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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.
Somebody help me out here. When did a compilation become a mashup?
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.
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.
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.
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.