Political Science Educator: volume 27, issue 2
Reflections
By Jeremy F. G. Moulton (jeremy.moulton@york.ac.uk)
Aside from reading the odd political thriller novel, for many the link between creative writing and political science will seem like a tenuous one. The use of the scientific method (as the name political science obviously implies) means that the study of politics has largely focused on hypothesis testing through qualitative and quantitative approaches – methods outside of that remit might, within this logic, be viewed therefore as illegitimate (Trepanier 2020, 1). However, studying creative writing can teach us a lot about both historic and contemporary understandings of politics and that the application of creative writing exercises can add to political science education. Creative writing can disrupt the norms of students reading journal articles and textbooks.
The capacity for using creative writing as part of my teaching practice has interested me over the last few years. I began integrating it more into my courses. In part, this is made easier as one of my main areas of research and teaching interest is environmental politics – a subject area that demands students engage with a range of “what if” questions about the future, be it ones marked by ambitious environmental action or ones where environmental inaction has devastated the human and non-human world alike. While not exclusive to the subject area, environmental politics is a field where students’ creative imagination is especially useful in engaging with the subject area.
Creative writing has the potential to add excitement to courses by disrupting the established patterns of teaching and learning of university classrooms. Whilst I would disagree with Porritt’s (2005) claim that environmentalism is ‘depressing and dowdy’, it never hurts to try and add vibrancy to a field of study. In fact, this is already happening to some extent within the political sciences. For example, International Relations (IR) has been noted as having taken a contemporary ‘aesthetic turn’, one that has stretched into IR pedagogy and included the use of creative writing (James 2021). This aesthetic turn is one that already builds on the humanistic approach in IR, one that more squarely focuses on world politics through the lens of individual experiences and values (e.g. Alker 1996). Commenting on this development, Ramel and Vergonjeanne (2022) emphasize the potential to boost students’ hope for the political futures that they envision through engagement with creativity as part of the teaching and learning process.
There are two primary benefits of using creative writing in the political science classroom to deepen student engagement with the subject area. Firstly, the use of fiction anchors discussions around conceptions of environmentalism and different modes of governing the human-environment relationship. Secondly, the use of an in-class creative writing exercise gets students to consider possible environmental futures.
Fiction can shape discussions of political possibilities. Utopias and dystopias can create binaries of future possibilities that illustrate the ills of our present age. Two works, in particular, have been useful reference points in my own environmental politics teaching: Ursula le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston. Both lean more towards the utopian than dystopian. They balance portrayals of important “whats ifs” in their fictional accounts of attempts to reset the human-environment relationship. These fictional accounts can, in turn, be used as stark contrasts with contemporary norms, providing the kind of counterfactuals which are key to political science hypothesis testing (Fearon 1991).
Interestingly, Callenbach, the author of Ecotopia, made a clear prescription for engaging with potential environmental futures through creativity, arguing that “It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now… But without these alternate visions, we get stuck on dead center. And we’d better get ready… We need to know where we’d like to go” (Callenbach quoted in Timberg 2008). This framing provides a good introduction to the second way that I see creative writing as beneficial to the political science classroom – by asking our students themselves to write.
Of course, not every political science student will jump at the chance to write creatively. After all, perhaps there is a reason they chose not to study creative writing at university. However, there is a clear benefit in doing so: One that, if communicated to them, should allay concerns. Especially within environmental politics, there are many parts of contemporary society that are taken for granted and yet are key drivers of environmental destruction (for example, see Moulton 2023 for one specific example of this approach in practice). Challenging students to write fictional accounts of worlds without economic growth or consumerism, for example, gets them to experiment with thinking that otherwise might be limited by ingrained imaginaries.
This is not a practice that needs to be limited to the study of environmental politics. Asking our students to think creatively could provide a new framing on many different situations and issues that we study within the political sciences (for other examples that link science fiction and political science see Weldes 2006). These exercises can provide refreshed thinking and approaches that can enable our students to best engage with the problem of the day.
References
Alker, Hayward R. 1996. Rediscoveries and Reformulations: Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fearon, James D. 1991. “Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science.” World Politics 43(2): 169-195.
James, Patrick. 2021. “Developing a Course on Security and Intelligence with Spy Novels: An Extension of the Science Education Initiative into International Relations.” Journal of Political Science Education 17(S1): 527–544.
Moulton, Jeremy. F. G. 2023. “Writing the Future? Creative Writing in the Classroom.’ Active Learning in Political Science. 18 October 2023. [Online]. https://activelearningps.com/2023/10/18/writing-the-future-creative-writing-in-the-classroom/
Porritt, Jonathon. 2005. Capitalism as if the World Matters. London: Earthscan.
Ramel, Frédéric. & Vergonjeanne, Anaëlle. 2022. “Creative Pedagogy in IR Examination. When Fiction Unleashes the Learning Process.” Journal of Political Science Education 19(4): 531-544. https://doi.org/10.1080/15512169.2022.2122832
Timberg, Scott. 2008. “The Novel that Predicted Portland.” The New York Times, 12 December. Retrieved 15 November, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/fashion/14ecotopia.html
Trepanier, Lee. 2020. “What Can Political Science Learn from Literature?” The Political Science Reviewer 44(1): 1-19.
Weldes, Jutta, ed.. 2006. To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jeremy Moulton is a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of York in the United Kingdom.
Published since 2005, The Political Science Educator is the newsletter of the Political Science Education Section of the American Political Science Association. All issues of The Political Science Educator can be viewed on APSA Connects Civic Education page.
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