Webinar: Teaching Students to Critically Examine the World

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney denounced the so-called ‘rule-based world order’ as ‘fiction’ that was covering up the ‘asymmetries,’ no one in the community of IR scholars was surprised. On socials, many shared their dismay that it needed a white, wealthy, Western man to say out loud what they already knew and argued. Yet, it was a powerful demonstration of the tenacity of the ‘fiction’ of the ‘liberal world order.’

In this webinar, Catherine Goetze, senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania and author of the new Sage text World Politics: A Critical Introduction to International Relations, will discuss some of the ‘tricks’ she uses in world politics that can help teachers and students alike to think outside the box and critically examine the world. By teaching students how to see the world using approaches to IR like feminist, queer, and post/decolonial IR or critical IPE and historical sociology, we offer a toolkit of transferable skills around thinking critically and robust, rigorous analysis in a way that’s not dogmatic.

In the classroom, in front of eager students of IR whose knowledge comes from mainstream, Eurocentric analyses, the greatest challenge in teaching critical approaches to IR is having to dismantle these myths, the naturalized Eurocentrism of IR and its many inherent, tacit assumptions about states, order, rationality, reason and progress.

Decentering the West, looking for ‘where the women are’ (to paraphrase Cynthia Enloe) and learning to understand how to see the queerness of the social world – and of IR – is not only a useful exercise in critical thinking. It also helps students navigate an increasingly complex and anxiogenic world, think about alternatives and about their role, options and futures.

The critical skills students learn when deconstructing myths like that of the ‘rule-based order’ also help them to understand other complex social phenomena and to make sense of other politics that might appear nonsensical. Yet, decolonizing, feminizing, queering and decentering the curriculum often also pushes students out of their comfort zones.

The webinar, part of Sage’s Politics Webinar series, is free.