Inclusivity and bias in the teaching of international relations

• Autor(a) principal: Xi Zhao
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/27907
• topic: Bias; Undergraduate teaching; Syllabi; Relações internacionais -- International relations; Viés; Ensino de pré-graduação; Currículo -- Curriculum

This study focuses on a region beyond the West to add more information to this discourse of diversity and inclusion in the teaching of International Relations. More specifically, it focuses on China’s universities that are not special administrative regions of China (not Hong Kong or Macau). My study assessed the geographic and gender bias using the reading lists (or syllabi) for analysis, expanding previous existent studies of the teaching of IR to more countries outside of the West, to see whether geographic and gender bias and special focus on the US also exists. The results show that clear gender bias exists when it comes to the authorship of assigned readings. The vast majority (96%) of all assigned readings on the syllabi are authored by men. The USA is the country in which most of the authors of the assigned readings were trained and a resident of. This supports the studies that show that US-trained, US-resident, male scholars dominate the field of International Relations and reading lists in undergraduate courses. However, on the three syllabi we can also see that a substantial number of assigned readings are authored by scholars that are Chinese residents and that were trained in China. The results show that while US-resident and US-trained scholars are the most represented on the syllabi, the majority of the authors are non-US-resident and not US-trained.