This is a guest post from William Kindred Winecoff, Incoming Chair

The Online Media Caucus’s 2019 Duckies have come and gone. The reception celebrating Online Achievement in International Studies, generously sponsored by SAGE Publishing, included three fascinating Ignite speakers and the presentation of five awards to very deserving scholars.

Ignite speakers:

Meg Guliford, PhD candidate at Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, spoke about “Operation Hedge of Protection,” which contains her strategies for dealing with trolls on Twitter.

Naazneen Barma, Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and Co-Director of Bridging the Gap, presented some ideas for thinking about best practices in online activity.

Paul Poast, Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, explained how and why he created a Twyllabus for his Introduction to IR course.

Awards:

Best Blog Post: Yolande Bouka, “Wakanda, Afrofuturism, and Decolonizing International

Relations Scholarship.”

Best Blog (Individual): Roxani Krystalli, Stories of Conflict and Love.

Best Blog (Group): Active Learning in Political Science.

Best Twitter Account: Thomas Juneau.

Special Achievement: Erica Chenoweth.

In other news, the Online Media Caucus has decided to change some of the categories in online achievement. Above are the categories that we’ve used for the past few years. But we recognize that the online landscape has been changing. For one thing, the blogging terrain has more or less stabilized, with fewer new individual or group blogs being created and older ones retiring.

Instead, we’ve seen the emergence of a new pattern of individual scholars writing individual blog posts and think pieces for various media, as a response to particular research and policy questions or to current events. These individuals publish not regularly but infrequently, and often at different sites. At the same time, new forms of media have become prominent, which has encouraged scholars to adopt new technologies to promote their ideas.

To reflect these shifts in online activity, we’ve adapted our categories. We’ve retired the Best Blog for both individuals and groups, and expanded our focus on individual blog posts. We’ve also created an audio/visual category to capture new media like podcasts, YouTube videos, and other related material that were not prominent when the OMC was established but are now.

Best Blog Post by a Senior Scholar (post-tenure or a non-tenure scholar active for five years or more)

Best Blog Post by a Junior Scholar (pre-tenure or a non-tenure scholar active for less than five years)

Best Audio/Visual Entry

Best Twitter Account

Special Achievement

Our call for nominations will go out later in the year, but please send us nominations for these categories whenever you like at onlinemediacaucus@gmail.com. Thanks again for all your support and see you in Hawaii in 2020!