Consciousness Raising in the Politics and International Relations Classroom

This paper contributes to critical scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in politics and international relations by introducing the use of consciousness-raising techniques in a UK undergraduate teaching setting. Traditionally associated with second-wave feminism, consciousness raising seeks to foreground connections between personal lived experience and socio-political context. While UK undergraduates may not suffer from sources of collective oppression to which such practices have traditionally responded, consciousness raising can viscerally expose students to the everyday effects of the international and their diverse relations within it. As such, deployed as a pedagogic tool, consciousness-raising techniques transcend epistemological approaches to knowledge transmission traditionally associated with the field, and contribute instead to a model of education conceived as a process of collective political becoming.