IR Resource Bank: a tool for diversifying and decolonizing the curriculum

Abstract

Spurred on in part by the large social justice mobilizations that began in 2020, recent years have seen growing calls for diversifying and decolonizing the disciplinary practices in the field of International Relations (IR). In response to these calls within the field and across academia more broadly, faculty and students in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University embarked on a project to produce a ‘Resource Bank’ highlighting and centring alternatives to Euro-American epistemologies, pedagogies, and ontologies that have thus far dominated the IR field. Drawing on our experiences as project managers of this Resource Bank project since its inception in 2021, we discuss some of the most salient issues and important challenges that emerged in the course of this work. We employ a postcolonial theoretical framework to tease out and problematize the Eurocentric foundations of the IR field and utilize the Resource Bank to reimagine research and teaching in the IR field.