Racialized Hearts and Minds: Emotional Labor and Affective Leadership in the Teaching/Learning of IR

Abstract

International relations (IR) is traditionally taught from a detached standpoint, as the international realm is conceptualized as distinct from normative, emotional, and embodied realities. We challenge this abstraction and focus on emotions to examine the intersection of race and international relations in how we teach and how students learn. Focusing on emotional labor, we maintain that students are taught and learn about the presence and absence of race in the discipline in specific ways. As teachers and affective leaders, we manage student emotions at the intersections of race and international relations, including when to make these feelings visible and how to connect them to racialized narratives. After a brief review of recent critical scholarship on race in the discipline, we present a conversation in which we highlight our own affective leadership, emotional labor, and pedagogical strategies in the international relations classroom, as they pertain to engaging with issues of race and racism.

Resumen: Tradicionalmente, las relaciones internacionales (RI) se enseñan desde un punto de vista separado, ya que el ámbito internacional se conceptualiza como distinto de las realidades normativas, emocionales y materializadas. Desafiamos esta abstracción y nos centramos en las emociones para examinar la convergencia entre la raza y las relaciones internacionales en cómo enseñamos y cómo aprenden los estudiantes. Al centrarnos en el trabajo emocional, afirmamos que a los estudiantes se les enseña y aprenden sobre la presencia y la ausencia de raza en la disciplina de maneras específicas. Como maestros y líderes afectivos, administramos las emociones de los estudiantes en la convergencia entre la raza y las relaciones internacionales, incluido cómo hacer que estos sentimientos sean visibles y cómo conectarlos con narrativas racializadas. Después de una breve revisión de la reciente crítica sobre raza en la disciplina, presentamos una conversación en la que destacamos nuestro propio liderazgo afectivo, trabajo emocional y estrategias pedagógicas en el aula de las RI, ya que se relacionan con la participación en cuestiones de raza y racismo.

Extrait: Les relations internationales (RI) sont traditionnellement enseignées d'un point de vue détaché, le domaine international étant conceptualisé par opposition aux réalités normatives, émotionnelles et incarnées. Nous contestons cette abstraction et nous concentrons sur les émotions pour examiner l'intersection de la race et des relations internationales dans la façon dont nous enseignons et dont les étudiants apprennent. En mettant l'accent sur le travail émotionnel, nous soutenons que les étudiants apprennent et découvrent la présence et l'absence de la race dans la discipline de manières particulières. En tant qu'enseignants et leaders affectifs, nous gérons les émotions des élèves aux intersections entre la race et les relations internationales, notamment quand afficher ces sentiments et comment les relier à des récits racialisés. Après une brève revue de la recherche critique récente sur la race dans la discipline, nous présentons une conversation dans laquelle nous mettons en évidence notre propre leadership affectif, notre travail émotionnel et nos stratégies pédagogiques dans la classe des RI, dans la mesure où ils concernent les questions de race et de racisme.

More than 20 years ago, Doty (1993, 445) demonstrated inductively that, despite clear evidence of the role played by race and racism in shaping international relations (IR), the field had yet to integrate such questions; “race was not sustained and never did cut to the heart of international relations as an academic discipline.” More recently, Acharya (2014, 648) reminded IR scholars that the field is still not reflective of most societies of the world, and he reflected on how we often remain “complicit in the marginalization of the postcolonial world in developing the discipline.” Proposing a research agenda for “Global IR,” he asked IR scholars to disregard “the Westphalian mindset when it comes to analyzing the past, present, and future of IR and world order” (Acharya 2014, 652). In their own stylistic ways, Doty and Acharya, two prominent IR scholars, criticized international relations’ lack of engagement with questions of race and racism and did so with embodied metaphors relating to the heart and the mind of the field and its scholars. In this paper, we contribute to this ongoing call to take race into serious consideration as an “analytical category” in the “study and teaching of International Relations” (Chowdhry and Rai 2009, 84). In light of the works of Brennan (2004), Ahmed (2004a), and Hochschild (2003), we focus on the silence of race and racism in the field and shed light on the roles of affective leadership and emotional labor needed to support learning on such topics in the IR classroom.

As international relations is traditionally researched and taught from a detached standpoint, everyday identity markers and processes such as gender, class, and race are either underplayed or absent. Chowdhry and Rai (2009) show that international relations is taught through a series of theoretical and methodological manoeuvres that detaches the concepts, theories, and narratives of international relations from the embodied concerns and realities of daily life. All three of us have struggled with this sense of disciplinary detachment in our teaching. We share a common pedagogical commitment to providing students the necessary tools to engage with and understand the world by connecting events happening “far away” and to “other people” to our students’ everyday lives. Utilizing the classroom as a structure through which students collectively navigate emotional responses to difficult international relations realities, another of our shared pedagogical commitments is to “empathetic unsettlement,” which encourages students to constantly question conventional emotional scripts when dealing with IR issues as they intersect with their own lived experiences (Zembylas 2006, 322). In line with Zembylas (2006, 312), we see teaching as a way to engage with a critical politics of affect, mobilize emotional landscapes in order to produce new ideas and possibilities, combat the exclusionary dynamics of othering, unpack the mechanisms of global power, and foster an ethos of change and engagement.

We demonstrate that the lack of explicit engagement with questions of race and racism in international relations manifests in the classroom through specific emotional codes, finding shape in the ruptures between IR concepts and theories, and everyday experiences. Due to disciplinary blinders and erasures as they pertain to issues of race and racism, international relations as a field requires explicit attention to how students navigate the emotional landscapes emerging in the IR classroom around these topics. Developing a conversation based on our experiences in teaching undergraduate classes in Canada and Northern Ireland, we maintain that students’ engagement with race and racism—as othering—can be overcome by fostering not a detached perspective but an engaged positionality and connection with their own daily experiences. Notions of affective leadership and emotional labor are useful in understanding this context, although they require a pedagogy of proactively maintaining awareness of our own positions and privileges. As teachers, we deploy specific pedagogical techniques that require us to perform emotional labor, which involves supporting students’ emotional responses to a given topic. Our commitment to addressing race and racism in the IR classroom demands additional emotional labor in the form of affective leadership, as it also requires managing student emotions, including when to make these feelings visible and how to express them. As affective leaders, we guide students in these emotional landscapes with vigilance, in a discipline that tends to erase questions of race and racism (Zembylas 2006, 323). After a brief review of how international relations tackles questions of race, we discuss three emotional landscapes students navigate when race is brought up in the IR classroom in order to start a discussion on common strategies that can be adopted.

Engaging with Race in International Relations

Narratives we teach each other about international relations through our practices and memories of the field are generally based on the omission and erasure of race relations in the formation of the discipline. For instance, the change of the name of a key international relations publication in 1922 from the Journal of Race Development to Foreign Affairs has now become a key counternarrative to the perceived color-blindness of international relations’ praxis, theory, and history (Vitalis 2005, 171–173). Race in international relations surfaces every time we inform colleagues, students, and the broader public about what we do and how we do it, especially if we frame it as excluding such a topic. In this section, we review recent IR scholarship on race and racism with an emphasis on the intersections of teaching about race and the IR classroom. This review sheds light on the various manoeuvres that reproduce the exclusion of race and racism in international relations and help present the different struggles of and techniques adopted by IR teachers in addressing these silences. While there have been more conversations recently in the discipline about race, there has been little conceptualization of the role of educators in creating the emotional landscapes that allow their students to engage with discussions of race and racism.

Race and the Field

Given the increase in “arbitrary visa regimes, immigration controls, and liberal modes of transnational incarcerations” throughout foreign affairs, IR scholarship has focused more on questions of race, racism, and racial relations (Anievas, Manchanda, and Shilliam 2015, 10). The emphasis on race has mostly been on explaining why, in contrast to other social sciences, these discussions and insights are still marginal and marginalized. If comparative politics has spent time focusing on how “states make race,” the absence of these insights in international relations is a potent marker of disciplinary blindness (Vickers and Isaac 2012). The critical contributions reviewed here highlight how a specific historical contextualization of the field feeds the whitewashing of the IR narrative, while also identifying techniques that impede disciplinary questions about race and racism.

The context of the discipline, in terms of historical landmarks, key thinkers, important events, and underlying worldviews, reflects choices that erase the significance of race in IR theory and praxis. Vitalis (2000, 332) has convincingly noted that the field is “an institution of racism” in which the mere recognition of a racist history is not only sidelined but actively erased. For instance, he discusses the ways in which, during a key time in the field's short history, questions of race and racism were put aside: “[u]ntil recently, race was a central category of international relations for statesmen, intellectuals, and the white working classes of the colonial powers and the industrializing colonial-settler states” (Vitalis 2000, 335; emphasis in original). Vitalis’s naming of white supremacy in international relations is an analytical, practical, and emotional reminder of discomfort that continues to pervade the field's disciplinary practices.

Historical hierarchies of race and supremacy frame the character and focus of IR study. With “the a priori right of the superior race to access society's rights and privileges and to dominate the inferior to maximize the racists’ values and interests,” the field of international relations is built on a practice of influential states utilizing racism as national ideologies and foreign policy building blocks (Le Melle 2009, 78). Racialized hierarchies have shaped the history of politics under the purview of international relations. This includes the League of Nations’ mandate system, Arthur de Gobineau coining the myth of Aryan supremacy as a foreign policy pillar of the Third Reich, and arbitrary post–World War Two immigration, foreign aid, and economic policies. Through all of these, the actual practice of international relations and its academic study are deeply implicated in colonial practices (Le Melle 2009, 79–81). In international relations, so the story goes, with the end of colonialism came the end of race and racism in the sphere of the international.

For Thompson (2015, 45), failure to acknowledge this history of international relations reflects the field's selective amnesia, as continuing to be “largely perceived as color-blind, though [it is] more likely color-coded.” One key component of this collective amnesia is the erasure from the field's canon of key thinkers such as Du Bois and his concerns with the “global color line,” which reveal “those global practices of colonial cartography based as they were on white supremacist ideals” (as quoted in Anievas et al. 2015, 10). Selective amnesia serves an affective purpose when it allows whiteness to have the “force of a charismatic religion” and institutionally adopt practices of settler colonialism in the way it displaces discussions of race while maintaining the innocence and rational abstraction of the discipline (Lake and Reynolds 2008, 2). It also provides affective respite from addressing “white supremacy as a global norm” and avoids the colonial overtones of discursive instruments of the post-1945 world order, global governance, and humanitarian intervention as norms of international relations (Vitalis 2000, 332).

Some IR scholars emphasize the implicit racism embedded in IR paradigms such as realism and liberalism. The privileging of the system of states, and of Eurocentric understandings of rational self-interest that are at the core of mainstream theory, starts from an ontological standpoint that “assumes for whites a higher order of being than for nonwhites” (Henderson 2015, 17). The justification for paradigms devoid of discussions of race, racism, and white supremacy is based on a series of techniques and “ontological and epistemological manoeuvres” (Georgis and Lugosi 2014, 71) through which concepts such as state sovereignty and nation-state “structure the emergence of ‘common sense’ regarding the boundaries of IR” in which questions of race are met with lack of interest (Chowdhry and Rai 2009, 85). Here, race is understood as an individual or domestic societal question, without impact or relevance at the level of the international, and as such is outside the realm of the discipline (Doty 1993, 448).

Explicitly addressing race and racism in the field requires a strong commitment to criticizing the various depictions of international relations as an objective, scientific, and neutral exercise, whether it is justified ontologically, epistemologically, or methodologically. Despite ongoing discussions of the state of the discipline through its Great Debates, little has been done to disrupt the exclusion of race from international relations. Agathangelou and Killian (2016) remind us how racism functions through this expansion by hiding the whiteness of IR theories and normalizing their discordance with the places and students where international relations is learned. Although our focus here is on the affective atmospheres and emotional labor relating to addressing race and racism in the IR classroom, it is important to note that such a pedagogical commitment is grounded in a recognition of the limitations of conceptualizing international relations as an objective inquiry. As IR practitioners and teachers, we have an important role in opening up such disciplinary blinders, especially when dealing with race in classroom discussions, even if this will bring specific challenges.

Race and the Classroom

The absences and erasures of the field's racialized heritage are the starkest in the contemporary IR classroom. Ironically, international relations is framed as the study of the global and the international, and yet it faces greater challenges as the location of the classroom and its students disperse across the globe. International relations scholars have expressed specific challenges in teaching race to IR students (Anievas et al. 2015, 10). The uneasiness of these discussions is magnified by a lack of resources, either in the form of textbooks, canonical texts, or even concepts that are a starting point for bringing race back into international relations (Mittelman 2009, 99–100). The recent Handbook on Teaching and Learning in Political Science and International Relations has remarkably little to say about teaching and dealing with the issues of race in the classroom (Ishiyama, Miller, and Simon 2015).

Nonetheless, some scholars have shared their own insights on zeroing in on race. For example, Doty (1993, 457) reveals a genealogical method of “sites where racial differences have to be constructed” in order to help understand that “race does not just cross boundaries but becomes a site where boundaries are produced.” Mittelman (2009, 99) ensures that the “transnational dimensions of race” are not marginalized to conceptual tools such as state sovereignty, which makes it hard to have discussions on race at the international level. And these techniques have inspired many IR scholars to open up the discussion about race and racism in the IR classroom. One revealing narrative is Chin's (2009, 93) experience in navigating student questions within a discipline known to be “deafeningly silent on race.” She notices that discussions of race are an ongoing practice, dealt with “either by associating race exclusively with the past and/or insisting on its irrelevance in the present, [and thus] we run the risk of perpetuating an entrenched belief that invokes race while obscuring it at the same time” (Chin 2009, 93). In her view, discussions of foreign aid and the “schema of a linear developmental strategy” are especially revealing, as they hint at persisting colonial undertones. Chin (2009, 93–95) further argues that claims of international relations as a raceless or color-blind discipline are neoliberal devices erasing the significance of racialized histories and power relations in contextualizing the political and economic weight of specific individual states.

Race is exemplary in structuring ignorance as a mode of political hegemony through processes such as memory, institution building, and forgetting (Mills 2007, 29). Whiteness structures the social relationships of racism, even as it risks reifying the concept of whiteness and rendering nonwhite as exceptional. Routley (2016) discusses these representational challenges in teaching about Africa in the IR classroom. Nonclassroom learning about Africa often becomes an impediment to teaching international relations because “pedagogic strategies cannot be fully separated from the question of who the students are and who the teacher is,” as context and relationality are key in understanding how race plays a role in learning (Routley 2016, 482). Routley (2016, 483) outlines how nonwhite students face the double bind of being the “authentic voice for all Africans” even as their accounts are suspect because of their subjective voices and their lack of Western objectivity, rationality, and agency. This observation is in line with what Harlow (2003, 348–350) notes about the difficulties of teaching about race as a woman and the additional emotional demands on professors of racialized and gendered minorities. The challenge found here is defined by how the whiteness of the monocultural classroom privileges the expectation that expertise should be delivered by white male voices. Resisting the homogenization of representation in the classroom, in texts, in class discussions, and in key examples is addressed through foregrounding race and any disruption of whiteness as the standard. Such techniques show how the IR classroom is shaped by race, making its exclusion ever more disturbing.

These insights echo the approaches developed by Stienstra (2000) and others in teaching gender in the IR classroom. In her view, a gendered IR learning is possible if educators involve students’ everyday life perspectives and sacrifice their “truth-holder” position to engage with various interpretations of examined social processes (Stienstra 2000, 240–243). However, Stienstra argues that such an approach involves a lot of work outside of the established canon, textbooks, and curriculum and can also trigger students’ resistance to a different type of IR learning. In line with this warning, Theodore (2008) highlights how teaching race in international relations can spark negative feelings. She argues (2008, 455) that

keeping race at the margins of IR teaching and research contributes to students’ perceptions of race as irrelevant to the discipline and has led students to question the professionalism of professors who include race, racism, and the like in classroom readings and discussions.

Here, the disciplinary limitations of race and racism are directly linked to the emotional reactions of students when confronted with these issues as inherent IR topics. By not addressing them, we may be complicit in perpetuating a certain blindness to power and a general bias toward the status quo; rather than fostering a critical approach to learning, serious questioning is exempted from the IR classroom as the current matrix of power relations is reproduced and taken as given. However, addressing these relations directly means additional emotional work on the part of professors toward a student body not equipped with this idea in the form of affective leadership. Emotional management becomes key in the face of negative student feelings. Any pedagogy deployed in the IR classroom should address issues of race and racism explicitly, as such a move seeks to disrupt the norms of the field, to challenge and question the status quo, and to push students to deal with a connection they may not be prepared to acknowledge.

Race and Emotional Management

Although international relations’ canon is built on theories and histories of nationalistic clashes and anarchy, its affective impact on students is rarely considered an important aspect of the IR classroom, even if, as teachers, we have all experienced collective cynicism, gloom, and hopelessness when addressing key issues like environmental governance and international development from an IR perspective (Zembylas 2006, 306). For scholars such as Ahmed (2004a, 119), emotions are better understood in their circulation between individuals and within communities as a form of capital: “while emotions do not positively reside in a subject or figure, they still work to bind subjects together.” In this section, we discuss the ways in which emotional labor and affective leadership are useful tools to understand how emotions are managed in specific ways in the teaching and learning in the IR classroom.

The IR classroom is a specific locale where students’ emotional states and responses contribute to an affective atmosphere in which the teacher has a role of affective leadership, especially for issues less discussed in the canon, such as race and racism (Zembylas 2006, 311). As educators, IR teachers deal with the affective atmosphere that emerges when discussing specific topics. This atmosphere can be understood as “the shared grounds from which subjective states and their attendant feelings and emotions emerge” (Anderson 2009, 78). Put differently, teachers and students share more than disciplinary content, as they necessarily engage in affective atmospheres that shape the feelings of everyone involved in class discussions. In this atmosphere, teachers—and often students too—are required to offer affective leadership, as they provide some answers, codes, and ways for others to manage their emotional responses in specific social and political contexts. Whereas the affective atmosphere refers to a circulation of emotions in a specific context, affective leadership builds on and intensifies the emotional bonds circulating in an affective atmosphere, helping the collective to gain some cohesiveness and allowing those bonds to carry the group foreword (Brennan 2004, 58).

Affective leadership is a key form of emotional labor performed by teachers, as the management of student emotions, when dealing with issues and topics specific to one's discipline, is part of the work assigned to the teacher (Harlow 2003, 349). Hochschild (2003, 7) describes emotional labor as “induc[ing] or suppress[ing] feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others.” As emotional laborers and teachers, we present emotionally challenging ideas and materials to our students, encourage discussions on how students feel about international relations topics, question their common sense about the international, and help them grasp how various theories or practitioners acknowledge emotions in their responses on topics as wide-ranging as conflicts, humanitarian aid, and environmental crises. In our case, this emotional labor is made more complex by our commitment to student-led teaching, participatory learning, and/or flipping the classroom, which increases the possibility of negative student emotions. As teachers who value these approaches as important to our pedagogical goals, the emotional labor we perform goes beyond the standard expectations of the lectern and the conventions of classroom teaching; hence making any emphasis on active student participation in learning in an unpredictable setting in which unanticipated discussions and reactions may lead to negative emotional experiences.

All three of us have performed affective leadership as a key form of our emotional labor when it comes to discussing marginalized topics in the IR classroom, such as gender and race. As affective leaders, we utilize a common teaching style that helps shape the affective atmosphere in the classroom. This includes highlighting whiteness and race as a problematic or analytical perspective, in order to render the social hierarchies of the classroom present (Garner 2007, 3). For instance, each of us has utilized popular culture to help render the problems of dealing with whiteness and race emotionally accessible in the classroom. This includes YouTube videos, popular movies, or social media posts that can both confront and comfort students in processing difficult emotional discussions through the familiarity and normalcy of these media. The proliferation of nontraditional texts in the IR classroom is a response to students’ media literacy and to the desire to overcome the inherent tension of authority in emotional management and the individualized need to reach students in more subjective and personal ways (Lobasz and Valeriano 2015, 400). Moreover, our use of jokes, comics, and funny clips to deal with the difficult issues is a way to lighten the otherwise burdensome emotional dynamics of forgetting about race in global politics. As Zupancic (2008, 136) argues, the temporality of a joke provides immediate pleasure but can also be an ongoing reference point in its remembrance and retelling, a way to ground the affective environment of the classroom class in an emotional state that allows students to feel comfortable. Encouraging the use of nontraditional texts, combined with an accessible and familiar affective atmosphere, also allows for IR discussions on race and racism to take place in various ways and from various angles.

We would be remiss not to mention our own positionalities and their role in shaping our experiences as both emotional workers and affective leaders on questions of race and racism in the IR classroom. Whereas Jean Michel Montsion is a queer white male who speaks English as his second language, Dan Bousfield is a straight white male and Heather L. Johnson is a straight white woman, and both speak English as their first language. As teachers who shed light on the role of race, we struggle to deal with what Ahmed (2004b) has described as the nonperformativity of whiteness, or the way in which race as a social hierarchy takes whiteness as a given. Foregrounding race as social privilege can be utilized to critique the standards and expectations associated with norms of the classroom but cannot escape intersectionality (Harlow 2003). Race—like class, gender, and sexuality—necessarily informs any teaching of IR material, especially in the expectations of emotional labor and questions faced about one's expertise and objectivity. As teachers who engage explicitly with our positional whiteness, an ongoing struggle is to incorporate intersectional voices in our teaching without claiming representational authority for them. Foregrounding whiteness is to retain the inescapable role of racial hierarchies in our practices and to recognize an inherent ignorance in our capacity to represent others’ experience of the world.

Our positionalities also differ in some ways. Montsion's sexual identity and linguistic background require him to adapt his performance in the IR classroom because students have explicitly cited his “eccentricities” to discredit his expertise and disengage with critical material that is part of the course requirements. As a straight white male, Bousfield utilizes his privileged position to foreground the absence of whiteness as a focus of critical study and the ignorance that pervades the white settler classroom and his capacity to teach on intersectional issues. In valuing nonacademic voices and ideas, he tries to devalue his positional authority and manage the anxieties that come from the admission of “ignorant” teaching. As a woman, Johnson navigates gendered expectations where emotions are both more readily accepted as a topic but with the concomitant effect of making the class as a whole “less serious.” Her experience as a foreigner in Northern Ireland enables her to engage with racialized topics, as her whiteness allows her to be perceived as not personally embedded in local matters. She utilizes this privilege to move between different subject positions and demonstrate how racialized hierarchies continue to define identities in the classroom.

Decoding Emotional Landscapes in the IR Classroom

Without any intentions of being representative of the experiences of our colleagues, here we discuss some of our experiences in teaching specific components of the IR curriculum as they relate to race and racism. We share a common commitment to allowing students to struggle with, rather than solve, problems relating to race in an environment that fosters accessibility and familiarity through popular media examples as well as by encouraging the use of emotions to connect students’ personal experiences to the experiences of others. First, Montsion presents the ways students navigate the shock of associating international crimes with the country in which they are studying. His story speaks to the importance of disidentification as a strategy to unsettle common senses found in course materials and of creating an affective atmosphere in which collective surprise is mobilized to stimulate creative and critical thinking. Second, Bousfield discusses the absence of settler colonialism and the role of whiteness in framing student expectations of the potentialities of IR theories and their emotional responses when realizing international relations’ limitations. His experience foregrounds the need to encourage affective strategies that incorporate the teacher alongside the student in ways that expose the implicit biases in the classroom. Johnson similarly reflects on classroom dynamics and the construction of race as an experience of the other in a postconflict context where the legacy of difference remains palpable. She works with students to navigate the affective registers of complex identities in order to highlight the manifestations of power in the everyday lives and to connect their daily experiences to broader, global discussions.

Case One: Shock, Surprise, and International Crimes at Home

When I (Montsion) took over an introductory class on issues and theories in international studies in my department, my goal was to make sure the hundred or so students—mostly English-speaking white females straight out of high school—understand how people and communities are directly affected by and can also affect international structures and processes. As someone who has grown up through the white settler experience, I am committed to sharing with my students the realization and awareness that comes with this privilege and the dominant framings of settler colonial sensibilities in Canada. For instance, I learned that when teaching about how states deal with genocide and crimes against humanity, it is crucial but difficult to make the linkages to questions of race and racism in international relations. Students tended to more easily racialize these types of crimes and justice mechanisms when they occur on other continents and to erase the visibility of such crimes and justice battles in Canada. As such, I perform disidentification as a pedagogical strategy to make the link between international processes, students’ everyday lives, and the racialized dimensions of knowledge production in the field, while at the same time navigating through student narratives of shock. Performing disidentification not only helps to unsettle students from what they have read and from their common sense of the field, it also stimulates, through collective surprise, an affective atmosphere favorable to new ways of thinking.

In teaching about international mechanisms to support justice, the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the last 20 years has become a cornerstone of IR teaching and learning, highlighting both the potential for coercive action against leaders who shield their decisions under the guise of state sovereignty and the parameters limiting the International Criminal Court's reach and mandate (Edkins and Zehfuss 2014, 590). While the basic contrast to the International Criminal Court in conceptualizing international justice has conventionally been the International Court of Justice, I focus on the roles and functions of truth and reconciliation commissions (TRCs) throughout the world after such crimes were revealed, emphasizing not only how the international community deals with such crimes but also on how communities are trying to live afterward (Devetak, Burke, and George 2007, 222–37). With their national reach and focus, TRCs are a counterexample framed as outside of a traditional IR focus. However, they present an alternative vision of how and why justice is needed in specific social contexts, with an interest in shedding light on past wrongdoings at a systemic level rather than prosecuting responsible individuals for infractions in the international arena (Daase et al. 2015, 8–9).

By fostering discussions of the difference between corrective and distributive justice, I saw my role as performing “interpretive labor” with a student body not aware of the fuzziness of justice categories and their intersections with international affairs and state borders (Balfour 2011, 411). Such exercises take shape in my classroom through the presentation of short clips contrasting Laurent Gbagbo's trial at the International Criminal Court and Desmond Tutu's role during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the discussion that follows, students usually start by identifying some visual and procedural differences, including the robes of ICC prosecutors and judges and the robes worn by Tutu and other dignitaries at the TRC hearing. The discussion then moves to questions of which type of justice is better, hence building on a false choice that students experience in the IR classroom when they try to make sense of complex social processes in an engaged pedagogical way (Bousfield 2011, 294).

Having previously read Mutua's (2001) article, which highlights the racialized expectations in framing human rights violators, victims, and saviors, students usually end up discussing the racialized aspects of the use of the International Criminal Court to intervene in specific countries and not others. Nonetheless, students are less prepared to make linkages to Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the treatment of indigenous peoples during the residential schools era and its enduring and sustained legacy. When introduced into the discussion, students experience surprise and shock at not being prepared for and having seen this connection, as ignorance continues to frame the white settler experience in Canada. This affective atmosphere is quite ambiguous at first, as many students quickly minimize crimes outside of the main crimes investigated by the International Criminal Court. As such, I often have to address explicitly how the TRC report speaks to cultural genocide and how historically this type of genocide was excluded from the official definition, which makes students feel even less prepared to continue with the topic (Akhavan 2012, 43–51; TRC of Canada 2015). The affective atmosphere of surprise and shock that ensues usually combines the following: comments about guilt from needing to “look in our own backyard” and “take care of our own”; traditional IR reactions, such as the lack of relevance of such matters, including TRCs, to international affairs; and impatience in wanting me to present a solution to the conundrum. Behind their puzzled looks, some students clearly disengage from the exercise, as they do not understand how to reconcile the new information with what they have read and what they know about what international relations as a field is and does.

I found Balfour's (2011) argument in support of using precise vocabulary helpful here because it gives students clear tools and parameters within which to revisit historical claims and common senses from an alternative, complex, and sophisticated perspective. In this case, the term “genocide” helped cut across disciplinary lines to pluralize the meanings of international crime and justice. Making connections beyond and often against the IR canon, I also found Muños's (1999) work on disidentification a productive pedagogical tool to create this atmosphere of shock from which students can seriously bring questions of race back into IR topics and using precise language to do so. By focusing on “moments of disidentification with mainstream representations” (Muños 1999, 3), I am able to get students in a tabula rasa mood to question the field's collective memory and narratives on which student performances are usually based and to hear their thoughts on how to navigate within the field with this new lens.

I do not offer to solve the contradictions that emerge from disidentifying my commitments to international justice from what students may come to think of as a Canadian domestic concern. Therefore, students are left feeling puzzled as they negotiate the various logical gaps they have to bridge between IR theories and the complex realities we experience. They do so, moreover, while learning to become comfortable with the limitations of the discipline and experimenting with making connections, especially when addressing racialized processes (Muños 1999, 12). Using shock to create an affective atmosphere adequate for new ways of thinking beyond what comes naturally to their white settler experience is one of my commitments as teacher: I utilize disidentification performances to “strive to envision and activate new social relations” and so that students can engage with the practice and theory of international relations through a reflection on their daily lives, their positionality, and the country in which they learn (Muños 1999, 7).

Case Two: Ambivalence, Trauma, and Failure in the Classroom

I (Bousfield) have always been ambivalent about my role as a teacher and adopting the positional authority that accompanies the traditional whiteness of me on the lectern. As my own undergraduate experience was filled with what I recall as a level of political militancy and theoretical dogma, following Rancière (1991), I tend to overemphasize participatory forms of learning, asking students to draw on their own experiences in directing their studies, and disrupting the monovocal classroom. I promote the use of social media in class and in assignments, as I think that popular culture and nontraditional voices should be considered in most cases. I also like to encourage critical thinking about my role in adopting the position of the white male instructor and what that means for their studies. As a consequence, what Mills (2007) has characterized as “white ignorance” is foregrounded as an inescapable element of the classroom, evoking feelings of frustration, antipathy, and student disengagement in predominantly white classrooms. My effort to counter this is to almost entirely avoid exclusionary language and jargon from critical international relations in lectures and discussions, while often promoting the insights of queer, settler colonial, antiracist, and feminist critiques (Holsti 2000, 33). While not always successful, allowing students to render their discomfort into everyday language lessens the burdens of engagement and allows students to link their academic and nonacademic experiences. By intentionally rendering classroom language plain, students are often surprised about the attitudes and opinions held by their peers, while foregrounding the disparity in attitudes that stem from the prearranged perspectives of international relations.

In dealing with settler colonialism in the IR classroom, it remains difficult to reinforce issues related to indigeneity, Aboriginal status, and the reproduction of colonial sensibilities without encountering student avoidance. In a larger international law class, we begin with a lecture on Borrows's (2010),Canada's Indigenous Constitution to highlight what would be otherwise absent from the course texts, and I encourage the idea that “inter-national relations” takes place beyond and within the state. Students are encouraged to pursue essay topics or class assignments relating to settler colonial issues, but in the larger classroom setting they use relative anonymity to choose the more comfortable frame of state sovereignty as the primary referent for their international law papers. Unlike Lobasz and Valeriano's (2015, 406) assertion that we should avoid the “clichéd and simplistic” when dealing with media in the IR classroom, I have found that issues relating to indigeneity and Aboriginal affairs are often actively jettisoned from student interest through a series of white settler tropes, such as “we won the war,” “it is in the past,” and “it is a domestic issue.” Instead, exposing these logics of settler colonialism can become a running caveat, a verbal footnote in classroom discussions and presentations as students become increasingly cognizant that, much like gendered language (i.e., reference to vessels with feminine pronouns), whitewashing, anachronisms, omissions, and errors seep into thought and practice. Without being dogmatic, it is possible to encourage subtle affective strategies to confront the classroom ignorance of whiteness without creating an environment of policing.

Following Halberstam's (2011) arguments about the importance of play and the lack of constraints in animated worlds, along with a general lack of interest in understanding policy failure, I show a selection of themes from movies such as Disney's Zootopia to help recover the relationship between notions of indigeneity and race, development, and ecology, and how civilization is often framed in terms about how we think about international relations. This also rejects the conflation of race and indigeneity in IR teaching under a label of diversity (Ricks 2015), which would otherwise reproduce a liberal sensibility bearing a settler colonial logic. By choosing a playful and accessible intersection of race, settler colonialism, and international relations, students are able to discuss the issues without the seriousness of policy. The limited intersectionality of my privileged hierarchical speaking position is utilized here to render the general unease of students “thinking about themselves as white per se” into a legible frame for the class (Garner 2007, 36). Fostering a nonserious affective atmosphere makes it possible for students to discuss “controversial” topics (such as the Israel-Palestine conflict, in which many are often personally invested through heritage or nationality) in ways that force the entire class (myself included) to confront our own ongoing participation in policy failures stemming from deference to settler colonial logics and persistent racial hierarchies. The rational, abstract, disinterested position of a neutral observer so often advocated by international relations can result in an ambivalence that can be overcome by utilizing intermediary strategies that displace issue of race and oppression onto spaces that lack the seriousness of the real world.

Implicating our choices, both as educators and students of international relations, with the responsibility of practical consequences is also a way to demonstrate affective leadership in the context of race. It allows students to recognize the limits of their interests and that the intersections with everyday practices can be difficult to navigate affectively. In a United Nations issues class, upper-year undergraduate students begin by reading Johnson's (2011) “Click to Donate,” an article on the media's role in funding humanitarian organizations. Students are encouraged to engage critically with the United Nations as a culture and media producer and to focus on humanitarianism's role in utilizing emotion to generate markets and branding through international aid organizations (Kapoor 2012). Consequently, in search of affective emotional videos, students gravitate toward those that include celebrities, pop culture, and powerful and emotional messages and content. However, affective-focused teaching requires a heightened vigilance against students inserting their own beliefs when humanitarian issues are framed in a postpolitical way. Upper-year undergraduate students often have real-world experiences with aid, charity, or political organizations and find it difficult to analyze critically, as part of their learning, the manipulation of their own emotions. While the angered outburst is relatively well-known in political science and IR classrooms, students’ experiences with trauma, suffering, and imagery of mass death produce situations that can exceed any IR training (Malet 2015, 244). Therefore, following Bentley (2016, 114), I expect students to provide “trigger warnings” to the classroom when they introduce new visual material, not simply for comfort, but rather to acknowledge the “adverse reaction and effects [the content] could have in their mental and emotional health.”

When focused on my emotional labor, I am able to acknowledge that a particular topic will make me cry, is too disturbing, or is simply impermissible for my class. This is about recognizing that abstraction, reason, and logical thinking may simply be inappropriate given the content or issues being addressed. The issues of ethics and the depiction of the taboo and horrific are relatively underdeveloped in international relations. In my classroom, we have an open discussion within the first few weeks of the semester about boundaries we believe should be enforced on media shown in the classroom. To date, these discussions have not followed any perceptible gender, race, class, or sexuality patterns; rather, the composition of the class tends to determine what is permissible. However, I have maintained a strict ban on the depiction of murder or death in a video during class. While several colleagues have expressed concerns that I am sheltering students from the reality of the world, following Razack (2005), the color line continues to render the death of certain bodies “ordinary” and exploitation of death to make a political argument remains, to me, unethical. These limitations can provoke the common political science student outburst, as one student left the class after I refused to show a video of acid being thrown on Afghan women's faces.

Case Three: Presence, Absence, and Racialized Conflict

I (Johnson) moved to Northern Ireland after teaching—and learning to teach—in Canada for more than seven years. The first thing that struck me upon arriving in the classroom in Northern Ireland was that my previous use of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to address the racialization of terrorism under the contemporary war on terror would not work; indeed, with respect to the Irish Republican Army, any oversimplification of the Troubles was deeply problematic, and any discussion of terrorism in the Irish context deeply contested. This transition taught me a good deal about different ways of experiencing othering, difference, race, and whiteness. In this way, my pedagogical practice has focused on how to bring the seemingly very local and personal experiences of difference and identity together with how both the public discourse and the discipline of international relations itself portray or occlude race and the “other.” In navigating complex experiences of identity and their emotional dimensions, it is possible to unpack and reflect on the ways power operates not just at grand scales but at the level of everyday life, showing that an understanding of these lived experiences of both self and other can be understood, in part, by understanding how they feel.

My classrooms are generally composed of a relatively homogenous community. Significantly less than 10 percent of my students are racial or ethnic minorities, and at least two thirds would identify as either Roman Catholic or Protestant, the latter being a primary marker of difference that remains from the sectarian divide and conflict. My classroom dynamics are framed by the Anglo experiences of whiteness, in line with a public discourse on race and racism that is extremely complacent, if not absent. Race and racism is portrayed as somewhere else, even as racialized hierarchies pervade the classroom. In my teaching, the challenge has been to encourage students to see themselves in global politics—both to help in their understanding and to inspire them to think beyond what is traditionally quite an inward-looking society still dealing with the legacies of conflict. Nevertheless, all of the students from Northern Ireland have had direct and personal experience with a segregated society where the markers of difference are experienced through hierarchical identity. This racialization is not “worn” on the body through the association with skin tone but instead emerges from accent, religious practice, and even names. Its “visibility” is colloquially understood in how students certainly “know” which community their colleagues are from. This “wearing” of conflict, and of a precarious peace process, informs each individual's understanding of politics, and of how to think about and study war. Those who are not from Northern Ireland, such as myself, arrive in Belfast with preset expectations and assumptions about a divided society that stem from white sensibilities about the role of race in conflict. There is, therefore, a lot of very palpable baggage in the room before we even start.

In my first-year class on conflict and peace, race is a core concept, and we engage with it in multiple ways. My lectures are interactive, and I make use of video clips and music to raise different examples and themes that, ultimately, help us to provisionally define each concept. I encourage students, when they are engaging with world politics, to ask themselves three questions: Where is the race? Where is the class? Where is the gender? This is a running theme throughout each week of the term, which gives students a familiar starting place for any discussion. It also means that questions of power remain at the core of the class content. The repetitiveness of this framework also means that discussing issues of hierarchy and identity, which can be dangerous and weighted down with context in a postconflict society, becomes normal, familiar, and more comfortable.

I understand my task primarily as providing students with the tools they need to engage with and begin to understand the world. What this means in practice, however, is that simply asking questions about race and discussing it as a theme are not sufficient: whiteness renders it as a problem that is “over there,” and students maintain an abstracted view of international relations in which they themselves are not present. To bridge this gap, we take abstract experiences of popular representations of race and difference as a starting place. Race, as a structural lever of power, is about other societies and is not something that they experience (or so they believe). I point out the ways in which this assumption can be challenged by directly addressing the conflict in Northern Ireland as a manifestation of othering and the politics of race, hierarchy, and difference. This approach requires that students have difficult discussions with their colleagues who are from the “other community” (Catholic or Protestant), and for many this is the first time they have such interaction. Apprehension, curiosity, and sensitivity are all highly pitched. What is, at times, even more difficult for students, however, is to break out of the binary system of Catholic/Republican versus Protestant/Unionist and to recognize how racialized hierarchies also frame the other communities who live in Northern Ireland. Further, realizing that all of the peace efforts to build a shared society are imbued with a new set of discriminations and marginalizations, and that these are connected to a broader politics of power, are often very new ideas.

I see my own role in this process as one of facilitation, with a heavy dose of management. I am uncomfortable with this management, as it pushes against a participatory ethos in teaching. I try to combat this by taking on an affective leadership role by which I model behavior: I ask as many questions as I can (and listen to the answers); I express confusion and struggle when discussing difficult and emotional issues; and I provide multiple ways for students to reach me, including an anonymous feedback box that is always at the back of the classroom. The success of these efforts is difficult to ascertain, as they are part of long-term and deeply personal processes. Moreover, the public discourse in the United Kingdom is heavily conditioned by Brexit and a pervasive xenophobic nationalism, which makes the task more, not less, difficult. However, each year the majority of students choose to write their assignments on marginalization and power and often explicitly engage with questions of race. In their reflective weekly journal assignments, students directly connect their learning to their own experiences and how they “read” the world in media, popular culture, or interactions. Each year, these exercises have offered a window into student engagement, and the trend over the course of the term is overwhelmingly a deeper awareness of the ways in which difference connects their lives to the wider world.

As previously noted, I acknowledge that there are two further elements of my own position that facilitate my teaching and the navigation of the affective environment when tackling questions of race and difference in international relations. My status as “a welcome foreigner” (white, Anglophone, and from a familiar cultural background) means that I am not personally implicated in the legacies of the conflict, and so I can utilize my whiteness to have greater freedom of voice. This privilege means I can, quite simply, say things that my British or Irish colleagues cannot. Based on the experiences of being born a white woman, the gendered assumptions about emotion and caring mean that it is less jarring for me to speak about emotion or to take emotion seriously. This has a downside: in much the way that women are marginalized in the discipline, so too might our teaching be considered less “serious,” and so my validation of the emotional register could be seen as not part of the “legitimate” or “real” study of international relations. My response to this, broadly, has been to refuse to accede to it. While race is omnipresent in our considerations, as are class and gender, this focus is integrated into, rather than separate from, the abstract theories, institutional analysis, and “factual” accounts of world events. I also do not limit my own emotional range to more gendered, caring emotions such as compassion. My anger is clear; so, too, is my hope, and in this I also attempt to model behavior and give students permission to feel their way into their studies and thus to navigate the complexity of identity and difference and how power operates—and feels—in their everyday lives.

Concluding Remarks

In line with Doty's (1993) and Acharya's (2014) calls to align international relations’ hearts and minds with the need for any social science field to address issues of race and racism directly, we share some of the pedagogical strategies and challenges that come with taking on this task in the IR classroom. Teaching race in international relations has not only been sidelined, the emotional dimensions of tackling such topics have often been discarded. In our teaching, all three of us have addressed international relations’ lack of explicit engagement with questions of race and racism by highlighting the ruptures between IR concepts and theories and racialized everyday experiences. Due to our field's disciplinary blinders on the matter, special attention must be given to how students navigate the emotional landscapes around these topics. Keeping in mind Zembylas's (2006, 322) “empathetic unsettlement” technique, our pedagogical commitments include allowing students to struggle with, rather than solve, problems relating to race in international relations classes and to work through some of the key racialized issues that a canon based on claims of detachment erases. They also involve rendering issues related to race and racism accessible and personal through popular media examples.

Whether it is about realizing how international crimes may be committed at home, IR theories’ limitations in addressing settler colonialism and of the implicit biases present in the IR classroom, or the uneasiness of relating racialized experiences to othering experiences in everyday life, in all three cases the economy of emotions that circulate in our IR classrooms is found first and foremost through our role of emotional laborers. Any teacher performs a specific kind of emotional labor in supporting students’ emotional reactions to various types of material. This is as true in the Canadian context as it is in Northern Ireland. In the IR classroom, we see the need for emotional labor when we get students to understand and connect global politics to their local and everyday life experiences. International relations’ disciplinary blinders toward issues of race and racism require additional efforts in the form of emotional work if we are to render the racialized aspects of international relations visible in the classroom.

Our diverse classrooms and distinct positionalities partially explain the variety of pedagogical strategies in meeting our common goal of addressing race and racism in the IR classroom. Montsion highlights disidentification as a performative strategy to break down classroom common senses and encourage critical thinking, Bousfield uses absences to stimulate a collective atmosphere of ambivalence in which students realize international relations’ limitations, and Johnson helps students navigate complex affective registers that link moments of their daily lives to broader discussions of global politics. Although all three of us agree that making race and racism in international relations visible requires deconstructing the abstract nature of the field, our individual teaching practices differ: Montsion starts from a traditional understanding of international relations before deconstructing it, Bousfield juxtaposes academic expectations about the subject matter by foregrounding disciplinary ignorance, and Johnson approaches IR topics by starting with student experiences and common senses. The ways we choose to teach are as distinct as they are intrinsically linked to the type of affective atmosphere we choose to foster to meet our common understanding of international relations and its limitations in addressing race and racism.

Similarly, the place from where we teach international relations plays a big role in how we address such topics in the IR classroom. This location is key in understanding the ways in which our affective leadership differs, as our guidance of students through various emotional landscapes necessarily starts from their backgrounds and profiles. Questions about indigeneity may resonate more easily in the Canadian context at a time when reconciliation is a contentious and ongoing topic, while the negotiations of one's identity in a postconflict context can serve as a productive starting point for discussion in Northern Ireland. Despite our different starting locations and social positions as teachers, we share the broader teaching agenda of disrupting the engrained racism and implicit white supremacy tendencies of international relations, and we utilize a critical politics of affect in order to do so (Zembylas 2006, 312). We attempt to show how international relations’ silence about race and racism are connected to other forms of silencing at play in IR practices and theories. We also try to set the stage for the IR classroom for students to share ideas on how to fight such forms of othering and exclusions.

It is important for us to discuss our affective leadership openly, as we need to share with each other our experiences and techniques on what works and what does not. Following the stories of Chin (2009), Routley (2016), and Theodore (2008), such work also comes with extra emotional labor that we often do not speak about, especially when, as teachers, we experience resistance from and the negative feelings of students. Discussions about our own emotional limitations and related student responses are needed to ensure that, not only is the content of race and racism addressed in the IR canon classroom, but that the emotional dimensions of such an exercise are well understood. For our emotional labor and leadership to be effective, we, too, must remain aware of how forms of oppression, often invisible in the field, can surface through our students’ participation, ourselves, and pedagogical materials.

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2016 Annual Millennium Conference and the 2017 annual conference of the International Studies Association. We would like to thank the organizers, panellists, and participants for engaging with our work, as well as the insights received from the anonymous reviewers of this journal. We would also like to acknowledge the passion, insights, and engagement of the students in our classes as the cornerstone on which we develop this collaboration. Please note that this research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

References