Pedagogy | #OCCUPYIRTHEORY

Hello friends!

We are back with another great episode of Fully Automated. In this episode, we step back a little bit from the grander political themes that we are usually preoccupied with, to do an episode on the pedagogical possibilities (and challenges) presented by contemporary technology.

When it comes to online teaching in the discipline of International Relations, there are very few that can claim to have the experience or insight of Dr. Sebastian Kaempf. Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland (Australia), Kaempf is a scholar of global media politics, focusing on the impact of changing media technologies on contemporary conflicts. He is also is the producer (with UQx and edX.com) and convenor of ‘MediaWarX’, one of UQ’s Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and probably one of the largest political science MOOCs in the world.

For some, MOOCs seem to represent a sort of ultimate form of “democratized” education whereas, for others, they seem to herald the dawn of a new dystopian age. For Kaempf, now a longtime veteran of online teaching, its important to bring some nuance to this conversation. Pedagogy can make a difference. And, as you’ll hear in this conversation, Kaempf and his partners at UQ put a lot of thought and material resources into their approach, pushing the medium to the very edge of what it can accomplish.

Here then, Kaempf discusses the minutiae of how he and his colleagues actually built and delivered the course. On the one hand, they avoided the traditional lecture form in favor of what they call “spaced learning” — because research shows that human beings kind of struggle to concentrate that long. On the other, and in a break with the usual stereotype of dry pre-recorded lectures, a central theme of MediaWarX is the seriousness with which they approached the class as a kind of media production. So, for example, portions of the course are presented in a kind of ‘road movie’ or documentary style, blending diverse archival footage with on-site discussions from locations all around the world, and interviews with well-known academics and experts (including Glenn Greenwald!).

We’ll also hear Seb discuss the ethos of “Hacktivism” that he tries to bring to his online teaching. Thus, he uses discovery assignments to teach about everything from how search algorithms work, to how we are addicted to being online, to the power of big data and surveillance. In this way, the course develops a kind of “crowd sourced” content.

Finally, I ask Sebastian about Covid, and where and how it has changed the fate of MOOCs and online instruction in general. After 18 months of more or less totally online instruction, how does his experience of working with, and thinking about, MOOCs effect his perception of the future of online education in a post-pandemic world?

Sebastian Kaempf can be found on Twitter @SebKaempf and his podcast, Higher Ed Heroes, can be found on all leading podcast apps. And his International Studies Perspectives article with Carrie Finn, discussed in the interview, can be located here:

Thanks for listening. Next episode, we go to Korea to visit the crew from the podcast Red Star over Asia. And in the next episode after that, we will be chatting with Christine Louis Dit Sully.

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Welcome to another episode of Fully Automated! This week we are starting a short series of podcasts on the place of Marxism in In- ternational Relations. Next episode, we’ll be joined by Sebastian Sclofsky and Kevin Funk, who are going to be discussing a piece they have in the latest issue of International Studies Perspectives, ‘The Specter That Haunts Political Science: The Neglect and Misreading of Marx in International Relations and Comparative Politics’. So, look out for that episode, coming in about a week’s time. Its a great interview, and I am really looking forward to posting it for you.

Meanwhile, on this episode, we are joined by Bryant Sculos, an adjunct professor at Florida International University (FIU), to discuss an 2015 piece he co-authored with Sean Walsh, of Capital University, entitled “Marx in Miami: Reflections on Teaching and the Confrontation with Ideology,” which appeared in the journal Class, Race and Corporate Power. In this interview we talk about the particular challenges of teaching Marxism in a city like Miami, with its high population of Cuban immigrants. You’ll hear Bryant discuss some of the unique challenges he encounters in the classroom, and some of the pedagogical approaches that he and his co-author have developed, as they seek to overcome them. Marx, of course, was one of the great thinkers of the historical situatedness of human consciousness. And, regardless of your take on his wider political program, the value of his approach to questions of human nature and political power, cannot be gainsaid.

Towards the end of the interview, we’ll also ask Bryant about his recent run-in with the far-right media, who’ve picked up on a recent piece of his, on the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast, which Bryant argues is exemplary of toxic capitalist masculinity … we’ll ask him why he refused to go on television and defend the piece.

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Tag Archives: Pedagogy

Episode 34: You Sexy Hacktivist MOOCer, with Sebastian Kaempf

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Episode 9: Bryant Sculos, on “Marx in Miami”

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Horizontal Politics & IR Theory

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