ABSTRACT
The scene is a University of Melbourne seminar room in the mid-1990s. Together with around fifteen other students, I wait for a postgraduate teaching assistant to open discussions in a tutorial accompanying an international relations module. The tutor begins by explaining that he has recently returned to Australia following postgraduate study of the subject in the United Kingdom. He name-drops the institution at which he was enrolled and the eminent British scholars of the discipline he has encountered. With his bona fides thus established, he surveys our group and asks, “So who here has studied international relations before? And I don’t mean any of that postcolonial bullshit”.
