Doing world politics and social media: Digital practice and open education in international relations

Abstract This paper sets out the need for, and potential offered by, introducing social media into teaching global challenges. We argue that teaching on global challenges should involve teaching with, through, and about social media as a place of politics. This paper suggests that using social media in our teaching can help to equip students with critical digital literacies as a set of skills for engaging, understanding, and analysing digital materials. We also argue that digital spaces can offer real potential to open dialogue and thought on global challenges in our classrooms. The article presents reflections from our own classroom experiences to think through how social media offers the potential to re-work hierarchies and unpack knowledges of world politics that are taken for granted. In doing so, we are engaged with wider academic discussions on how digital pedagogies are connected to and can enact critical pedagogies. Finally, the article sets out a research agenda that can take this forward to better understand how students learn through social media and how we can best incorporate this into our teaching as a discipline.