We Are a Community of Practice, Not a Paradigm! How to Meaningfully Integrate Gender and Feminist Approaches in IR Syllabi

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AbstractThe most frequent practice in teaching western undergraduate students about international relations (IR) is either to avoid gender studies altogether or at best to compartmentalize them to a single week. This practice marginalizes feminist research by amalgamating highly heterogeneous publications under the pretense that “they look at gender.” Rather than treating gender studies as a unified research program, they should be linked to the full range of theories, approaches, or topics they are relevant to, based on their normative and ontological assumptions. In the end, gender-oriented scholars do not form a would-be paradigm, but a community of practice. This community, however, can itself perpetuate colonial exclusions and silencing. This study is based on a content analysis of fifty western undergraduate “Introduction to IR” syllabi from 2015 to 2020, as well as a reflection on my own experience since 2011 as a student, teaching assistant, guest lecturer, and professor in ten IR courses at three western universities.