International Studies and Being Critical
What does it mean to be critical? Are there any ground rules for pursuing a critical line of thinking, or is everything permitted? Should arguments be based on identity or rationality? Is it ever acceptable to negatively typecast someone we disagree with? These are increasingly crucial questions for any academic environment. For us as International Studies, it is important that we recognise the basic principles of where we are – a university – and who we are – a scholarly community.
In the recent Leiden university film ‘Humans of Humanities’ several of our colleagues gave their understanding of the value of a humanities approach to investigating social realities. Rob Zwijnenberg (professor of art and science interaction) spoke of the need for ‘reflecting on who and what we are as human beings, our place in the world, our relationship with others. It’s about contemplating ethical and cultural issues that affect us as living beings.’ And María Gabriela Palacio of International Studies expressed the view that ‘The humanities allow us to have a critical line of questioning, where we can situate certain narratives and read them in their historical, political, geographical context.’ This, then, is the value of the humanities: having the space to critically address human relations and our relations with the world we live in.
The university is a unique place in which this investigation can occur. It is also a privileged space – not everyone can study at university, due to financial limitations, family reasons, cultural barriers, or simply not making the grade. Not everyone wants to study at university either. Nevertheless, it is important that we do self-reflect on the role of our privileged space, and that we build this critical awareness into our education. This involves addressing the substance of our subjects, our disciplines, and our own outlooks on the world, to recognize what our ‘cultural baggage’ is and what it stimulates us to do, to think and to say. Also, to recognize how what we do, think and say can have an impact on others. It asks us to recognize who is not being heard, who still has their story to tell, and why they have been excluded up till now.
The curriculum of International Studies already encourages such a critical approach, in the sense that its courses do not accept the world as ‘given’. The teaching staff involved in the programme aim to provide multiple ways to interpret and re-interpret the world, to look beyond the immediate news, to understand the complex meanings, interests, and powers that are at work shaping our world every day. With its four disciplines and regional/global perspective, it is a kind of crash course in global ‘deep learning’. Most of us are dedicated to making the world a more just and honest place, even if we don’t always agree on the best ways to accomplish that. That is academia – we have the space, the privilege, to debate it out.
Our approach is therefore framed around a set of fundamental principles. The cause of social justice in its multiple forms is one. Uncovering and investigating systems of belief (religion, populism, nationalism) is another. We aim to introduce more attention for environmental justice in the years to come. And at the centre of these principles lies the foundation stone for the whole enterprise – the ability to critically judge academic arguments. International Studies is not simply about encountering multiple views on the world, it is above all about developing the academic skills to judge the merits of one argument over another, to test if a statement is verifiable, to weigh up the evidence and contrast ‘facts’ with facts. Why is one position of greater importance than another? How can we test the truth claims of every perspective? It may sound banal, but this approach is at the root of everything we do, and it is what provides us with the necessary common ground in this enterprise. And it is what we hope all our graduates would agree with.
Sometimes it may seem that this is not enough, and that the humanities can only gain value by taking powerful moral standpoints and becoming more activist in approach. There is space for this too – the university should definitely not be separated from the causes that are shaping society at large. But only as long as the foundation stone – the ability to academically judge the merits of every argument - remains in place. That is our common ground, and that is what defines any programme in any university worth its name. It is more valuable than you might think.
Giles Scott-Smith,
Chair of the Programme