SF, IR, and Pedagogy

11 April 2012, 0354 EDT

After Charli’s video mashup this feels pretty lame, but I did promise the slides from my talk. Thanks again to all those who responded to the bleg. If it isn’t obvious, I should note that everything I said is influenced by PTJ and his course.

The basic takeaways?

1. Science Fiction (SF) has close ties with social-scientific inquiry and, in general, has lots of political and international-relations content. It is therefore well-suited for these kinds of courses.

2. We need to be less focused on using fiction to teach intro to international realism (bad isms!) and more on choosing works that communicate interesting international-political and political ideas. Teaching The Hunger Games, for example, isn’t about stretching for realism or the state of nature, but exploring ‘organic’ themes about the dynamics of empire, revolution, games and politics, roleplaying and narrative expectations, voyeurism, etc. Good novels or films, like Charles Stross’s Halting State and Iain M. Banks’ Player of Games have a lot to say for themselves. Lots of SF deals with state formation, problems of the “other,” and states of exception… so teach those things.

3. Students are smart and creative; render them collaborators in the course by letting them explore themes that they want to pursue.

4. Make the course lots of work to deter students who think that taking a class like this will be a way to bypass serious intellectual engagement.

Slides below the fold.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

5 Comments

Colin Wight on 11 April 2012 at 06.08 EDT

Somebody help me out here. When did a compilation become a mashup?
- dnexon on 12 April 2012 at 14.02 EDT
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(digital)
  
  The fact that Charli used her own audio and edited to repurpose the images for an entirely new product makes it a mashup. If she’d just run a series of clips and presented them as per their original intention, it wouldn’t have been one.
Vikash Yadav on 11 April 2012 at 13.43 EDT

One question that I would have liked to ask the panelists if I could have attended your panel:

In your experience does offering a course on science fiction and IR attract a particular student demographic, in other words does it limit the diversity of the classroom? I’ve had several colleagues in different disciplines state that teaching courses that incorporate SF themes leads to a much larger proportion of Euro-American (“white”) students in the classroom.
- dnexon on 12 April 2012 at 14.01 EDT
  
  My n is too small. I’d say that the class was more euro-American than some seminars I’ve taught, but less than others.
- Nicholas Lees on 12 April 2012 at 14.36 EDT
  
  Though presumably, even if that were the case, then by pushing other students elsewhere such courses would serve to make other classes at our hypothetical institution *more* diverse. Of course, it would still be problematic if certain relevant sub-sections of our cohort had their hearts set on IR 101 but were put off by all the SF stuff.

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