A Note on Pedagogy

One of the principal goals of my courses, which is intimately related to course content, is cultivating a disposition of critical empathy in my students. 

While the field of medicine and social work has rightly viewed the “education of empathy” as critical to its own critical practices, empathy in the humanities, and especially in history, has been subject to disagreement.  While many scholars have noted the importance of evincing critical sympathy toward the object of historical inquiry, especially in the recognition that people in the past might exhibit forms of thought and habit that would appear foreign to a contemporary student of the discipline, the cultivation of empathy is often taken as an undesirable if not impossible learning outcome.  At its worst, its critics argue, taking empathy as a learning goal emphasizes an emotional or affective affinity with the subject that assumes a metaphysical inhabiting of the “other.”  Moreover, this attitude is often based on a mistaken understanding of empathy by which students are encouraged to recognize and adopt a stance of mourning for past suffering rather than to actively consider how and why people in the past thought, felt, and acted.  The emphasis was not on rigorous evidence-based inquiry, but on ungrounded acts of imagination or even flights of fancy.  Insofar as history pedagogy has accepted the teaching of empathy, it has done so with the very strict meaning of drawing on historical evidence to understand how collective mentalités shaped past institutions and practices.

The literature on empathy in history pedagogy ignores, however, what I believe to be the political and ethical commitment inherent to a critical pedagogy of Islam and the Middle East.  It ignores the long history of empire and imperial knowledge that has generated the epistemologies by which scholars have constituted the region and its people as a form of knowledge and the institutions in which these epistemologies are reproduced.  As a result, it also ignores the necessary self-reflexivity that would implicate the historian-teacher in the very same history of empire and the knowledge/power nexus that it has constituted.  Without this critical self-reflexive maneuver, empathy as a pedagogical modality has the tendency to reproduce a new division of affective labor in which the liberal subject of the global north exhibits empathy toward the global south.  As Michalinos Zembylas argues, what is required is an active decolonizing pedagogy that positions, even implicates, teacher, student, and epistemology in this history.  He writes that, “Rather than claiming that cultivating empathy is an affective solution to complex structural, political, and economic problems, critical pedagogy as decolonizing pedagogy would interrogate what empathy’s diverse manifestations might tell us about the affective nature and workings of contemporary international geopolitics or how the affective aftermaths of empire continue to shape both politico-economic and psychosocial relations” (Zembylas 2019, 415).

What does this mean for teaching the history of Islam and the Middle East?  First, it means situating our subject and our mode of inquiry in a long history of empire and imperial knowledge that has produced the “Middle East” and “Islam” as both ontology and epistemology.  Second, it means implicating ourselves (both teachers and students) in that imperial history as integral to its reproduction.  Third, it means to use our inquiry into the history of the Middle East and Islam to actively generate alternative understanding of both in ways that challenge, undermine, or reformulate what we could call the imperial pedagogy of the region and its people.

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Michalinos Zembylas (2018) “Reinventing Critical Pedagogy as Decolonizing Pedagogy: The Education of Empathy,” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 40:5,404-421.

COURSES TAUGHT

Undergraduate

  • Hist. 1308:  Introduction to Middle Eastern History

    Interdisciplinary course that focuses on medieval and modern history of the Middle East (A.D. 600 to the present). Introduces the Islamic civilization of the Middle East and the historical evolution of the region from the traditional into the modern eras. Covers social patterns, economic life, and intellectual trends, as well as political development.

  • Hist. 1800:  The Global History of Anti-colonial Thought

    This class charts the contested process of decolonization and the emergence of the “Third World” as an idea and a political project in the twentieth century.  We will begin with the assumption that this was a movement that was global in its reach and its impact.  Thus, we will consider case studies from across the colonized world, looking both at the ideas that motivated anti-colonial resistance and the institutional practices that forged new political solidarities during the Cold War and after.  Thus, we will consider the political thought of such figures as Gandhi, Guevara, Nkrumah and the national liberation movements of India, Egypt, Cuba, Algeria, and more.

  • Hist. 3110:  Honors Seminar

    Practical historiography for students who wish to write a senior honors thesis. Emphasizes choice of topic, critical methods, research, organization, argumentation, and writing.

  • Hist. 3328:  Seminar in Middle Eastern History

    Examines selected issues in modern Middle Eastern history. Check with the department concerning the specific subject of the seminar.

  • Hist. 4328:  The Modern Middle East, 1600-present

    Primarily from 1800 to the present. Attention divided equally between the region's political history and international relations and its patterns of economic, social and cultural modernization in the main countries.

  • Hist. 4329:  Islam in the Modern World:  Revivalism, Modernism, and Fundamentalism, 1800-2001

    Examines the more important movements of reform in Muslim world (including Africa, the Middle East and India) from the 18th century to the present, and their origins and intellectual import. Due to the trans-regional nature of this broad movement of reform, particular attention is paid to how these movements related to local political, economic and social contexts, and how they, in turn, moved across larger networks of oceanic commerce and trade. Concludes with extended case studies of Islamic reformism in modern Egypt and India, and their ultimate influence on the politics of contemporary Islamist movements, especially the intellectual position of Ussama B. Ladin.

  • Hist. 4359:  The Global History of Modern Arabia

    Examines the history, politics and society of the countries of the Arabian Peninsula (modern day Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE) in the period between 1800 and the present. The guiding assumption will be that the histories of Arabia cannot be studied in isolation from broader histories of capital formation, imperialism, religious reform, state formation and the discourses and practices which they informed. To that end, the focus will be on Arabia as part of the British, Ottoman and Omani Empires, a participant in Indian Ocean commerce, a source and destination for migrant scholars, students and laborers, the center of the petroleum economy and a domain of struggle for activists and intellectuals representing multiple political/ideological currents-not only Islamist, but also, liberal, socialist and communist.

 

Graduate

  • Hist. 5000:  Historical Methods

    This course is intended to introduce University of Colorado graduate students to the professional study of history at an advanced level. At the more abstract level, the seminar explores the art and science of historical knowledge. Our goal will be to examine the varieties of questions that historians ask, the procedures they employ to answer them, and the nature of the conclusions they offer. At the practical level, the seminar’s purposes are the following: to review and consolidate the basic techniques of research and writing you have already developed; to hone critical, analytical, and synthetic skills in thinking and writing; to introduce you to the history of the discipline and, to some degree, to the professional culture of academic life. The texts we will read advance a range of approaches toward historical thinking and history writing and offer us opportunities to explore possibilities and pitfalls of explaining and interpreting the past.

  • Hist. 5328:  The Modern Middle East, 1600-present

    Primarily from 1800 to the present. Attention divided equally between the region's political history and international relations and its patterns of economic, social and cultural modernization in the main countries.

  • Hist. 6019:  Readings in World History (The Middle East in the Long 19th Century)

    This course is intended to introduce graduate students in history to some of the main themes in the historiography of the modern Middle East (c. 1798-1979).  We will begin with a discussion of revisionist work on the late Ottoman Empire and the now infamous “decline thesis” and continue with a discussion of the general movement of state-centered reform known as the Tanzimat.  We will then move to a series of monographs that detail the rise of nationalist politics, the nature of colonialism, the elaboration of gendered political identities, the politics of national liberation in the post-war period, and the development of Islamist politics in the 1970s.   

  • Hist. 6800:  Readings in Global History (The Global History of Anticolonial Thought)

    This class charts the emergence of anti-colonial thought and practice in the global south during the twentieth century. Spanning the period between 1900 and 1979, the course will chart the varying ways in which intellectuals and activists approached issues such as freedom, nationalism, capitalism, race, gender, and political subjectivity as part of the global struggle against colonial rule. Drawing on a diverse set of case studies from Latin America, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia this class begins with two central assumptions: First, that the work of intellectuals is always embedded in historical context. Second, that the problem of empire and resistance to empire generated a shared discursive community that was global in its reach and its impact. To that end, the readings will give equal weight to the writings of anti-colonial thinkers and the historical contexts in which they emerged as vocal critics of European empire with an eye toward their shared material and discursive environments.

  • Hist. 7800:  Seminar in Global History

    How do we effectively write a history of “nowhere?” This seminar will introduce students to some of the basic concepts and theories of global and transnational history. In doing so it will encourage students to shift their focus from the static framework of the nation-state to the mobility of peoples, ideas, commodities, technology, non-human animals, and climate patterns as subjects of history. Moreover, the class will look carefully at the methodologies of global/transnational history research. In particular, we will deal with many of the practical issues of conducting research on global and transnational topics, such as: proposing manageable research questions, conducting multi-sited research, locating and navigating the appropriate archives, etc.