Jonathan Rodwell

Why do I teach?

Because we are not going to fix things if we don’t discuss and understand them. And working with students to do this is rewarding. Most importantly, I wouldn’t be able to do this if not for the opportunity and education I received from the lectuers and teachers who taught me (and in some cases that still do teach me). SO I think I have a responsibility to offer the same opportunity back to others. It’s a privlidge to be able to do that.

How I’ll teach you

I teach with the assumption that students who have committed to a degree want to be here and want to study; somewhere deep down it is ‘what they want to do’. At the same time, too many people around the world - through no fault of their own -  don’t get the chance to study at all, nevermind go to university. As a result, to me not taking advantage of the opportunity is wrong. My job is to help people take advantage of that opportunity.

At the same time, learning something new is made much more difficult if it is boring. For all the challenges university is also supposed to be one of the most enjoyable times of your life. It was for me. My responsibility then is also to make the subjects I teach relevant and valuable to the world students experience. The study of politics or IR is not some abstract functional course, it is the academic study of power, probably the most important thing to study. So if my teaching - and the degree for which I have shared responsibility - is boring, irrelevant, or not of a high enough academic standard, it is not good enough.

Why study…

Why study my subject? Because you want to know how the world works, why the world is the way it is the way it is, and think about the potential for change. If you are not interested in that, don’t study politics and IR! Having said that, unless one has a specific career path mapped out, one which demands certain technical training (say, programming or medicine) then everyone needs to learn more about how the world really works. 

There are lots of odd definitions (often in texbooks) of what ‘politics’ and ‘IR’ actually are, but it is simple. Politics is the study of social power and IR is the same but with a focus on the international. This is great stuff to study becuase power is everywhere. My focus is on theory (via IR Theory) is because a broad theory of power and society is what underpines all political action. Everyone uses some theory, even if they don’t know it.

Finally, all this does get you a decent ‘BS detector’ (in the world out there you’ll need one!).

Postgraduate teaching

Unit leader: History of IR

The above is part of the Ma ‘International Relations and Global Communication’.

Subject areas

Politics and International Relations.

My research was originally focused on the foreign policy of the United States, and largely inspired by the work of William Appleman Williams and the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (with some to and fro with Paul Feyerabend). As a result, I am now placed more within International Relations Theory. My over-arching research (and teaching) interest is trying to use discussions around the causal role of ‘ideology’ in world politics as a lever to examine epistemological and ontological questions in IR / Political Science. The key question being ‘is IR a science?’ and what does it mean to ask that sort of question…

Specifically my current (ongoing) research project is to examine the current theoretcial gaps in studies of Diplomatic History / the History of US Foreign Policy and how that links to an uncomfortable relationship between the field and US power in the world. I argue that because ‘mainstream’ US Diplomatic History borrows from the weakest parts of IR Theory it fails to engage with epistemological and ontolgocial questions. As a result Historians (and IR scholars) are reinforcing and perpetuating the ongoing tragedy of US Foreing Policy.  

I am also interested in questions of technology and politics/power. What I am interested in is how and why empirical data and neo-positivist analytical approaches - for example the rise of ‘metrics’, ‘evidence based policy’, ‘dashboards’ and so on - are prime examples of the epistemology (and thefore hegemony) of neoliberalism. When looking at this there are lots of different inspirations, but it probably started with some of the history of neoliberalism prodced by Philip Mirowskiand most recently the analysis being produced by William Davies at Goldsmiths. There is also some of Evgeny Morosov’s stuff in there as well.

Finally, I think it is unjustifable in any sense to seperate out sport from politics, and one day I want to conduct more research on the contemporary politics of sport.