Description
Trump was banned from Twitter, Mi5 has an Instagram account, terrorist attacks are now immortalized in ‘memes’ as well as official memorials, revolutions are arranged through WhatsApp. International politics is liked, tweeted, shared, and preformed online. The global pandemic has accelerated a move to understanding, organizing and delivering online, hybrid and blended learning of Politics and International Studies. At the same time IR as a discipline is grappling with the role of social media in international politics. It is increasingly important that students are taught a critical digital literacy in order to be able to engage in an international politics that is increasingly done online, whilst social media provides a pedagogic opportunity for teaching and learning International Relations. This paper draws on the latest pedagogical literature in relation to digital practices, open educational practices and the role of social media in the classroom to understand how students can (and already do) learn world politics through social media. It uses focus group research with students to explore their understanding of social media in world politics to build a digital repository of examples, create and test an open pedagogical approach to learning IR in/through social media, and enhance the understanding and place of social media in the IR syllabus.
