Orientalism is not my opinion: Decolonial teaching and the problem of credibility in IR courses with a MENA focus

Abstract

Teaching about the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in politics or international studies courses in ‘the West’ is challenging due to the many stereotypes that inform students’ imagination. A common pedagogical purpose is to help students recognise their biases and work through them. This often renders the classroom a controversial place and the teacher suspect of lack of objectivity. The specialised literature points at ‘cognitive dissonance’ as an intervening factor. On occasions, cognitive dissonance leads to harm on teachers’ credibility. This article evaluates the question of credibility in two activities developed in International Relations (IR) undergraduate courses with a MENA focus, where students had to identify the impact of ‘Orientalism’ in the film Argo and in analyses of the ‘Arab Spring’. The article argues that to fully grasp episodes of cognitive dissonance and attending problems of teacher credibility, the disciplinary context in which learners are socialised into needs to be considered – in this case, IR. The article advocates the articulation of a student-centred decolonial teaching pedagogy that renders subjectivity an object of learning and, at the same time, prepares students to understand the potentialities and weaknesses of different IR paradigms.