Teaching international relations

Our teaching of the European Union in international relations is still shaped by discussions around whether the EU is a ‘serious’ global actor and if so what kind. This chapter argues that instead we should move towards studying how the EU relates to others. It suggests that an engagement with ongoing feminist, queer and postcolonial debates in the International Relations discipline - usually marginalized in textbooks on the EU - enables our students and us to analyse the EU in its international and historical context. Specifically, the chapter draws on a classroom experience in which students worked with monographs on gender, sexuality and race within international security and politics - not explicitly dealing with the EU - to reconsider how the EU engages with others. To do so, students were actively involved in creating new knowledge and linking different sets of literature in a relational classroom setting.