Teaching Africa, presenting, representing and the importance of who is in the classroom

Abstract

Teaching Africa within international relations (IR) carries a responsibility to engage students with the power relations that dominate Africa's global position and 'western' knowledge of the continent. The key contribution of this article is to highlight the significance of difference and power relations not only when these are manifested in the identities present within the classroom but also just as importantly when they are not. The article argues that positionality and representations profoundly shape engagement with Africa. Who is in the classroom particularly matters when teaching material embedded in ongoing colonial relations. Disrupting students' assumptions, such as their alignment with Western actors who will 'solve' Africa's problems, may therefore involve disempowering them. By doing so, it is possible to potentially establish more productive starting points for learning about Africa within IR.

Toward a Pedagogy for Critical Security Studies: Politics of Migration in the Classroom

“…Another objective is to prompt students to rethink their own subject positions in political, economic, and social relations. This is an essential dimension of critical pedagogy, which postcolonial and/or feminist pedagogy also strongly shares and is highly relevant to the present case (Mohanty 1989and 1990, Routley 2016, DeLaet 2012. The overwhelming majority of students we engaged with were Turkish of uppermiddle and upper class backgrounds.…”

“…CP of CSS is not about promoting one criti-cal approach over another, but about opening students up to analytical, ethical and political alternatives in the politics of security. Deriving from the literature on critical pedagogical practices in postcolonial and/or feminist IR (Mohanty 1989, 1990, Brydon 2004, Danielzik and Bendix 2013, Routley 2016, DeLaet 2012, Parisi et al 2013, the present analysis asks how a scholar of CSS can contribute to the production of a political subjectivity in the classroom that would critically reflect on the politics of security where power interacts with notions and practices of security. As this is an explicitly ethical and political objective, the analysis is derived from the ongoing discussion within the discipline about how IR should be taught in order to challenge the exclusionary, violent, and oppressive relations and structures in world politics, where multiple selves and multiple others interact locally as well as globally.…”

On Peace Capital: The Case of Academic Cultural Capital Inside the United Nations and its Universities

“…There are a number of intentional steps that could be taken -to foster equitable and critical higher education for peace -that transcend the challenges raised here. These include, among other strategies, confronting the colonial and modernist legacies of social, economic and political thought within the class and without (Takayama, Sriprakash and Connell 2017;Routley 2016). In addition, teaching Global Southern perspectives (De Lissovoy 2010; Connell 2007) that complement and/or challenge narratives from the industrialized world, and that especially disrupt "the danger of a single story" in PACS is a desideratum (Adichie 2009, n.p.…”

Empathy: simple and inevitable? Development education and narratives of African poverty

“…Finnegan (2013) explains how teaching American students about the role of the US in the structural causes of African poverty made them feel infuriated and disturbed, yet motivated them to work for social change. Such pedagogy could be adapted to the UK context (for critical commentary on the educational implications of the UK's unique relationship to Africa, see Routley, 2016). Boler and Zembylas (2003: 108) call such teaching a 'pedagogy of discomfort', because recognizing severe forms of injustice, and even one's own potential role in it, may spark disillusionment or anger.…”