Out from the Wreck: International Relations and Pedagogies of Care

Abstract

How can international relations professors care for students who are facing structural crisis, if we understand “care” as the duties of providing support, assistance, mutual respect, and tools for navigating and confronting disaster, in the context of their instructional duties? What, if anything, can an introduction to a notoriously bleak discipline offer students besieged by unpredictability and death? This chapter investigates the imperatives of care, flexibility, and improvisation that navigating these layered crises requires. Drawing on my own experience and conversations with students who navigated New York during the pandemic, as well as scholarship on care in the classroom, strategies of instruction in crisis zones, and critical and feminist pedagogy, I argue that generosity, carefully paring back to essential learning goals, and emphasizing what international relations can teach us about cooperation, collaboration, mutual aid, and collective restitution are key strategies for helping students learn in crisis.