Decentring the Western Gaze in International Relations: Addressing Epistemic Exclusions in Syllabi in the United States and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past few decades, International Relations (IR) scholars started to acknowledge the field’s racist and colonial legacy. However, only a few studies examined ethnocentricity in the Western IR classroom, and whereas most studied textbooks and graduate training, they seldom looked at undergraduate courses. This article demonstrates that the discipline is taught to IR scholars-to-be by centring Western experience, epistemes, history and agency. After defining the Western gaze of IR, I explore ways to decentre syllabi in the presentation of (1) world history, in (2) reading lists and in (3) the minds of Western IR instructors. This article is based on a qualitative analysis of 50 ‘Introduction to IR’ undergraduate syllabi in the United States and Canada. Décentrer le regard occidental en relations internationales : Les exclusions épistémiques des plans des cours aux États-Unis et au Canada
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".