Pedagogy as Encounter
Naeem Inayatullah, 2022 (nEW!)
What is the role of politics in the classroom? How does the desire of the teacher shape the pedagogical process? Is teaching possible? Is learning possible? Pedagogy as Encounter engages with such larger issues. The majority of discussions, workshops, conference panels, articles, and books avoid meta-pedagogical issues by focusing on technique. Such “technique talk” examines schemes, methods, and procedures that do and do not work in the classroom. It answers the “how” question at the cost of ignoring these bigger queries.
Pedagogy as Encounter consists of 120 vignettes arranged in eight chapters. Most of these are first person autobiographical stories that describe encounters with students and colleagues. They portray a teacher whose classroom disappointments lead him to radical experimentation. But there are also a few theoretical sections, as well as segments that are epigrammatic in nature. All of it is grounded in a Lacanian political psychology and in a critical global political economy. The theory, however, remains largely implicit and is confined to the footnotes. The body of the text is free of jargon and presented in a conversational voice.
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Within, Against, and Beyond Liberalism
David Blaney & Naeem Inayatullah, 2021
This book provides a generous immanent description of liberalism, but also works against and looks beyond it. It engages liberalism and its variants in IPE at a moment in time when liberalism and liberal internationalism are experiencing something of a crisis of confidence. Though we are deeply critical of liberalism, especially the variant that dominates in IPE, we picture liberalism as variegated and rife with doubt and tensions that potentially open it to traditions of thinking beyond itself. We also show how these tensions and doubts often prompt attempts at closure in the form of defensive maneuvers, like Eurocentric conceptions of development that justify Western dominance and the condemnation of scholarship that exposes relations of domination and subordination as violating the precepts of unit-level positive science. But recognizing these maneuvers as defensive reactions may help us grasp the moments of greater openness within liberalism that connect to traditions that think against and beyond its central tenets.
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Savage Economics
David L. Blaney & Naeem Inayatullah, 2010
Our key theme is that poverty is the Lacanian “real” of global capitalism; it is neither something theorists can avoid nor solve. We focus on the comparative ethnology that shaped political economy and international relations theory. This then is a book of cultural political economy. Themes include notions of development/progress, order, civil society and social/ethical pluralism, equality and inequality, wealth and poverty with implications for framing and re-framing contemporary IR/IPE. There are chapters on Adam Smith, two other members of the Scottish Enlightenment (Adam Ferguson, James Steuart), Hegel, Marx, and on the temporal orientation of contemporary hunting and gathering societies.
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International Relations and the Problem of Difference
Naeem Inayatullah & David L. Blaney, 2004
The Peace of Westpahlia (1648) is marked as the theoretical and historical origin of modern international state society. We argue that while this received view maybe meaningful, the Peace of Westphalia is better seen as a deferral of the fierce and dangerous problems resulting from cultural and religious difference. For IR theory, Westphalia marks both the opening and postponement of how to react to difference. After explaining how the problem of difference emerges and how it is deferred, we demonstrate how this legacy continues to plague contemporary theory and practice. We also uncover recessive themes that can turn the problem of difference into opportunities for democratic cultural encounters.