Description
Based on the experience of recently developing and delivering the module ‘global apartheid regimes’ during the first term of 2022/3, I will discuss the challenges of engaging in the classroom with contested contemporary themes in international politics. Offered as a third-year module to undergraduate students at Newcastle University, the unit discussed apartheid as an historical object and a conceptual framework to analyse contemporary separation regimes. In this talk, I will share the pedagogical deliberation, frustration, and exhilaration inherent to educating in general and about conflicts associated with apartheid in particular. Specifically, the concerns and dilemmas of approaching a deeply contentious issue and my positionality as a scholar dealing with and originating from Palestine/Israel, which featured as one of the case studies. I will explore the conceptual challenges of exploring apartheid within a comparative framework and the applicability of the term to teachings on the conceptual constructions of a global ‘south’ and ‘north’, climate crisis, mobility, infrastructure and planetary urbanisation and the process of designing forms of assessment that reflect the inherent difficulties of teaching apartheid today.
