and lacked innovation. Working with a partner organization— WUSC—was helpful for determining what innovations are already in place or have been tried before.

Conclusion Overall, this course is one of the most exciting and interesting teaching opportunities I have had. Students were encouraged to think innovatively and to reflect deeply on the challenges of problem solving. They were given feedback from diverse perspectives (the course instructor and teaching assistants, the Social Innovator in Practice as well as community partners—especially through support provided by WUSC). The students learned important skills such as creating a budget and organizing their solutions in line with a clear rationale and situating it within the scholarly debates. They prepared three-minute presentations, designed visual presentations of their work, worked in small teams, pitched their work to social entrepreneurs from the business community in Ottawa, and prepared substantial written proposals that were evaluated by a panel of judges. Most importantly, students learned to straddle the deconstructive/constructive divide, to use critical analyses to inform their thinking and to design solutions to ‘wicked problems’ by employing problemsolving techniques. In most cases, students integrated the principles of social innovation into their proposals well. However, there were some weaknesses in terms of sustainability indicators. Many students fell back on charitable models of project innovations without due consideration for the long-term ownership and independence that is required to achieve social change (a core principle noted above). For example, in several cases, projects included the provision of supplies (such as menstrual hygiene products) to improve student retention among girls. However, these proposals often failed to build in self-sufficiency such as a strategy

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to locally produce these products and end the reliance on donors for charitable giving of these supplies. In summary, this chapter has offered an overview of the importance of integrating an analytical and constructive approach to educational design and a specific teaching technique (social innovation training and project proposal writing) used. The course helped the students navigate and simultaneously employ both critical analysis and problem-solving strategies. As more and more universities adopt social innovation programs, certificates and courses, deliberate efforts are needed to balance solution generation with critical analysis. The lessons learned from this course reinforce the challenges of maintaining a fair balance between deconstructive and constructive elements of pedagogical design, even when critical analysis is integrated throughout the course design. The conceptual and analytical frameworks arising from feminist and post-colonial scholarship serve as useful reminders for students who need to carefully consider the inherent power dynamics that are prevalent when addressing ‘wicked problems’.

References Carruthers, M. (2018). For Cambodia anemia crisis, the limits of a ‘Lucky Iron Fish’. NewsDeeply. Accessed online on February 13, 2020 at https://www. worldcrunch.com. Chambers, A. (2009, November 24). Africa’s not-so-magic roundabout. The Guardian. Accessed online on February 13, 2020 at https://www.thegua rdian.com/commentisfree/2009/nov/24/africa-charity-water-pumps-rounda bouts. Collins, J. (2014, April 8). Impoverished kids love the soccer ball that powers a lamp – until it breaks. Public Radio International. Accessed online on February 13, 2020 at https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-04-08/impoveris hed-kids-love-soccer-ball-powers-lamp-until-it-breaks. Harding, S. (2008). Sciences from below: Feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities. Durham: Duke University Press. hooks, b. (1991). Essentialism and experience. American Literary History, 3(1), 172-183. . hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge. Kipling, R. (1899). The White Man’s Burden. Accessed online on February 13, 2020 at https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/white-mans-burden.

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Kolko, J. (2012). Wicked problems; problems worth solving.Standard Social Innovation Review. Accessed online on February 13, 2020 at https://ssir. org/books/excerpts/entry/wicked_problems_problems_worth_solving. Parisi, L., Allison, J. E., Aragon, J., DeLaet, D., Penttinen, E., Rytkonen, H., et al. (2013). Innovating international relations pedagogy. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 15(3), 412–425. Rittel, H., & Webber, M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155–169. Rivers, B., Amellini, A., Maxwell, R., Allen, S., & Durkin, C. (2015). Social innovation education: Towards a framework for learning design. Higher Education, Skills and Work-based Learning, 5(4), 383–400. Accessed online on February 13, 2020 at https://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/7601/1/AldenR ivers20157601.pdf. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Scaled Purpose. (2015). Where to begin: How social innovation is emerging across Canadian campuses. Accessed online on February 13, 2020 at https:// static1.squarespace.com/static/54989eb5e4b0148a61452d50/t/56a15a3c3 b0be350f654045d/1453414972551/Where+To+Begin+-+Social+Innova tion+Scan.pdf. Stellar, D. (2020, July 1). The Playpump: What went wrong? Earth Institute, Columbia University. Accessed online on February 13, 2020 at https://blogs. ei.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-what-went-wrong/. Tiessen, R. (2019). Fostering creativity and critical thinking in social innovation projects in international development studies. Website for Rebecca Tiessen: https://rebeccatiessen.weebly.com/blog.

CHAPTER 12

Youth Anxiety and Pathological Security-Seeking in Turbulent Times Wilfrid Greaves

Introduction The turbulent first decades of the 21st century have signaled an end to the decade of optimism that followed the Cold War. A confluence of geopolitical, societal, and ecological factors has produced conditions of increasing insecurity for people around the world, including those in wealthy, relatively secure societies in the Global North. Given the high level of material comfort and social privilege that people in the North, on average, experience compared to their Southern counterparts, the nature and sources of insecurity within prosperous democratic societies are worth analyzing to better understand broad patterns or trends in contemporary global security politics. In this era of global disruption, the kids are not quite alright; evidence increasingly indicates that young people are experiencing more anxiety and social discontent than older age cohorts. While previous generations

W. Greaves (B) University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_12

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of youth have also experienced geopolitical challenges that caused anxiety and undermined their wellbeing—fear of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War, for instance—the effects of multiple, compounding global crises have produced a particular socio-political context for contemporary youth in wealthy countries (Pickard and Bessant 2018). Consider these data. In recent decades, overall wellbeing for youth globally has increased across numerous measures, with youth in the Global North experiencing higher objective wellbeing compared to their poorer counterparts. In fact, the Global Youth Wellbeing Index finds that only youth in high income countries experience high overall rates of wellbeing (Sharma 2017, p. 22). Yet, while mental and substance abuse disorders, including anxiety and depression, are the leading cause of disability among children and youth around the world, they are most prevalent in wealthy countries, where rates exceed 10% of young people (Patel et al. 2007; Ritchie and Roser 2020). These rates are also increasing: studies in the United States demonstrate as much as a 50 per cent increase in youth incidence of depression, suicidal outcomes, and mood disorders (Twenge et al. 2019). These increases are also greater among Generation Y (“iGen”) than Millennials, with young adults in the former group “49% more likely than [Millennials] to have reported serious psychological distress in the past month” (Twenge et al. 2019, p. 188).1 And despite their relative affluence—or perhaps because of it—young people in wealthy countries are the most pessimistic about the future: “The higher the GDP per capita, the less likely youth were to say that their future standard of living will be better than that of their parents,” with an average of just 33% of youth in eight wealthy countries expressing such optimism (Sharma 2017, p. xix). The inverse relationship between GDP per capita and positive future expectations indicates the specificity of youth anxiety within the Global North principally as a function of non-material challenges facing young people. In this chapter, I connect youth anxiety to a dual security dilemma in the Global North. Using examples from Australia and Canada, I argue that contemporary politics have produced an ontological-physical security dilemma whereby the collective identities that many people in wealthy societies use to understand their place in a complex social world are directly linked to practices that harm their own security and others’. 1 Millennials are those born between 1980-1994 and Generation Y/iGen those born between 1995-2012. See Twenge et al. 2019, 187.

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Meanwhile, political efforts to transform those identities pit younger people against older generations of their fellow citizens who are more opposed to social change. The result is not just a generational divide on many important societal issues, but the (re)production of human insecurity due to the failure to effectively address the sources of insecurity, particularly for younger people who bear the future brunt of these political failures. In effect, a commitment to ontological security qua national identity results in the maintenance of harmful and destructive practices linked to those identities by and within wealthy societies. In the conclusion, I discuss the International Relations classroom as a site where security, state practices, national identity, anxious young people, and possibilities to transform the ontological-physical security dilemma intersect.

Ontological Security and Pathological Identities ‘Ontological security’ refers to a stable sense of self-identity. Building on Giddens (1991), Jennifer Mitzen (2006, p. 342) explains that “ontological security refers to the need to experience oneself as a whole, continuous person in time – as being rather than constantly changing – in order to realize a sense of agency. Individuals need to feel secure in who they are, as identities or selves.” Maintaining the integrity of how they view themselves and their place in the world provides social actors with cognitive stability in an unpredictable environment. Mitzen (2006, p. 342) notes that “individual identity is formed and sustained through relationships. Actors therefore achieve ontological security especially by routinizing their relations with significant others. Then, since continued agency requires the cognitive certainty these routines provide, actors get attached to these social relationships.” These relational routines become the basic framework for agency at both the individual and collective level, and are an often-taken for granted part of people’s behavior and worldview. Though focused on states, Mitzen’s observation that actors can routinize negative or destructive practices also applies to individuals. In that instance, “ontological security can conflict with physical security. Even a harmful or self-defeating relationship can provide ontological security” (Mitzen 2006, p. 342). In such cases, we might consider ontological security-seeking to be pathological—from pathos, for suffering—in that they deviate from a healthy or sustainable condition. The maintenance of

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pathological collective and individual identities, while providing a measure of ontological security, also harms the self and others. Ontological security-seeking is a powerful force in the (re)production of collective identities, and states are a principal vehicle through which such identities are expressed. No state has a single, monolithic identity, but most do have a group that is demographically, culturally, or politically dominant within its territory and institutions, and which can thus mobilize the state in its own interests: “Because losing a sense of state distinctiveness would threaten the ontological security of its members, states can be seen as motivated to preserve the national group identity and not simply the national ‘body’ [territory]” (Mitzen 2006, p. 352). A state’s “type” can be identified by the features that underpin its dominant identity, and its consequent “role identity” must be preserved for ontological security to be maintained. These categorizations are not immutable, since “state identities or types are constituted and sustained by social relationships rather than being intrinsic properties of the states themselves” (Mitzen 2006, p. 354). Ultimately, a state’s type cannot be separated from its behavior. I suggest pathological ontology security-seeking helps explain the maintenance of routines and relationships that produce human insecurity at home and abroad. As discussed in the next section, it also contributes to contentious debates around racism and inequality, settler-colonialism, and climate change in societies like Australia and Canada. These debates exhibit a generational divide, with younger people more favorable to social transformation but thus far on the losing end of political struggles to bring about the desired policy changes (Saha et al. 2007; Pickard and Bessant 2018). It seems reasonable to suggest a relationship between youth anxiety and their greater support for urgent socio-political transformations, given that in many instances, their own personal and collective security is threatened by the status quo.

The Ontological-Physical Security Dilemma: Two Cases In this section, I explore two examples of the ontological-physical security dilemma: respectively, white supremacy and settler colonialism in Australia and fossil fuel extractivism in Canada. I outline a relevant aspect of the dominant national identity for each, and the ways in which ontological security-seeking produces other insecurities within each society. What

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follows is not causal in the sense of ontological security-seeking causing anxiety for young people, though it seems reasonable to hypothesize that a destabilized sense of collective or individual self, or membership in a nation that defines itself in ways they oppose, may contribute to the anxiety and discontent of many young people. Rather, my argument is a constitutive one, in that it explores how dominant national identities and pathological practices are co-constituted, and how the pursuit of ontological security for members of a dominant identity group can constitute insecurity for themselves and others. This approach allows for the argument to be broadly illustrated, though a full understanding of each case requires deeper discussion of their respective contexts.2

Australia Australia is not unique as an Anglo-European settler colonial society founded through dispossession, settlement, disenfranchisement, segregation, assimilation, and other forms of direct and structural violence against Indigenous peoples. In this, it resembles Canada, the United States, and neighboring Aotearoa New Zealand, all of which began as British colonies and still share cultural and institutional similarities. But of these, Australia is unusual in its degree of reluctance to engage with Indigenous peoples in order to address the conditions of its founding, mitigate chronic public policy challenges, and devolve governance to Indigenous communities. Although substantial progress has been made, the ongoing denial of Indigenous rights suggests a dominant Australian identity rooted in colonial notions of white European civilizational supremacy: “Racism against Indigenous Australians permeates the very fabric of contemporary Australian society” (Paradies 2005, p. 2). The maintenance of a national identity founded on these principles results in ontological security-seeking that (re)produces various insecurities for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Whiteness, property ownership, sporting masculinity, and ties to empire have been at the heart of Australian identity since European settlement in the eighteenth century (Anderson 2006; Carey and McLisky 2009; Moreton-Robinson 2015). From federation in 1901 until 1973, the White Australia Policy prioritized British migrants and prohibited 2 Indeed, this chapter could have inverted the cases and examined climate change in Australia and white settler colonialism in Canada.

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further non-white migration. Although there has been considerable evolution since towards a more pluralistic, multicultural conception of Australian identity (Austin and Fozdar 2018), affirmative action initiatives and other efforts to rectify racial disparities face resistance (Dunn et al. 2004; Paradies 2005). Nativist political parties such as One Nation have successfully contested federal and state elections, and race-based protests and violence by white Australians that targeted visible minorities across the country in 2005 garnered international attention, highlighting the prevalent attitudes by some in the white majority towards racialized groups. Overall, “the national imaginary remains white” (Dunn et al. 2004, p. 417). The centrality of whiteness within Australian national identity and public life is clear with respect to Indigenous peoples. It was not until 1967 that Indigenous Australians were afforded basic personhood and citizenship rights such as electoral suffrage and counted in the national census, and not until 1992 that the doctrine of terra nullius (‘no man’s land’) was repudiated by the Australian High Court. Unique among its settler colonial comparators, Australia’s Constitution still does not recognize the rights of Indigenous Australians, referred to as Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. Australia has signed no treaties with Indigenous peoples, and though it recognizes Indigenous “rights and interests” over 40 per cent of Australia’s land area (NIAA n.d.), they do not exercise selfgovernment as in Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Prospective treaties and proposals to amend the Australian Constitution to include Indigenous peoples—such as the 1988 Barrunga Statement and 2017 Uluru Statement —have been discussed at the highest levels of government since the 1980s, and appear supported by large majorities of Australians (Murphy 2019). But Australian Aboriginals remain the least institutionally empowered Indigenous peoples in the Global North (Maaka and Fleras 2005; O’Sullivan 2014), and there has been a sustained lack of action by Australian politicians and institutions. This maintenance of colonial governance over Indigenous peoples has substantial effects. Not only does it exacerbate the deep social, health, and economic disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians (Paradies 2005; Shepherd et al. 2012), it has been used to legitimate highly interventionist forms of governance and coercion by the Australian state, such as the dubious 2007 intervention in the Northern Territory by the Australian military to remove Indigenous children from their families and deliver them to state care. The paramilitary response to Indigenous

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protests in major Australian cities, the over-incarceration of Aboriginal people in Australia’s penal system, and struggles over land use all reflect harms that are inflicted through the pursuit of ontological security for the dominant national identity (Cunneen 2011; Lamensch 2019). But the effects rebound on the welfare of non-Indigenous Australians, too. Economically, racial discrimination costs Australia nearly AUD$40 billion per year (Elias 2015). And as the devastating 2019/20 wildfire season vividly illustrates, existing land management practices across southern Australia have produced extreme risk under conditions of climate change. These fires, and ensuing flooding, resulted in catastrophic damage to life, property, and natural systems, causing at least AUD$100 billion in damages, making it by far Australia’s most destructive environmental disaster (Read and Denniss 2020). By contrast, Indigenous land use and fire management practices rejected by state authorities offer significant promise in making communities less vulnerable to fires, with Indigenous-managed territories forming small pockets that have been preserved in the face of vast swathes of ecological and socio-economic devastation (Petty et al. 2015; Asmelash 2020). Only by embracing Indigenous knowledges and practices, incorporating them into state policy, and thus rectifying the structural exclusion of Indigenous peoples from Australian politics can these risks be mitigated for all Australians in a rapidly warming global context.

Canada A settler colonial society, like Australia, from the earliest period of post-European contact Canada’s political economy has been driven by the extraction and export of “staple” commodities that have catalyzed foreign investment and linked the country to global markets (Stanford 2014). While various staples—including fish, furs, timber, and grains— have been central to the economy at different points in time, since the mid-20th century hydrocarbons have become an increasingly central part of the Canadian economy and national identity (Willow 2016; Hanrahan 2017). The challenges associated with this extractivist national identity are reflected most acutely in the case of the bitumen sands of northern Alberta (Preston 2017). In 2003, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated that Alberta’s 175 billion barrels of economically recoverable bitumen were the second largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia. Between

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1995 and 2004, bitumen production doubled to more than 1 million barrels per day, and by 2010 the bitumen sands accounted for more than 70% of Alberta crude oil production and nearly 52% of total Canadian oil extraction (Holden and Rolfe 2012, p. 5). After the 2008–2009 global financial crisis, Alberta was characterized as the engine of the Canadian economy, and oil and gas remain Canada’s largest exports, comprising around 10% of GDP. For these reasons, as well as the particularly energy intensive and environmentally damaging nature of bitumen extraction, the bitumen sands have featured prominently in Canadian and international discourses around climate change (Greaves 2013; Boyd 2019). Critics routinely note the challenge of reconciling continued bitumen extraction, let alone expansion, with Canada’s international commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and contestation over the significance of fossil fuels within the national political economy remains an ongoing axis of debate and deep disagreement within Canada. The maintenance of a dominant identity and national economy built on the continued extraction of fossil fuels is pathological because of Canada’s acute vulnerability to climate change and the economic risk of a carbonintensive extractive industry. First, Canada is deeply affected by climate change. Its massive land area; diversity of climate regions and ecosystems; vulnerable infrastructure; and population centers that range from highly concentrated urban areas to small, isolated communities pose a range of challenges. As the federal government’s most recent climate assessment outlines, the most significant current and predicted impacts include: ocean acidification along all three coasts; increased but highly variable seasonal precipitation; reduced freshwater access; loss of Arctic sea ice; coastal flooding; and more extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, drought, extreme snow and rainfall events, and wildfires (Bush and Lemmen 2019). Due to the susceptibility of high latitude regions to warming, Canada has already warmed by approximately twice the global average. In recent years, severe damage has been inflicted on many of Canada’s largest cities by extreme weather events linked to climate change, as well as smaller communities across the country, and there is a growing attention within Canadian public discourse over not just contentious political debates over climate change policy, but also the effects of climate change as a lived reality. Canada’s economy is also specifically vulnerable to climate change in multiple ways. First, there are considerable economic and financial costs associated with climate-related extreme weather. In 2018, $1.9 billion in

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insurance claims were filed due to severe weather events, making it the fourth most expensive year on record and representing a nearly fivefold increase in average catastrophic loss insurance payouts from 1983–2008 (Lewis 2019). Notably, 2018 insurance claims were not driven by a single event, as in the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, 2013 Alberta floods, or 1998 Quebec and Ontario ice storm. Instead, multiple smaller events across the country accumulated into a substantial annual total (Insurance Bureau of Canada 2019). The most expensive Canadian weather event was the Fort McMurray wildfire, which caused nearly $10 billion in damage, drove more than 88,000 people from their homes, and forced the closure of approximately one million barrels per day in bitumen production, equivalent to 25% of all Canadian oil production, at an estimated economic loss of around $70 million per day. Oil and gas is not unique in this respect; other sectors of the economy are also susceptible to climate-related losses, such as agriculture, fisheries, and forestry. In addition to the direct threats posed by climate change, another risk must be considered: namely, Canada’s economic exposure to the prospect that the international community actually succeeds in its stated goal of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions and phasing out fossil fuel use by the middle of this century. Central banks in both Canada and the United Kingdom warned in 2019 about the economic and financial risks of decarbonizing the global economy, and observed how limited current econometric modelling and analysis is. As such, data is speculative, though one report estimated that should global warming be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius—the putative though unlikely goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement—it would result in $120 billion in stranded oil and gas assets in Canada alone (McCarthy 2019), the large majority of these in Alberta. The unequal distribution of these effects across Canada—reflecting the varied reliance of different provinces on fossil fuel extraction—also makes a political response exceptionally challenging. Maintaining the status quo, however, will only deepen the local and global crises of human-caused environmental change that are demonstrably harmful to Canada’s own interests.

Conclusion What does all this mean for teaching and learning in International Relations? To start, the concurrent rise of multiple serious global crises— even before the traumatic global lockdown caused by the COVID-19

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pandemic in early 2020—should contextualize the anxieties being experienced by young people, including, of course, many post-secondary students. The ‘crisis of mental health’ across university and college campuses, including Australia and Canada, has attracted considerable attention, as educators, practitioners, and policymakers have struggled to respond adequately to the surge of students experiencing mental health difficulties (“Today’s Anguished Students” 2015; Loissel 2019). In Australia, the top three personal concerns among youth aged 1519 are coping with stress, school problems, and mental health, and the most important issues in Australia identified by this cohort are, respectively, mental health, the environment, and equity and discrimination. Conversely, more than 52% “felt they have a say none of the time in public affairs” (Carlisle et al. 2019, pp. 4–5). In another study, 64% of those aged 15–29 “do not believe government cares about their wants or needs” (Sharma 2017, p. 81), reflecting a younger generation whose disconnection from mainstream politics and democratic decisionmaking has serious implications for Australia’s future governance (Martin 2012). Studies also highlight generational dynamics relevant to the white Australian identity; for instance, younger Australians are far more likely to support constitutional reform to include Indigenous peoples than older people (Reconciliation Australia 2018, p. 97), while “older persons show greater intolerance […] Tolerance progressively increases […] into the two younger age categories” (Dunn et al. 2004, p. 415). Even among younger Australians, however, anti-Indigenous racism remains common (TNS 2014), underscoring the prevalence of such attitudes within the national consciousness. In Canada, young people are also experiencing significant anxiety and mental health concerns; are deeply concerned about climate change, and more opposed to new bitumen pipelines than the general public; and are ambivalent about government. Young Canadians rank the rising cost of living and housing, climate change, and mental health as their top three concerns, and majorities or strong pluralities believe that government has done a poor job addressing these (Coletto and Kishchuk 2019, p. 12). Their views on climate change are particularly strong relative to older cohorts: 87% of those aged 15-30 see climate change as a serious, very serious, or extremely serious issue (Coletto and Kishchuk 2019, p. 12), while Canadians older than 35 are more than twice as likely as those aged 18–34 to believe that “climate change is a theory that has not yet been proven” (Angus Reid 2018). Canadians younger than 30 are

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also less supportive (32–46%) and more opposed (27–20%) than older Canadians to constructing new oil pipelines, express a stronger preference for demand for oil to decline, and more strongly support economic transformation to address climate change, including the virtual elimination of fossil fuel use. Concerns over climate change are a clear source of anxiety for younger Canadians: 32% of those 18–29 “think about [climate change] often and [are] getting really anxious about it”, 30–50% more than older cohorts; 61% say they’ve “grown more worried about climate change and it is changing [their] view of oil”; and 50% unambiguously characterize climate change as an emergency (Anderson and Coletto 2017; Coletto 2019). With 68% of young Canadians agreeing that the climate emergency requires Canada to adopt a “wartime-scale response”, and 87% that “climate change represents a major threat to the future of our children and grandchildren,” little surprise that 55% also say that Canada’s political system responds “not well” to their needs and views, or that 66% believe government is doing too little to combat climate change (Coletto 2019; Coletto and Kishchuk 2019, p. 14). Collectively, these issues draw our attention to the International Relations (IR) classroom as a site where security, state practices, national identity, anxious young people, and possibilities for social transformation intersect. As educators, we should be sensitive to the anxieties our students are experiencing, and incorporate a praxis of support and empathy into our teaching. This is not just good pedagogy, it is particularly important within expressly political disciplines like IR, where courses are prone to “depressing” topics that produce higher rates of anxiety, fatigue, and burnout among our students (Zartner 2019). Higher information and more politically engaged students are likely more susceptible to anxiety over these issues, making political science and International Relations classrooms more prone to being populated by anxious students. And, to reiterate: this was the case before the unprecedented social and economic disruptions and hardship wrought by COVID-19. As serious as youth mental health issues already were, they will doubtless worsen as the psycho-social effects of the pandemic and lockdown unfold over the coming months, years, and beyond. As educators, we must also recognize the role our teaching plays in (re)producing or critiquing dominant accounts of national identity, politics, and security for our students. Instructors exercise power and authority in the classroom in ways that influence student opinions and shape their perspectives on the social world (Emmanuel and Delaney

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2014). How we design and implement courses, assign readings and other learning materials, approach discussion and interactive learning, and foster understanding of complex social issues—including, inter alia, racism, settler colonialism, and climate change—can influence our students’ perspectives on these issues and far beyond: “Educational knowledge, in this sense, not only provides knowledge that children, youth, and adult students may acquire or discard; it also positions them as particular kinds of subjects” (Spencer et al. 2012, p. 2). Not every instructor is critical or radically oriented in their politics, and there is no objectively ‘right’ way to teach or understand many complex political issues, but every instructor has an ethical obligation to interrogate whether what and how they are teaching reinforces unjust or harmful practices and institutions. Finally, we should acknowledge that we, as International Relations teachers and scholars, are not immune to the anxieties associated with our subject matter, either. To the contrary, “burnout can especially affect us as teachers. Repeated exposure to difficult material and attempts to provide an empathetic environment in the classroom for the students as they work through such material, can have a significantly negative effect [on us]” (Zartner 2019, p. 349). As employees of post-secondary education institutions often founded on white supremacist ideals, and members of a profession that still embraces consumptive and high-carbon modes of academic production and professional development, we are often deeply aware of, affected by, and implicated in structural injustices such as racism and white supremacy, and existential challenges such as climate change. But separate from our work contexts, educators are also citizens, and relate to challenging social issues in personal as well as professional terms. These affect not just our work but our private interests, social relationships, future plans, and mental health. In this regard, IR teachers are also differently situated with respect to these issues at least in part on the basis of their own age. Many junior faculty and contract-based instructors are Millennials, meaning that we are also experiencing the dramatic increase in anxiety, depression, and poor mental health discussed here. The parameters of ‘young people’ thus includes most students and many post-secondary instructors. The anxieties associated with ontological-security seeking, pathological national identities and practices, and frustration with the inadequate pace of social change link together students and teachers in an ongoing exercise of balancing political engagement with preservation of mental health. As we seek to educate students about, for instance, how ontological-security

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seeking may undermine our physical security, we must attend to our own wellbeing as well as theirs, and work to build greater solidarity across educational hierarchies to better address the common challenges that we experience.

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Elias, A. (2015). Measuring the economic consequences of racial discrimination in Australia. PhD Thesis. Deakin University. http://dro.deakin.edu.au/view/ DU:30079135. Emmanuel, G., & Delaney, H. (2014). Professors’ influence on students’ beliefs, values, and attitudes in the classroom. Journal of College and Character, 15(4), 245–258. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Greaves, W. (2013). Risky ruptures: Integral accidents and in/security in Canada’s bitumen sands. Journal of Canadian Studies, 47 (3), 169–199. Hanrahan, M. (2017). Water (in)security in Canada: National identity and the exclusion of Indigenous Peoples. British Journal of Canadian Studies, 30(1), 69–89. Holden, M., & Rolfe, R. (2012). State of the west: Energy 2012—Western Canadian energy trends. Canada West Foundation. Insurance Bureau of Canada. (2019, January 4). Severe weather causes $1.9 billion in insured damage in 2018. https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/severeweather-causes-1-9-billion-in-insured-damage-in-2018-865701340.html. Lamensch, M. (2019, May 1). Australia’s slow progress on Indigenous rights. OpenCanada.org. https://www.opencanada.org/features/australias-slow-pro gress-on-indigenous-rights/. Lewis, J. (2019, January 18). Climate-fuelled flooding is Canada’s costliest and fastest-growing extreme-weather challenge, report says. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-climate-fuelled-flo oding-is-canadas-costliest-and-fastest-growing/. Loissel, E. (2019). Mental health in academia. ELifeSciences. https://elifescie nces.org/collections/ad8125f3/mental-health-in-academia. Maaka, R., & Fleras, A. (2005). The politics of indigeneity: Challenging the state in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. Dunedin: University of Otago Press. Martin, A. (2012). Political participation among the young in Australia: Testing Dalton’s good citizen thesis. Australian Journal of Political Science, 47 (2), 211–226. McCarthy, S. (2019, January 16). Canadian oil reserves at risk from policies that combat global warming, report warns. The Globe and Mail. https://www. theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadian-oil-reserves-at-risk-from-pol icies-to-combat-global-warming/. Mitzen, J. (2006). Ontological security in world politics: State identity and the security dilemma. European Journal of International Relations, 12(3), 341– 370. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The white possessive: Power, property, and Indigenous sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murphy, K. (2019, July 11). Essential poll: Majority of Australians want Indigenous recognition and voice to Parliament. The Guardian. https://

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CHAPTER 13

Conclusion: Pandemic Pedagogy Heather A. Smith and David J. Hornsby

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (hooks 1994, p. 12)

Introduction Let’s talk about pandemic pedagogy. Pandemic pedagogy, speaks to the approaches we employ in our learning environments to teach and foster learning in a context of a serious health crisis and the spread of a new disease. Health crises are nothing new. But this moment feels and is different. The response has been unprecedented and global, resulting in the cessation of normal social, political and economic activity in the name of preventing the spread of COVID-19. As we all engage in

H. A. Smith (B) University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada e-mail: [email protected] D. J. Hornsby Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. A. Smith et al. (eds.), Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption, Political Pedagogies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_13

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social distancing, the closure of our campuses, and the difficult debates regarding how to open back up, we must ask, what does the present pandemic mean for teaching and learning? For a discipline that so regularly prides itself on unpacking the nuanced intersections between power and politics, it is time to reflect on the relationship that exists between power, pedagogy and politics. We must be mindful of the values we are instilling through our teaching. As a community, let’s come out of this pandemic with more collaboration and a pandemic pedagogy that is inclusive, innovative, and based on care.

Power in Our Pedagogy International relations theorist Robert Cox (1986, p. 207) argues “theory is always for someone and for some purpose”. Adapting Cox’s maxim, central to our argument is the belief that “teaching is always for someone and for some purpose” (Smith 2017, p. 211). Teaching is not neutral. The classroom and curricula are sites of power and politics. We create the discipline for our students through our course outlines. Our course outlines can be sites of inclusion or marginalization. A well crafted lecture can be engaging but we fundamentally believe that traditional authoritarian forms of teaching marginalize student voices and undermine student learning. “Passive curricula help prepare students for life in undemocratic institutions” (Shor 1992, p. 19). Reflecting on the relationship between power, pedagogy and politics is always relevant but now, in the midst of a pandemic, reflection is essential. As bell hooks asks: “Who speaks? Who listens? And why? (hooks 1994, p. 40). Pandemic pedagogy is not only about teaching in extraordinary times, but also about developing an understanding of who we are, and how we teach International Relations. The values that inform how we approach face-to-face teaching, also inform our strategies as we pivot to online learning. If we prefer lecture-dominated classes face to face, there is a strong likelihood that we will opt for lecture capture technology or synchronous conference room type classes often personified through such platforms as Zoom. These reinforce a transfer of information that is passive and predicated on the idea that students do not have much to offer. Such an approach is often imbued with a politics of hierarchy that treats students as empty vessels incapable of understanding or relating to the material at hand.

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If we privilege active learning where students are more self-directed with multiple sites of engagement, we will seek to translate that into an online space as we aim to create discussion groups, adopt many formative assessment techniques and seek to mix synchronous and asynchronous approaches. This model encourages students to develop key skills associated with good citizenship and democracy: cross cultural understanding, problem solving, critical thinking, team work, to name a few. This type of approach is also rooted in a politics of equity and inclusion, of a community where the multitude of experiences in a learning environment are treated as opportunities to develop understanding, awareness and appreciation of difference. A more active online environment, inherently models democratic norms. A pandemic pedagogy is also about how we frame teaching and learning in our public discourses. The lament for the ‘normal’ or ‘return to normal’ obfuscates and denies the inequities of ‘normal’. Normal in this context generally infers the return to the way things ‘were’. It’s vital to remember however, that ‘normal’ also includes course outlines that have not changed in years, were lacking in diversity, teaching practices that marginalized the student voice, university practices of massification, precarity in employment for too many of our colleagues. Do we really want to return to that normal? We are not naive. We are well aware of the commentaries (Paxson 2020) being actively shared (and pondered) about the economic implications of a fall, and maybe winter, semester online. We understand there are dire implications for universities, faculty, staff, families, and students if we go online. We must, however, see our students as whole (hooks 1994, p. 15). We must not make our students, and ourselves, guinea pigs in the name of ‘normal’, and ‘budgets’.

Suggestions for Moving Forward as a Community Given so much uncertainty, proposals for moving forward are difficult. However, we believe that as a community we can come together to support our role as teachers, not just researchers. Teaching is often a solitary endeavour and now is the time to change that. Now is the time to collaborate and to engage in practices that support our students’ learning. To be clear, we love being in the classroom. We are not suggesting a long term dismantling of face to face teaching, but rather our suggestions are designed to support our students, and each other, as we move through

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this pandemic. Moreover, many of the suggestions can also transform our teaching and can be applied to face to face classes in the future. First, we need to be mindful of the values that inform our course outline and our assessments. Thinking about our course material—do we move beyond the traditional canon in terms of reading material or resources? Is our content diverse? When designing our assessments, consider the liberal use of formative assessments. Formative assessment can help us understand the effectiveness of our teaching and provide insights into student learning. And do you really need a three-hour surveilled final exam? What does that form of assessment say about trust in the classroom? Second, as Deming (2020) rightly points out, factors that provide students with individual attention such as small group tutorials, feedback and mentoring are necessary factors in promoting learning and student success. The challenge, however, is that these things are often neglected or diminished in online spaces. Whilst the prospect of the more bespoke elements of teaching may be daunting ignoring them comes with significant consequences for student learning. There is no one mode to effect tutoring, individualized feedback or mentoring, they are all integral to ensuring that our students continue to feel as part of a learning community and welcome in the process of learning. Third, as we plan our courses, regardless of whether they are face to face, or some variation of online, we should access, create and share open educational resources (OER) in our area of expertise. There is substantial data that shows the use of OER reduces course costs for students (See Dimeo 2017). OER can also help colleagues who struggle to develop content or who wish to integrate new ideas or methods into their courses. We also know that by using alternatives or different resources can help with encouraging student engagement. There are already a host of resources online and daily we receive announcements, tweets, emails regarding openly available resources. For example, the website, E-International Relations (2020) is a great example of a source for OER for International Relations. APSAeducate (2020) has a website dedicated to online education and it is updated regularly. The APSAeducate site also includes a “Faculty Virtual Guest Speaker Exchange” which may be of value to some and could be used in both synchronous and asynchronous modes—although be mindful of bandwidth and accessibility. The International Studies Association (2020) has resources that are available to non-members. Some sites and academic

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organizations have resources only available to members and that can be explained by the fact that the loss of income from conferences puts these organizations in peril. Our sense is, however, that many faculty will simply find their resources elsewhere rather than pay for them—but then we are not on the inside of these organizations and do not know this to be the case. Fourth, the opportunity to move out of the neoliberal model of competition between universities and to foster cooperation and collaboration is ripe. Many of us do collaborative research and are involved in research networks - so why not teaching networks? We are already witnessing the creation of networks of scholars who could guest lecture or drop into discussions in your online class (depending on how you set up the class). Networks are sharing course outlines and OER. These resources would be great in any class whether it is face to face or online and whether or not it is the middle of a pandemic. Now is the time for sharing not siloing. Fifth, we must include students in our deliberations and planning. There is a vast body of literature on students as partners and it outlines how we can work with students in curriculum design, research, pedagogy partnerships, among other areas (See for example Healy et al. 2014). The inclusion of the student voice throughout these processes is essential and models more democratic and inclusive processes. Further, it also acknowledges that our students live and breathe the politics that we espouse. Their views and experiences matter and are relevant. Sixth, all of us need to approach our teaching with an ethic of care. “We need to create pedagogies of care online and allow what we discover in these new spaces to influence what we do at brick-and-mortar institutions” (Stommel 2013, n.p.). We know from studies that students struggle to learn in moments of stress, dislocation, and anxiety (Joels et al. 2006). We need to find ways to adopt pedagogies or assessment practices that acknowledge this reality. Compassion and flexibility in our classroom needs to be a hallmark of pandemic pedagogy. In the words of Cathy Davidson (2020, n.p.): “we need to be human first, professor second. We need to design as humans for humans in a global crisis. We need to design our courses with the awareness of pain, dislocation, uncertainty, and trauma now central to all our lives. It’s a lot to ask. It is the one and only essential as we design our courses for this disrupted fall.”

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Conclusion The way we approach our teaching and learning environment matters to how we move through and come out of this pandemic. As International Relations scholars, we are highly attuned to how power and politics are interconnected and shape our societies. This pandemic also forefronts how power is embedded in our pedagogical choices. As we look to ensure our learning environments continue to be meaningful spaces for students to develop understandings of the polis, we need to remember that our responses to online learning will shape the way our students approach politics going forward. We have offered a number of strategies to help navigate a way that does not reinforce hierarchies between professors and students, breaks down silos between institutions and inculcates a spirit of commonality between colleagues. These are by no means exhaustive, but important starting points as we navigate this world of pandemic pedagogy.

References APSAeducate. (2020). Online instruction during COVID-19. APSAeducate. https://educate.apsanet.org/manage-the-shift-to-online-instruction-dur ing-covid-19. Cox, R. W. (1986). Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond international relations theory. In R. O. Keohane (Ed.) Neorealism and its critics. New York: Columbia University Press. Davidson, C. (2020, May 11). The single most essential requirement in designing a fall online course. Hashtac. https://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/ 2020/05/11/single-most-essential-requirement-designing-fall-online-course. Deming, D. (2020, April 9). Online learning should return to a supporting role. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/business/onlinelearning-virus.html. Dimeo, J. (2017, June 28). Saving students money. Inside Higher Education. https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/ 06/28/report-saving-students-money-oer. E-International Relations. (2020). https://www.e-ir.info/. Healey, M., Flint, A., & Harrington, K. (2014). Engagement through partnership: Students as partners in learning and teaching in higher education. HE Academy. https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/system/files/resources/engage ment_through_partnership.pdf. hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

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International Studies Association. (2020). https://www.isanet.org/ProfessionalResources/Articles/ID/5781/ISA-Community-Resources–helping-us-copein-the-months-ahead. Joels, M., Zhenwei, P., Wiegert, Oitzl, O., Melly, S., & Krugers, H. J. (2006). Learning under stress: How does it work? Trends in Cognitive Science, 10, 152–158. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2006.02.002. Paxson, C. (2020, April 26). College campuses must reopen in the fall. Here’s how we do it. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/26/ opinion/coronavirus-colleges-universities.html. Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education. Chicago University of Chicago Press. Smith, H. (2017). Unlearning: A messy and complex journey with Canadian foreign policy. International Journal, 72, 203–216. https://doi.org/10. 1177/0020702017711702. Stommel, J. (2013, January 7). A user’s guide to forking education. Hybrid Pedagogy. https://hybridpedagogy.org/users-guide-forking-education/.