Description
As global politics becomes increasingly shaped by digital technologies, students of International Relations (IR) require the skills to critically navigate and interpret a deeply digitalised world. Yet, the discipline has been slow to address how digitalisation transforms not only communication and governance but also power, identity, and the very practice in ‘the international’. This reflective paper draws on our recent experience of co-teaching a course on “Digital International Relations”, designed to bridge this gap by integrating critical theory with digital qualitative methods. We introduce a pedagogical framework that combines constructivist, practice-theoretical, feminist, and postcolonial approaches with digital ethnography. This approach challenges the assumption that digital data must be analysed solely through quantitative, “big data” paradigms. Instead, we encourage students to engage ethnographically with digital practices and emotions – using fine-grained interpretive analysis to interpret tweets, memes, video games, websites, and other digital artefacts as ‘fieldwork’ sites of international meaning-making. Through guided use of software such as MAXQDA, students learn to collect, code, and interpret their own digital datasets, developing both technical and critical competencies. By cultivating methodological reflexivity and digital literacy, our teaching approach prepares students to confront the political and ethical dimensions of digitalisation, including the opportunities and risks posed by artificial intelligence. We argue that embedding qualitative digital methods within IR curricula not only enriches students’ analytical repertoires but also equips them to engage critically and responsibly with the digital infrastructures shaping contemporary global politics.
