Description
International Relations (IR) pedagogies in the Anglo-Saxon academe have experienced massive changes over time, currently imagining themselves as a civilisational project, advancing critical and inclusive agendas, also including so-called Southern voices. Yet how non-Western pedagogies evolve, adapt and transform is a question crucially negotiated at the Frontier – a space at once contested, underexplored and indeterminate.
This paper functions as a Frontier report: reflections of a Central European academic, educated in the UK, and now teaching IR and Security at the American University in the Emirates in Dubai. Here, the classroom operates as a crossroads where academic pasts and futures intersect, and where ideas traverse through a complex assemblage of terrains. Just like Dubai itself, the extremes being held at the same time are promises of futuristic and integrative skyscrapers next to the desert reminding us of the epistemic power of silence, absence and permanence. By reading pedagogy through this tension the paper argues that IR teaching in Dubai offers a glimpse into a post-Western classroom already in motion – a pedagogical frontier that European academia too often theorises but rarely encounters.
