Mehak Kapur Successfully Defends Her Doctoral Dissertation

On March 28th, Mehak Kapur successfully defended her doctoral thesis titled: “Why Does IR Remain Colonial USIR? Ask The IR Instructor And The Colonial Subjectivities.”

Mehak’s dissertation explores the reasons why the coloniality of the International Relations (IR) discipline recycles in the common imagination of the actors within and beyond the introductory IR classroom. In particular, the dissertation focuses on the IR instructors’ subjectivities (mental framework), their pedagogical practices, and broadly, the context of the neoliberal R-1 university that reinforces these mentalities by diminishing the actors’ hope to break free from coloniality in thoughts and pedagogical actions.

This thesis research question was motivated by concerns surrounding growing mental health concerns, apathy towards education, reduction of knowledge as a tool, and growing polarization and mistrust within educational institutions and more broadly within democratic societies.

With interpretative methodology inspired mixed methods, the supra-disciplinary research builds on insights from International Relations theory, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Critical Pedagogy, Poststructural Studies, Geopolitics of Knowledge, Political Science Education, Sociology of Knowledge, Art-based approaches to research, Internationalization of Higher Education, Bibliometric Studies, Political Economy of Higher Education, and Postcolonial Studies.

In doing so, the research highlights the human side of the IR instructors caught in the web of coloniality that inspires colonial and decolonial pedagogical actions in the introductory IR classroom.

Mehak’s thesis committee consisted of Dr. Marshall Beier (supervisor), Dr. Lana Wylie, and Dr. Robert O’Brien. Dr. Sandeep Raha from Pediatrics as the chair, and Dr. Heather Smith (University of Northern British Columbia) as the external examiner for the defence proceedings.

Congratulations, Mehak!