How did you come to choose your research topic?

I’ve always been fascinated with theories of international politics — they’ve always appeared as these elegant explanations of an extremely messy world. The more I learnt, however, the more I understood that theorycrafting requires you to erase or sideline inconvenient truths. The accordance of importance then becomes a political project: who gets to count and why? Teaching this is a challenging proposition, especially because IR/PS graduates typically go on to be politically active and relevant professionals. The more I searched for work that contemplated the classroom implications of teaching theory, the more I understood that this was an understudied literature. When I presented early versions of my work, and I was recommended to choose a “substantive research agenda”, I realised that this lack of academic activity was at least partly a result of professional and political considerations. I wanted to know more, and I decided to use the opportunity that the PhD affords — choosing and pursuing a single research topic for an extended period of time — to do so.

Can you describe your thesis questions and the methodology you use to approach those questions?

My first PhD paper asks: How is the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) positioned relative to other research pertaining to education in IR/PS? And how can SoTL in IR/PS be reconceptualised as a rigorous, discipline-specific research agenda that critically evaluates teaching and learning? The paper relies on bibliometrics, a computational network analysis method used to graph academic publications in interconnected networks on the basis of their metadata (like publication outlet, authorship, bibliography overlap, etc.). This method helps approach these questions from a structural perspective, and my approach is informed by the growing volume of academic productivity and its concomitant demand on academics’ attention, which means that visibility and community are more important than ever before if one is trying to improve access to knowledge.

The second paper asks: What are prevalent pedagogical practices among SoTL scholars in IR/PS? And how might these be connected to pedagogical traditions to reaffirm the professional value of teaching in IR/PS? Relying on qualitative interviewing and a correspondence analysis, the paper formalises the clustering of the pedagogical practices identified during the interview phase of the research. This approach helps to systematically identify and describe pedagogical practices and connect them to a theoretical tradition to enhance the analytical purchase that teaching interventions represent.

The third and final paper asks: What are the barriers and enablers that SoTL scholars in IR/PS encounter? And what might these barriers and enablers reveal about the operation of social power in the field? The paper relies on Bourdieusian sociological analysis. Bourdieu’s claim to fame is the extension of the concept of capital into the social world: it’s not just about money, it’s about who you know, what you know, and how you act. I opted for this approach to help identify some of the overlaps between the experiences of the interviewees, which came from and were teaching in wildly different settings.

What are your major findings?

The devaluation of teaching is on the one hand an effect of the continuing marketisation of higher education, and on the other hand an effect of a variety of structural and institutional reasons — and on a third hand informed by the intellectual insecurity specific to International Relations and Political Science. Nevertheless, there’s a rich and continually developing research tradition situated in and around the classroom, powered and steered by scholars who share a deep normative commitment to the stakes and practice of teaching. There is an urgent need for collaborative work that pushes back against the prevailing narrative that “anyone that can research can teach”, and which offers SoTL scholars a forum to innovate their work.

What could be the social and/or political implications of your thesis?

Amid growing inequality and polarisation, the importance of education is evidenced by the pressures levied against it. In all likelihood, this thesis is one small part of an ongoing conversation about the purpose and stakes of IR/PS as disciplinary fields. I hope, however, that the readers of the thesis find themselves curious to learn more about how to make teaching fun and effective, and eager to join an emerging and highly socially relevant research agenda.

What are you going to do in your post-PhD life?

I will continue my work as a regional network coordinator at NORRAG, where I help education actors from various sectors connect with one another with the particular mission of amplifying historically underrepresented voices and knowledges.

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On 28 January 2024, Bart Sebastiaan Gabriel defended his PhD thesis in International Relations/Political Science, titled “Power, Capital and Contestation: Towards a Critical Pedagogy”. Professor Elisabeth Prügl (second from the right) presided over the committee, which included Honorary Professor Thomas Biersteker (right), Thesis Director, and, as external reader, Professor Inanna Hamati-Ataya (screen), Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

Citation of the PhD thesis: 
Gabriel, Bart Sebastiaan. “Power, Capital and Contestation: Towards a Critical Pedagogy for International Relations and Political Science.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2025.
Access:
Members of the Geneva Graduate Institute can access the thesis via this page of the repository. Others can contact Dr Gabriel.

Banner image: part of an original image by Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock with modifications (original map replaced by a map produced by NORRAG).
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.