Becoming in Baghdad—When Normative Meets Empirical in a Classroom

As a discipline, International Relations (IR) often relies on secondary data sources for academic inquiry. Teaching at a private university in Baghdad, Iraq, Sara Katona, and Charl Swart set out to investigate how being in a region where the population experiences repercussions of war and insecurity in their everyday life affects teaching these very IR concepts in the classroom. Conducting in-depth interviews with Iraqi students and using a phenomenographic approach to interviewing and analysis, the inquiry then widened into an investigation of the effects of teaching in this region and being exposed to the lived experience of theoretical IR concepts.