A More Inclusive Definition of International Relations
[Music]
okay
so as sarah said just a moment ago with
my introduction i think it’d be a good
idea to start out right now with exactly
that
in introduction so i assume that most
people especially students
at some point in their lives have
prepared an introduction in a new
setting
for most people this usually goes along
the line of name maybe where you’re from
what you study or what you like to do
and especially in college it’s a lot of
name major field of study et cetera so
my traditional intro goes a little bit
something like this hi my name is
susie veal and i study political science
and education studies
with a focus on nationalism and genocide
studies
now to focus on that last part first of
all i say it because
it’s true that’s just literally what i
study
but second and more strategically i say
that last part to subvert any
stereotypes that began to form in the
minds of people
once i said the first part introductions
are really important
and so are first impressions and they
start an immediate line of thinking as
soon as you say it
so let’s unpack that a little bit susie
woman
political science general education
studies
sweet or benign but what i want people
to know when i say that i also study
education and genocide studies and
conflict
is that i’m serious and mean business
about a real connection between
international relations and education
and i see that
and with a word a very provocative word
like a crime against humanity or
genocide
immediately you can provoke people to
make that connection in the eyes of
others
at that moment now of course i believe
that education and international
relations are related
but in reality it should not have to
take mention of a crime against humanity
to have other people make that same
connection in their mind
oftentimes we see international
relations as a way by virtue of the word
international
and education as home or domestic but in
reality the two fields actually shape
each other
and they’re incredibly related in both
practice and in theory
so practically education and
international relations coincide because
schools are the primary sites of
political socialization for
people people go to school become
citizens and then engage with the entire
world around them
and theoretically well everything is
essentially diplomacy
whether it’s negotiating interests
international excuse me interpersonal
affairs
or representing yourself to a certain
body of people they’re very intimately
connected
but in the us access to international
relations education in u.s public
schools
is incredibly limited and unequal in
part this is because we all have such a
narrow definition of what international
relations specifically
is supposed to be so if we were to open
that up more perhaps we would be able to
teach more about international relations
across fields
and this is a national problem so the
common core standards for social studies
state
nothing at all about international
relations global or area studies
or world geography at all
and this contributes to a pipeline
problem
so the school to international relations
pipeline has actually become a school to
career diplomacy pipeline
and this is because those who are
encountering an international relations
education in their public schools
are really just getting in the sense of
what it means to be in the most narrow
sense
a diplomat someone engaging in
international relations i’m talking
u.n i’m talking think tanks i’m talking
foreign service
and the result of that problem is
reflected by the demographics of the
foremost diplomatic source
of the united states which is the
foreign service itself so as you can see
on these
statistics here the us department of
state career diplomats for 2016
were only 18 percent non-white whereas
in the u.s there was 28 percent on y as
of the 2010 census
and for sex in the us excuse me in the
foreign service career diplomats only 40
percent of them are women
and in the u.s 51 of citizens
are women so you can see that there’s
obviously a disconnect between the
people who are going abroad to represent
americans and
america and that’s because in part of
this narrow definition of ir
who gets access to it and who practices
it
so i’m going to prompt you all to
imagine what a more inclusive definition
of international relations
might look like if we could expand what
we think of as international relations
perhaps we could illuminate the need for
a broader education
of people who don’t just want to go into
the state department to be career
diplomats but simply people who want to
engage with the world
all around them the tools to make the
world a better place
should not be limited to those who are
lucky enough or have the ability to
encounter
and afford them but unfortunately in the
us
we’re not there yet so as a result when
people try to
seek out any type of education and
international relations
what they’re primarily looking to are
supplementary programs
such as model united nations or summer
sessions and summer academies
and the problem with these supplementary
programs while enriching for sure
is that they require a lot of extra time
and prior knowledge about ir
a lot of time dedicated to practicing
and prepping and finally a lot of
money so model united nations programs
are really exciting
but the bottom line is that they often
self-select for hyper-academic and
extroverted students
who have the means time and money to
travel around to different conferences
practice take weekends away from home
and finally of course buy a business
casual wardrobe
and that’s not accessible to everybody
and then on the other hand you have
summer sessions and summer academies
these are often very highly selective
again
expecting people to already have this
amount of prior
information about international
relations before they apply and they can
be incredibly expensive
so i fall into this latter category i
had no formal international relations
education during my time in u.s public
schools
so the summer of my junior year i
applied to a two-week long intensive
crash course program in ir
had a 30 global acceptance rate and a 6
500
price tag for two weeks and the bottom
line of all this is that had i not
gotten very generous financial aid
i would not have been able to attend
this program and for me that was my only
chance to learn about ir
so no aid equals no program fortunately
i got some very generous aid
so i went to the program and let me tell
you i had the best time
i absolutely loved it this program
completely
blew my mind and i ran the whole gamut
of everything that’s stereotypical about
international affairs
so i read like sun zoos the art of war
learned about the un and the world bank
and the international monetary fund
i did a crisis simulation as an acting
member of the kenyan government
things i never really thought i would be
doing i learned the word hegemony means
all types of things like that and i had
an amazing time and after that program
i thought i knew it all about ir i
thought i kind of had it had it nailed
down the patent in the bag
so i set my sights on it i was already
determined to restructure all my college
applications
around this newfound passion that i just
discovered and i thought it could be
pretty easy
so again changed my whole plan was
determined to do this in college
and didn’t see a reason why my interest
in education would not be
easily fit into this new scheme of
international affairs so i got to
college and here’s my five year plan i
had it all laid out
summer after my first year i’ve done an
internship at the un simple
summer after my sophomore year i’d get a
return offer at the un even simpler
summer after my junior year i’d be
promoted to assistant secretary general
of
something and then after graduation i
personally would be one of three on the
shortlist to be the next secretary
general of the united nations
easy right can anyone guess what
happened
certainly not that so i basically got to
college
and realized almost immediately three
things number one
my plan was absolutely ridiculous number
two
that this whole plan that i had laid out
did not include my interest in education
that i was so dedicated to prior to
attending the summer program
and number three that this debate that i
imagined was already rich and laid out
between international affairs and
education
did not exist at all so having fallen
from grace from my diplomatic
aspirations
i was sad and i was discouraged because
i really thought that i
got the full sense of what i wanted only
to realize that that wasn’t what i was
practically going after at all but even
so throughout all of this i really still
believe that there was a deep connection
between international affairs
and education and i didn’t want to give
that up so i reconfigured my approach a
little bit
so i knew that the disconnect between
the two fields was a problem in my own
community
so i kind of redirected all my energy
and started there
and my mother always told me that if you
want something done right you just have
to do it yourself
so that is what i did
and this began with a program called
hemispheres uh it was talked a little
bit about before but hemispheres would
end up being
the most rewarding and fulfilling
experience that i’ve had in my whole
time in college
it is a non-profit teaching group under
the yale international relations
association that provides free weekly
classes and international affairs to
local new haven high school students
and when i first got to yale i started
applying to a bunch of things as you do
to make friends kind of foiling around
like a fish on the water
and i found chemistry and i thought this
is great there’s this pulp cloud that so
seamlessly
mends together my two interests in
education studies and international
affairs
but i didn’t really get the whole story
at first that was kind of all that i got
i thought this is nice this is education
that just happens to be about ir
i never associated hemispheres with
being ir and it wasn’t until a couple of
weeks in
that i started to realize the really
disruptive and innovative work that
hemispheres was doing
what they were doing was disrupting the
knowledge pipeline of who gets to learn
about international relations
they are providing free classes to
students who otherwise would not have a
chance to develop the literacy in ir
therefore giving them a whole new seat
at a whole new conversation that these
students would have never
been a part of and i thought that was
amazing
so fortunately i had the privilege of
being appointed their director for the
2017-2018 year
and along with a team of three other
incredible yale undergrads
we poured ourselves into expanding
hemispheres as widely as possible
so throughout the year from 2016 to 2018
we went from having 20 students
attending each week to 70
offered from two to four classes per
week and increased
from serving three to ten schools around
the new haven area
and this is really when i started to
think wow maybe ir isn’t exactly what i
thought it was before
because here i was disrupting this
pipeline and changing the normative
culture
about who gets to learn about ir and for
that matter what ire even is
but it was happening in a classroom on a
friday afternoon with pizza
it was not in the hallowed halls in the
state department in a business casual
cat suit
so my role is kind of being flipped
around
and then it happened even more so so
then in the fall of 2018
i began to work as a student liaison for
the yale world fellows program
this is a program wherein global leaders
from all around the world come to yale
to serve as visiting fellows essentially
for one semester
and when i looked around at the fellows
i was suddenly surrounded
by 20 of people who had become my
coolest best friends ever
but also 20-ish people who became global
leaders by first starting in their
communities
and identifying problems that they had
access to and personal stake in
so looking around they didn’t look like
this traditional career diplomat that i
thought
encapsulated and embodied ir it was
totally different
the people around me had made jumps
between industries they had taken time
to take care of their families and even
start families
and they really started their work at
home yet now they were global leadership
they were international relations again
this whole idea of what ir was supposed
to be in my mind was totally
flipping around in seeing the fellows
their boldness
and their ability to disrupt empowered
and inspired me
to then pursue a different type of ir
because the diplomacy that i thought was
normative was not something that i could
fit into
myself so
what we think international relations
should be is in essence limiting
what it actually could be if ir were
wider it were a wider field that was
spread out
more in different fields we could have a
more comprehensive education about it
and more students could have the tools
to interact with the world beyond their
doorstep
to identify things that they think are
wrong to stand by things that they think
are right
and to ultimately speak the language of
effecting change and this should not
just be limited again to those who are
able to access it
so i kind of took a cue from this lesson
myself and i began to in the past year
or so work with iris integrated refugee
and immigrant services it’s
connecticut’s largest refugee
resettlement agency
and now i spend my time mentoring young
adults and helping them learn how to
self-advocate and thrive and remove
schooling environments that are
worlds away from where they were now in
the us safe from persecution
that is international relations and a
couple of years ago that is not
something i ever would have attributed
to being part of this field that i
previously thought
was so narrow and i really wish that it
didn’t take me such a long time to
realize this it shouldn’t have taken me
such a
reality slap in the face when i realized
how absurd my five year plan was
to open my mind to all this different
world that ir could be
but it did and i’m glad that now i’m
here at this point to realize that ir
has many faces yes it’s definitely
happening happening at the un
in the state department and among the
foreign service but it’s also happening
in a hemisphere’s classroom
weekly on fridays from three to five
it’s also happening among the world
fellows
and it’s also happening at iris during
english language classes
ir has a lot of faces so long as we can
contribute it to them
so a lot of things have changed in the
grand scheme of my time
in college and what i was up to um but
some things have not also
i still go back to this introduction of
introducing myself as hi i’m susie i
study political science and education
studies
focusing on nationalism and genocide
studies and yes
i still say that because it is still
true that is just what i study
but now i’m not saying that to prove
that anything is connected to anybody
i’m saying that now because i’m proud of
the work that i’ve done to ideologically
expand the definition of what
ir is and my students and my co-teachers
and my mentors all know that
because they were there along the way to
help force that path when nobody else
was
and we’re seeing results from it too so
just last week in the hemisphere’s class
on social movements we were learning
about the us’s involvement in latin
america
during the cold war era and we asked the
students are you surprised by this
because we know that they’re not
learning this in their social studies
curriculum at school
and one of the students responded no of
course not whatever i just learned that
hemispheres last year
that is what a broader definition of ir
could be so when i introduced myself to
people now yeah i still want to confuse
them by putting into conversation
international affairs and conflict with
school but again
not to prove anything to anyone instead
i want to show that i’m someone who
wants to complicate someone else’s
worldview
and for the sake of having a more
exclusive
inclusive definition of how we coexist
with each other and how we follow those
rules
i hope that they will apply the same
exact thing to me thank you
you