Description
This presentation offers an analysis of the concept of racial capitalism (Robinson 1983; Bhattacharyya 2018) as an epistemic and pedagogical tool that can contribute to the development of an anti-racist space inside the international relations classroom. It is based on an autoethnographic approach (Reed-Danahay 1997; Roz Camangian, Philoxene and Omotoso Stovall 2023), and reports on a course experiment conducted during Spring 2023 and Fall 2024, around a podcast project by a group of students on an introductory course in international relations in a Belgian university.
The research examines the pedagogical and heuristic relevance of teaching racial capitalism approaches, coupled with post-colonial and decolonial approaches, in international relations courses. In a context where the university itself is an institution embedded in the structures of racial capitalism (Gerrard, Sriprakash & Rudolph 2022), it links the importance of teaching these concepts with the necessary evolution in teaching practices themselves in order to promote an anti-racist climate in the classroom and to enable students to understand the power relations of racial capitalism and to experience the importance of experiential and subaltern knowledge in challenging these power relations (bell hooks 1994).
