Reflections on My Teaching

Broad approach

At Chicago, my alma mater, economists reputedly refer to the award for the best teaching assistant as “The Kiss of Death Award.” This derision rests on the assumption that good teaching and serious research are mutually exclusive. I seek to challenge this assumption by endeavouring to simultaneously be a top researcher and a top teacher.

My teaching directly influences my research; and my research directly informs my teaching. My intellectual project pivots around the central belief that ideas matter. In my research, I follow a revolutionary band that questions the dominance of materialist explanations of political and economic phenomena. In my teaching, I present the materialist orthodoxy along with the ideas-based heterodoxy. I challenge the students to investigate the roles of both material and non-material variables. I personalise this debate by showing them that this is largely a question of whether their ideas have the potential to shape policy.

My primary focus—the analysis of elite figures at critical junctures—is directly relevant to students committed to a lifetime of leadership and public service. At the LSE, I have the great privilege of teaching students with real policy-making experience from all over the world. Throughout my courses, we draw on the lessons learned from both their endeavours and the classic cases I study to probe the proposals proffered by the Ivory Tower. Through this dialogue, we generate deeper insight into the constraints and opportunities individuals face as they struggle to improve humanity’s fate.

Teaching innovations

Upon arriving at the LSE, I was attached to a small number of large, long-established courses: “International Political Economy” and “Economic Diplomacy.” While I was able to take ownership of my portion of these courses, mine was only a small part of the ancient leviathans. So, I began working with like-minded colleagues to develop an alternative model in which colleagues design and teach their own smaller courses. This has enabled us to be more innovative and responsive in our teaching.

I am especially proud of the new courses that I have designed and delivered, in the MSc in IPE, in the LSE Summer School, and LSE IDEAS. My course “Governing IPE: Lessons from the Past for the Future” has been even more popular than anticipated drawing in 60+ students each time that I have been able to offer it. My course “Great Thinkers and Pivotal Leaders: Shaping the Global Order” has also proven to be one of the IR Department’s larger–and most highly rated–courses in the LSE Summer School. I particularly like this course because it offers a huge canvas, challenges me to stretch into a wide range of topics, and grants me the chance to draw neophytes into the field of IR. In both courses, we explore the canonical (broadly construed!) IR theorists and theories, the most significant shifts in foreign economic policy and practice, and the interaction between the two across the last several centuries. More broadly, we also investigate the role of history and historical analysis in the study and practice of international political economy.

In these courses, my research deeply informs my teaching, and my classrooms become laboratories in which we explore the questions that drive my research. After just about every lecture and discussion, I head back to my office with the thought, “This is why we do what we do!” But, in all of my teaching, I endeavour to train students how to examine IR through a variety of lenses simultaneously. Whatever the course, the goals are always the same: to broaden our perspectives, to deepen our knowledge, and to gain new, practical insights into the great challenges we face today.

I am strongly committed to LSE’s broader teaching mission; and, over the last few years, I have become increasingly involved in its additional teaching programmes. I welcome the opportunities to travel to new places and meet new colleagues and students. This has broadened my own education in a way that nothing else can do. (Indeed, some of my best ideas have come from these experiences.) But I also love being in the classroom and doing what I can to advance education near and far–both for those who can afford to come to London and for those who cannot.

Last, I have created a regular, informal discussion group “Tuesday Night Live!” in which we discuss current events from a variety of IR perspectives.

My Challenges and Strategies

I face two significant challenges in my teaching. Both follow (in various ways) from my interest, and comparative advantage, in contributing the historical perspective to our IPE offerings.

First, some students initially find this material less accessible and less relevant. I address this challenge by making explicit connections between some of these less familiar elements and more contemporary points of reference. For example, there are many parallels between the theories and operation of the gold standard and the world of cutting edge currencies like bitcoin. But it goes well beyond that. I delight in discussing with students how Marx’s analysis (in The German Ideology) of the globalisation, cosmopolitanisation, and mechanisation of production anticipates much of the discussions today about the effects of labour migration and even robotisation. Some of the best discussions I have had in seminars have been of Gandhi’s critique of “Westernisation” as the privileging of consumerism over spiritual well-being and environmental stewardship. I believe that there is still much we can learn from engaging with these “old” cases and perspectives. Part of my mission is to find such fodder, make it accessible to the students, and then see where they run with it.

The other major challenge is truly formidable: the materials with which I work are disproportionately authored by white men from privileged backgrounds in elite positions within dominant powers. It is well and good–and vital–to discuss the influence that JM Keynes and Winston Churchill exerted–and still exert–on global order. I certainly spend a lot of time thinking and writing about that. But these dynamics–the great debates of dead white men–while indispensable, were merely one dimension among the many that have charted the course of global order over the centuries. And, thankfully, that specific dimension will matter relatively less in the future, as the discussions driving the world become ever more diverse (along every dimension).

How do I confront this challenge? Obviously, it is not as easy as simply counting and coding the elements on my reading lists–although I always do that as a matter of course, in any case. Instead, I employ three strategies.

First, and most simply, I highlight those bits (wherever possible) of “difference” that some of these figures themselves faced. John Locke and, especially, Adam Smith were not financially secure and, instead, depended upon the patronage of benefactors. Also, Locke faced religious discrimination, and Smith faced national discrimination. Keynes was born into incredible privilege, but his sexuality did not conform to conventional standards at the time. Winston Churchill, Montagu Norman, and (it seems) Harry Dexter White all struggled with varying mental health challenges. These are not the biggest points or even the biggest challenges, I know. But I do think they remind us that not all barriers are visible; and I hope that students who identify with these particular differences might draw some inspiration from these examples. After all, it is worth remembering that even the most “successful” among us face insecurities and instabilities at various points.

Second, and far more important, I try to diversify the perspectives and discussion as much as possible. This is actually easier–and more enjoyable–than it sounds as there is much wisdom to be had beyond just the pens of Keynes and Churchill! Elizabeth I was a major exponent of nationalist foreign economic policy and imperialism. Gandhi was one of the most original thinkers and influential activists of the modern age–even shaping, as I show the students, movements as far removed as the US Civil Rights Movement (as Dr King himself explicitly acknowledged). And Susan Strange not only helped to create the field of IPE, but she has defined much of the outside-of-the-box style of analysis that attracted me (and so many others) to the LSE in the first place.

Third, and most challenging, I try to confront these biases head on. For instance, I often teach Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” principally because it makes explicit the assumptions that under-girded much of the pre-war global order. It also deepens our understanding of the cogent criticisms of that order issued by Gandhi, Hannah Arendt, and Josephine Baker in the decades that followed. I might note that such figures rarely–if ever–make their way onto International Political Economy syllabi. Yet, were not colonialism, the Holocaust, and the subordination of women and people of colour (more generally) intimately connected to the political-economic orders of their day? Is there not still much to learn from these unconventional figures, just as there is still much to learn from Smith, Marx, and Keynes? And is not conversation of each not deepened and enriched when examined from the perspective of the others?

More broadly, this points to my unconventional approach to teaching within this field. Twenty years ago, the incomparable Barry Eichengreen published an article in International Organization on “How International Relations Looks from Economics.” He suggested that IR scholars “strengthen the connections between theory and empirics” “presumably by pooling cases across countries or over time and by taking advantage of the institutional variation in that expanded dataset.”¹ Many (most!) colleagues in IPE have taken this advice; and I agree that much good insight has followed from it. But I have specialised in analysing unique but pivotal moments–the kinds of “black swan” events that cannot be predicted and that Eichengreen agrees do require systematic case analysis on their own terms. To help my students analyse such sui generis events–the start of the free trade movement, the post-war wave of decolonisation, the Cuban Missile Crisis–I assign a truly broad range of materials and perspectives. My course “reading” lists and lecture material includes treatises, tracts, and treaties but also poems, paintings, and performances–all alongside conventional and cutting-edge social scientific scholarship.² In my courses, we study the speeches of Lenin, Keynes, and Churchill; but we also grapple with the boundary-breaking semi-nude performances of Josephine Baker, the self-reflective mea culpa documentary of Robert McNamara, and the social-political-economic critique of comedian Eddie Izzard.

At the LSE, I know that we are all driven by many of the same big questions: structure versus agency; the relationship between politics and economics; and the role of ideational and material variables. I believe that insights into these big questions have been offered by a diverse array of actors in a wide array of works and forms. My mission as a teacher is to help our students recognise that, to enrich their perspectives more generally, and to help them cultivate the habits and tools required to generate their own perspectives over the years to come.

---

1. Barry Eichengreen, “Dental Hygiene and Nuclear War: How International Relations Look from Economics,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 993–1012, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2601365 994, 1012. ↩︎

2. I hasten to add that my reading lists are all quite manageable in length. I go to great efforts to assign specific subsections of the materials–sometimes just a few pages of a work–to guide the students directly to the relevant material. ↩︎