Beyond Resilience: Teaching Political Science During War as a Practice of Care, Resistance, and Reckoning

This article examines the pedagogical and institutional stakes of teaching political science during the Fall 2024 war in Lebanon. Drawing on experience in three university classrooms amid Israeli airstrikes, infrastructural collapse, and national paralysis, it argues that crisis does not merely disrupt education, but transforms its meaning, methods, and moral obligations. Against the backdrop of institutional appeals to “resilience,” the article critiques responses that prioritize continuity over care and performance over clarity. Through analysis of classroom dynamics, administrative responses, and faculty networks, it proposes a framework of pedagogical care rooted in relational ethics, shared vulnerability, and justice-oriented learning and outlines how such care can be operationalized through institutional practices. Students and faculty did not simply endure the semester, but they politicized it. The classroom became a space of mourning, dissent, and reimagination. Rather than treat crisis as an exception, the article reframes it as a condition that demands pedagogical commitments: to center lived experience, challenge disciplinary neutrality, and recognize care work as political labor while also examining the limits of its institutionalization. This case from Lebanon holds broader relevance for universities facing repression, austerity, and collapse. It calls on political science educators to teach not only through crisis, but against the systems that normalize it and to reclaim the university as a site of care, solidarity, accountability, and radical possibility.