Diversifying Introductory Syllabi
Feb. 20th, 2012 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ajnabiehI have the pleasure of teaching a lot of intro courses this year. (I'm not being fascetious here; I legitimately like teaching intro courses.) The writing of a syllabus for an introduction to a field is always odd: there's certain material that "must" be covered, certain material that I might find impossible to leave out, and a whole range of other options that tantalize.
One of the challenges I face in introductory classes is presenting a diverse view of political science as a field. Some of this diversity means presenting different points of view and methods of doing political science. But another element of it is teaching that lots of different people can be political scientists, and can do work that needs to be taken seriously. That means paying attention to the identities of scholars and the topics covered in readings.
The narrative of political science as a field is depressingly white-male centric. This isn't poli sci's problem alone--the Western academy is a story of white men writing about other white men. But, particularly because I teach about world politics, the implication may quickly become that only white men have the right to understand the world--and that they understand it better, from their perspective in the West, than anyone actually living out there in the world could. That's not an implication I want to offer any support to. Therefore, I go out of my way to assign work by scholars of color, scholars from outside the US and Europe, and female scholars.
(Except that I also teach courses about gender and politics, where the majority of the literature is by women. I make an effort to assign texts by men in my feminist classes, because I want to make clear that male intellectuals have a stake in the analysis of gender, and that my male students can be feminists too. I haven't yet found texts that fit my assignment needs by people who identify outside the gender binary or as trans, so suggestions here would be excellent, if you have any.)
Since it can be hard to find scholars who fit into the underepresented categories whose work can be easily integrated into the framework of an introductory class, I wanted to put up a list of the readings I've assigned, in case others would find it useful, and to look for suggestions from others.
Without further ado, here's who I teach:
Amartya Sen
Sen is kind of an obvious choice--he's a major theorist of democracy and development, has won a Nobel Prize, and is a Seriously Big Deal. Nevertheless, none of my students had heard of him, so it's good to introduce him. I assign "Democracy as a Universal Value" when talking about critical perspectives on democracy, and his response Huntington's Clash of Civilizations hypothesis when we read Huntington.
Edward Said
Hey, I do Middle Eastern politics, of course I like Said. (My students, btw, routinely pronouce his name "sed," instead of "say-eed." I try not to cry.) I also use his response to Huntington when I teach Huntington. This one is slightly-less student-friendly than Sen's critique, but I still assign it.
Charles W. Mills
I assign a segment from his book The Racial Contract to talk about how race impacts citizenship in a racialized society. I'd assign the whole thing if I were teaching a democracy or citizenship course--it's pretty great.
Hannah Pitkin
HANNAH PITKIN I LOVE HER SO. I assign a chunk from her book on representation to introduce concepts of democracy (as a criticism of Schumpeter, although she doesn't frame it as such).
Mary Hawkesworth
I assign a methods chapter by her, which is a criticism of positivist political science and includes a really great breakdown of models of politics in political science. It basically breaks my students' brains, but I'm OK with that.
Iris Marion Young
I assign a chapter by her on civil society when I teach the concept. A colleague of mine teaches the entirety of one of her books, which I might do in the future, since I love her stuff.
Terry Karl
I assign the justifiably famous "What Democracy Is (and Is Not)" by Karl and Philippe C. Schmitter when I teach varieties of democracy.
Comparative Politics: Interests, Identities, and Institutions in a Changing Global Order
While both of the lead authors of the textbook I use are white guys, the majority of the chapters about non-European countries are written by scholars either from those countries or with ancestry in them (Rudra Sil for India, Vali Nasr for Iran, Yu-Shan Wu for China, Okechukwu Iheduru for Nigeria) and two chapters were written by women (Miranda Schruers on Japan and Paulette Kurzer on the EU). More diversity would be better, but this is definitely not bad.
Now, to point out the elephant in the room: my, that is a lot of things by white women and men of color! Apparently, the classic book title from 1982 remains true. So, in the future, I'm on the lookout for work by women of color that would fit into my syllabus, as it stands, at least.
In any case, I'm glad I've got some tiny semblance of diversity in my syllabus; I haven't done the math, but I still have a white-dude heavy reading list. And it's not like my students notice very much--I get a lot of people referring to Pitkin as "he," and many of them may not pick up on ethnic and racial clues in names unless I point them out. But, well--fail better, I suppose.
(And if you're curious: in my feminist political theory intro class, we're reading two women of color, one of whom isn't from the US, two white American women, and one white American man. Two of the five are queer-identified. Slightly better there, I think.)
One of the challenges I face in introductory classes is presenting a diverse view of political science as a field. Some of this diversity means presenting different points of view and methods of doing political science. But another element of it is teaching that lots of different people can be political scientists, and can do work that needs to be taken seriously. That means paying attention to the identities of scholars and the topics covered in readings.
The narrative of political science as a field is depressingly white-male centric. This isn't poli sci's problem alone--the Western academy is a story of white men writing about other white men. But, particularly because I teach about world politics, the implication may quickly become that only white men have the right to understand the world--and that they understand it better, from their perspective in the West, than anyone actually living out there in the world could. That's not an implication I want to offer any support to. Therefore, I go out of my way to assign work by scholars of color, scholars from outside the US and Europe, and female scholars.
(Except that I also teach courses about gender and politics, where the majority of the literature is by women. I make an effort to assign texts by men in my feminist classes, because I want to make clear that male intellectuals have a stake in the analysis of gender, and that my male students can be feminists too. I haven't yet found texts that fit my assignment needs by people who identify outside the gender binary or as trans, so suggestions here would be excellent, if you have any.)
Since it can be hard to find scholars who fit into the underepresented categories whose work can be easily integrated into the framework of an introductory class, I wanted to put up a list of the readings I've assigned, in case others would find it useful, and to look for suggestions from others.
Without further ado, here's who I teach:
Amartya Sen
Sen is kind of an obvious choice--he's a major theorist of democracy and development, has won a Nobel Prize, and is a Seriously Big Deal. Nevertheless, none of my students had heard of him, so it's good to introduce him. I assign "Democracy as a Universal Value" when talking about critical perspectives on democracy, and his response Huntington's Clash of Civilizations hypothesis when we read Huntington.
Edward Said
Hey, I do Middle Eastern politics, of course I like Said. (My students, btw, routinely pronouce his name "sed," instead of "say-eed." I try not to cry.) I also use his response to Huntington when I teach Huntington. This one is slightly-less student-friendly than Sen's critique, but I still assign it.
Charles W. Mills
I assign a segment from his book The Racial Contract to talk about how race impacts citizenship in a racialized society. I'd assign the whole thing if I were teaching a democracy or citizenship course--it's pretty great.
Hannah Pitkin
HANNAH PITKIN I LOVE HER SO. I assign a chunk from her book on representation to introduce concepts of democracy (as a criticism of Schumpeter, although she doesn't frame it as such).
Mary Hawkesworth
I assign a methods chapter by her, which is a criticism of positivist political science and includes a really great breakdown of models of politics in political science. It basically breaks my students' brains, but I'm OK with that.
Iris Marion Young
I assign a chapter by her on civil society when I teach the concept. A colleague of mine teaches the entirety of one of her books, which I might do in the future, since I love her stuff.
Terry Karl
I assign the justifiably famous "What Democracy Is (and Is Not)" by Karl and Philippe C. Schmitter when I teach varieties of democracy.
Comparative Politics: Interests, Identities, and Institutions in a Changing Global Order
While both of the lead authors of the textbook I use are white guys, the majority of the chapters about non-European countries are written by scholars either from those countries or with ancestry in them (Rudra Sil for India, Vali Nasr for Iran, Yu-Shan Wu for China, Okechukwu Iheduru for Nigeria) and two chapters were written by women (Miranda Schruers on Japan and Paulette Kurzer on the EU). More diversity would be better, but this is definitely not bad.
Now, to point out the elephant in the room: my, that is a lot of things by white women and men of color! Apparently, the classic book title from 1982 remains true. So, in the future, I'm on the lookout for work by women of color that would fit into my syllabus, as it stands, at least.
In any case, I'm glad I've got some tiny semblance of diversity in my syllabus; I haven't done the math, but I still have a white-dude heavy reading list. And it's not like my students notice very much--I get a lot of people referring to Pitkin as "he," and many of them may not pick up on ethnic and racial clues in names unless I point them out. But, well--fail better, I suppose.
(And if you're curious: in my feminist political theory intro class, we're reading two women of color, one of whom isn't from the US, two white American women, and one white American man. Two of the five are queer-identified. Slightly better there, I think.)