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This week we are looking at the pedagogy of politics. What can research tell us about the diverse ways in which we can teach about politics?

Bildung ist in historische, politische und soziale Kontexte eingebettet, und entgegen der verbreiteten Vorstellung ihres emanzipatorischen Potenzials stabilisiert sie Macht- und...

by Adrian Schlegel The year 2020 might fill our descendants' history books with the rampant phenomena that emerged around the COVID-19 pandemic. The global health crisis, aggravating social inequalities, political authoritarianism, gender-based discrimination and economic fragility might be few aspects that would serve as representational bullet points of currently lived...

I know many Crooked Timber readers will want to mark the passing of Harry's father, Tim Brighouse. Harry has sometimes written here about his father's pedagogy and influence, and more obliquely at his singularity and sheer loveliness. Today's Guardian newspaper carries an obituary: "Teachers and education experts this weekend paid tribute to Sir Tim Brighouse, […]

In Classics at Primary School: A Tool for Social Justice, Evelien Bracke presents a comprehensive toolkit for teaching Latin and Greek at primary school to empower children who do not typically have access to Classics in education. Employing culturally responsive pedagogy and critical self-reflection, Bracke provides practical steps for repurposing the teaching of Classics, which has … Continued

I was recently chatting with someone who teaches introductory macroeconomics (not using my favorite textbook). He does not teach the students about money creation under fractional reserve banking, which he considers an unnecessary technicality, but he does teach them the following two statements about inflation.


If
the Fed lowers the interest rate on reserves, that policy stimulates economic activity in the short run and, via the Phillips curve, increases inflation.
In
the long run, the quantity theory of money explains inflation.


I agree with both of these statements, and I consider them critical for students to understand. But consider: How does one explain the transition from the short run to the long run?

The only way I know to answer this question is that a lower interest rate on
reserves increases bank lending and expands the money supply by increasing the money
multiplier. But if students don't know about how banks create money under fractional
reserve banking, they are not equipped to understand this logic.The bottom line: The traditional pedagogy about how banks influence the money supply remains important if students are to understand the economics of inflation.Update: This post generated more than the usual amount of confusion and misdirection on Twitter. So let me explain my logic more slowly:


It is useful to teach
the quantity theory of money (M and P are parallel) as a long-run
equilibrium condition, regardless of which direction causality runs.
It is useful for
students to know that cutting the interest rate on reserves is
expansionary for aggregate demand and, over time, inflationary. That is,
it raises P.
To complete the story,
you need to explain how cutting the interest rate on reserves raises M.
To be sure, lower
interest rates increase the quantity of money demanded. But you also must
explain the quantity of money supplied.
The money supply M equals m*B, where m is the money multiplier and B is the monetary base
(currency plus reserves).
Cutting the interest on
reserves (unlike open-market operations) does not change B. So if it
changes the money supply M, it must work through the money multiplier m.
One cannot understand
the money multiplier m without understanding fractional reserve banking. (Under 100-percent-reserve banking, m is fixed at 1.)

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:




https://academic.oup.com/isp/article-abstract/22/1/1/5651202
https://doi.org/10.1093/isp/ekz025




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.

Our guest for Episode 12 of Fully Automated is Maïa Pal, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford Brookes University. Among other things, Maïa is a scholar of early modern European history, focusing on the colonial origins of the modern state. She is an editor for Historical Materialism. And she is currently working on a book project, entitled Jurisdictional Accumulation: an Early Modern History of Law, Empires, and Capital (forthcoming, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). You can find her on Twitter @maia_pal

This episode represents the third installment in our occasional series, on Marxism in International Relations. Previous guests in this series include Bryant Sculos (Episode 9), on the the topic of Marxist pedagogy, and Kevin Funk and Sebastian Sclofsky (Episode 10), about the sorry state of Marxism in IR, and in Political Science more generally. In this episode, however, Maia helps us begin to think about what it might mean to apply Marxism, in IR.

I invited Maïa on the show after I read her recent piece, Introducing Marxism in International Relations, in e-IR. In this piece, she argues that the contribution of Marxism in IR is to reveal what other, less critical approaches may contrive to hide. That is, how many concepts we normally take for granted in IR, like the international itself, can distract us from analyzing the social relations that comprise them, and the history of the material conditions that shape those relations, in turn.

As we discuss, some of even the most critical scholars in IR eschew Marxism because they fear it constitutes a kind of dogmatism. In the interview, however, you'll hear Maia refer to a letter that Karl Marx wrote, to Arnold Ruge, in which he states:
"But if the designing of the future and the proclamation of ready-made solutions for all time is not our affair, then we realize all the more clearly what we have to accomplish in the present—I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of everything existing, ruthless in two senses: The criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions, nor of conflict with the powers that be."
So, in this spirit, Pal outlines for us what we might perhaps want to call a relentless Marxism — one unafraid to examine itself, and its own suppositions about the world.

As Maia says in the interview, the function of Marxism in IR is to challenge and destabilize many of the concepts it cherishes, and which might appear otherwise stable to the scholar: not just the division between the national and the international, but that of the political and the economic. Marxism, Maia suggests, shatters the "linear progressive narrative of the history of international relations," as a discipline, and opens us up to the possibility of a much more messy and brutal history; a history of empire, and imperial conquest!

We covered A LOT of ground in this interview, and the result is a slightly longer episode than usual. But I hope you'll stick with us to the end. Later in the show, you're going to hear us talk about some of the implications of Maia's work for the left today: whether or in what respects can we say the state in globalization still has political capacity, and how might the left conceive of this capacity as it grapples with the question of anti-capitalist strategy; and how debates about xenophobia among the working class and so-called 'deplorables' can overlook not only the nuances of working-class electoral preferences, but can distract us from thinking about the 'normal' racism of the state as it works to categorize migrant populations as undeserving of access to wealthy zones and spaces, within globalization.

Towards the end, we'll also chat about what its like to be an editor with a left-academic journal like Historical Materialism, and get a little bit into the rationale behind the journal's latest issue, on identity politics. Finally, we get into Maia's current book project, and why she believes that Marxists need to pay more attent...