Abstract
Disrupting expected narratives can unearth new questions, unsettle assumptions and, broaden spoken and unspoken boundaries of expertise, appropriateness and academic research. In my teaching, I aim to identify ways to reveal the discordance in the familiar and, in doing so, enable students to question the status quo. One way I do this is by providing opportunities for students to apply academic tools of analysis to unexpected materials. What can we learn about power and representation by analyzing statues in the city, museum exhibits, or children’s books? Applying analytical tools to materials that students have an existing relationship with can be particularly powerful. Examining landmarks in the city, for example, can overlay new understandings on a familiar landscape and on places that they will revisit. Shifting research from the page to the community can also enable students to examine topics with new eyes. Exploring the meaning of human rights through interviews with members of the community, for example, contrasts local, personal perspectives with those codified in constitutions and conventions. Such activities disrupt the idea of what a ‘text’ is, unsettle concepts of expertise, and reveal how power configures the parameters of academic space.
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Notes
- 1.
Winnipeg’s water comes from the Shoal Lake 40 Nation a community that has been under a boil water advisory since 1997.
- 2.
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) is one important counter-example, however, the time elapsed between the international covenants on civil and political rights, and economic, social and cultural rights and UNDRIP, the insufficiency of existing mechanisms in addressing Indigenous rights, and the opposition of governments all reinforce the point made here.
- 3.
See Kenyon (2017) for a step by step description of a similar assignment.
- 4.
Viola Desmond was an African-Nova Scotian woman who challenged segregationist policy in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, Canada in 1946 by refusing to leave a section of a theatre reserved for white patrons. She was convicted of a tax violation (for the one cent difference in theatre fares) and received a posthumous pardon in 2010.
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Kenyon, K.H. (2021). Power and Politics in the Unexpected. In: Smith, H.A., Hornsby, D.J. (eds) Teaching International Relations in a Time of Disruption. Political Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56421-6_9
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