The climate movement has been gaining prominence in global climate politics since 2019. Research has been growing on the main features of its public speech along with its sociological and organizational characteristics. Yet we lack systematic analyses of the normative implications of this public speech to provide a thorough explanation of this political phenomenon. Applying discourse analysis, I identify and rationally reconstruct a set of categories and metaphors that activists use to make sense of the climate crisis. When it comes to advancing the politics of sustainability, I argue that although the climate movement promotes ecologically grounded, far-sighted, and integrated sustainability, it still embraces closed and static understandings of this concept. The paper advances the discussion on the contribution of global activism to deliberative climate politics and governance beyond national borders.

This paper examines the theological foundations in Grotius’ works, On the Satisfaction of Christ against Faustus Socinus and The Rights of War and Peace, highlighting the links between the atonement of Christ and other forms of human sacrifice. It suggests that the distinct changes regarding human sacrifice observed in Grotius’ argument across his works can largely be attributed to the political development of the Dutch theological controversies. In The Rights of War and Peace, Grotius takes a ‘secular turn’, creating a distinction between human and divine punishment while also differentiating between divine and human sacrifice of the innocent. Grotius’ revision of his position on human sacrifice resulted in two significant legacies in international law. Firstly, he shifted towards a universally applicable denunciation of the sacrifice of the innocent, thereby enhancing his critique of ‘barbarous’ practices. Secondly, he accentuated the distinctive status of individuals in international law through the prohibition of punishment transfer. The paper ultimately reveals how Grotius’ engagement with theological controversies considerably influenced his international political thought, and in turn, how theology played a crucial role in the formation of modern international law.

While power is central to the study of global politics, pedagogy is often under-recognised as a central site of power within the discipline, shaping not only what is studied but who is invited into this scholarly endeavour. We advocate for subversive pedagogies that challenge the status quo by troubling the ‘knowledge-transmission’ model of education that sees learners as passive recipients of knowledge imparted by subject experts. We articulate three key dispositions in our pedagogical practices that allow us to acknowledge how existing power relations structure our teaching and provide alternative frames for learning with our students: slowness, relationality and care. First, we identify the challenges we face working in ‘the academy at speed’, advocating a slower approach to our pedagogical practice. Second, we articulate the central features of relationality and care that can accompany a slower pedagogy, offering new possibilities for how we engage our subject and our students. We finish by tracing these elements of subversive pedagogies across the contributions to this special issue, noting how intentional subversion and attentiveness to time, relationality and care centres the power inherent in pedagogy.

As a collective of inter-cultural women moving in but not of, and against and beyond the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university we (t)race generative pedagogical experiences of worldmaking cosmopolitics and their (im)possibilities within the University and Politics Disciplinarity. We do this not to redeem or reimagine but to contribute to an enfleshed feminised and racialised undercommons for whom indigenist-decolonial feminist pedagogical-political praxis can never be nor desire to be obedient to the constraints, containments and violences of the settler colonial and its epistemological-pedagogical genocidal project of the Lettered City of anti-Blackness and Indigenous disavowal. We refuse inclusion within, representation as legibility, and the making of community of and as the University. We instead foreground abolitionist categories such as enfleshment, dignity, mutual recognition as exteriority, differential responsible relationship-making, multiple temporalities and the epistemological as ontological, and we centre the knowledges of Indigenist feminised subjects from the exteriority of modernity-coloniality. We are thus selective and explicit about who we choose to walk with, who we make relationship with, and to whom we are responsible and honour. We both guard our right to opacity as well as leave threads of pedagogical meaning-making as invitation to unlearning and relearning new-ancient onto-epistemologies and cosmovisions that move us towards plural pedagogical worlds beyond heteropatriarchal capitalist-coloniality.

This article examines the pedagogical politics at play in the quantification of faculty labor in contemporary U.S. academia. It focuses on the author’s experiences at a large, land-grant, R1 university, going through the Promotion and Tenure (P&T) review process and reflecting on the various kinds of responsibilities that emerged from structural and personal transformations during the COVID-19 pandemic. By developing a pedagogy of accountability against quantitative compartmentalization, the essay outlines how to posit care, empowerment, and reflexivity as central to all learning, especially for teachers and particularly in times of crisis. In this context, ‘learning how to count’ means going against faceless metrics of one-to-one correspondence with other faculty or peer institutions and instead embracing what Paulo Freire called the ‘civic courage’ to teach as a commitment to others and the self.

The neoliberal higher education model has often co-opted efforts from justice-based movements to disrupt academic complicity in a capitalist and colonial system of exploitation. Higher education institutions have already begun looking to, and appropriating, language and ideas from the climate justice movement to perform a response to the injustices that have led to and resulted from the climate crisis. As one way of subverting this appropriation, this article articulates, and reflects on, a specific approach to the Vertically Integrated Program (VIP) model, an educational idea originally developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology where undergraduate students work as researchers with faculty and graduate students. The approach put forth in this article is one based on the experience of the authors in developing a VIP that aims to foster and practice a culture of solidarity with an organisation that is addressing the causes and effects of historical injustices facing the community from which it grew. The practice of solidarity at a time of climate crisis offers a potential solution, showing students that it can be used to break down the walls of higher education, to practice solidarity with those excluded outside of it, and to remind us all of our humanity.

Listening is essential to student learning. But how can instructors build practices of listening into their courses? This article makes the case for adopting a listening-centered approach to university instruction to subvert the dominant “transmission model” of education. It also provides an example of how such an approach can be implemented in practice. Specifically, I present the “plague narrative,” a reflective writing assignment modeled after Thucydides’ account of the plague of Athens in 430 BCE. The plague narrative gives instructors the opportunity to listen to students’ experiences and to learn about their needs and situations. The exercise also offers students a relatively “low stakes” opportunity to engage in political theorizing and critique. Instructors, if properly focused on listening, can use this assignment to better understand their students while helping them make sense of contemporary political life. I conclude by considering how this assignment can disrupt the forces that might push a student to rely on generative AI tools and instead encourage them to use their own critical thinking and writing skills.

This article reflects on the challenges of developing anti-racist commitments in a UK university during and ‘post’ pandemic and re-envisions pedagogic failure in this context. Tackling racism requires that our conversations start from a recognition that we are always situated in relationship not just to others but to the structures and cultures of our environments and communities. There are long histories of empathy and its role, risks and limits in intersectional understandings of the transformation of inequalities. We contend that empathy is integral to anti-racist pedagogies because it: centres relationality in critical and reflective learning; has the capacity to be subversive through its challenge to the ‘dominant transmission model of education prevalent in the neoliberal colonial university’; reveals how the university acts upon and works to erase consciousness of our emotional and embodied selves, and has the capacity to unsettle our epistemic horizons to reveal our complicity in colonial practices. Developing a dialogue between the co-authors who worked on a small, funded project on anti-racist learning within a UK Russell Group university in 2022–2023, the article explores the barriers experienced, along with the possibility of constituting ‘generative and fulfilling spaces’.

The argument of this paper is that the experience and performance of joy can be a radical and subversive act of pedagogical agency. Although joy may seem out of place and out of touch in academia given the increased surveillance and policing of what is being taught in the classroom, and neoliberal administrative structuring prioritising uniformity and outcomes at the expense of creativity, it is here, under this oppositional structure, where joy is most subversive precisely because it is this dimension of human emotion that is increasingly being crowded out and disciplined in universities. Joy, as a positive emotion and dimension of wellbeing, has an underappreciated radical dimension only appreciable in contrast to its negative or oppositional dimension. Although joy has been a theme in pedagogy, its subversive possibilities there remain largely unpacked. This paper theorises joy through two themes that express its radical possibilities in and beyond the classroom. Specifically, joy is a relational and publicly embodied affect providing strength for the teacher, inspiration for students, and signalling resistance and defiance to structures of oppression. The paper concludes by acknowledging the risks and limits of joy that nevertheless are outweighed by its sustaining features found in our vocation.

In this article, we elaborate pedagogies of care, contemplating what it means to teach with and about care in the world politics classroom, situated within the neoliberal, colonial, heteropatriarchal, white western academy. Further, we actively reflect on what it means to work caringly and carefully in practice, exploring pedagogy as care. What are the dilemmas that arise for scholars and teachers, differently positioned in the academy, who seek to teach with and about care in the context of a world politics education? How can we teach with care in often uncaring educational institutions that are hostile to staff and students, particularly those from racialized and other oppressed and marginalized communities? How are our practices and methods of teaching also acts of care? Building on interdisciplinary feminist literature on care, we argue that caring pedagogies can disrupt academic hierarchies and foster intergenerational connection. We also position pedagogy as care, acknowledging that as we teach, we mourn and honor/care for antecedents (both human and more-than-human), nourish our present selves and those with whom we interact, and build community/care for (visions/versions of) the future. Our intervention contributes to ongoing conversations about opening our classrooms as spaces of radical possibility in contemporary higher education.