A distinctly unoriginal take on the pathologies of overvaluing academic “novelty.”
Get off my lawn! Are journal demands for “novelty” creating a culture of low-level academic dishonesty?
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Academia
So you’re thinking about Professing Abroad…
If there's one thing that American political scientists agree about, it's that the U.S. "job market" is pretty brutal. It's not uncommon for junior scholars to bounce between postdocs and visiting...
Dealing with the Digital Mob
Academics are increasingly becoming targets of online harassment, but too many universities and colleges are unprepared to support and protect their faculty. What steps should they take?
Adam Sandler and the Rise of the Rest: Theoretical Myopia and the Liberal International Order
Film critics have approached Adam Sandler’s films the same way that IR scholars have analyzed the rise and fall of the Liberal International Order (LIO)
More Academia Posts
Syllabus Musing—can we teach foreign policy without paradigms?
As a new postdoc to the Kinder Insitute, I have the good fortune not to be teaching this semester. In addition to working on my book manuscript—more on that later—I have been spending a good deal of time thinking through my class on U.S. foreign policy. This has been a good experience even at this early stage because it has forced me to think about what students really need to know about foreign policy, and it has provided me the spurring I needed to begin distilling my graduate training into a systematic framework. Writing a syllabus poses several challenges, not least of which are what the...
This Blog Post is About Conference Program Selection
This is a guest post from Jonathan D. Caverley, Associate Professor at the Naval War College and Research Scientist at MIT, and Monica Duffy Toft, Professor at Tufts University, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. The program for the 2019 International Studies Association (ISA) meeting has been released, and International Relations Twitter has feelings about it. The stakes of inclusion on the program are not small. Presenting a paper at ISA is frequently an essential step towards publication in the field’s refereed journals, these meetings provide valuable networking space, travel funds...
Reflections on a Hoax
Last week, an article published in the online outlet Areo revealed a hoax that involved ideologically motivated academics writing fake papers in the realms of what they characterized as “grievance studies,” and trying to place them in humanities journals—the idea being to demonstrate that such research is meaningless and not rigorous. Besides the fact that the hoaxsters were mostly unsuccessful in this endeavor—only four papers out of the twenty authored were published—the fact that this endeavor has been used as a tool to discredit a wide-range of scholarship in the realms of , inter alia,...
MbS made USCIRF smile: Gatekeepers and Norm Erosion
For many, Saudi Arabia finally went too far. Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi went missing after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul; reports suggest he may be dead. Pundits who gave Mohammed bin Salman—Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, also known as MbS—a chance to prove his reformist credentials have become critical. In the midst of all this, a commissioner of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom—(USCIRF) a government-affiliated human rights watchdog—announced…that Saudi Arabia is making great progress on protecting religious freedom? At first glance, this is confusing, but...
Welcome New Ducks
The school year is off to a great start, and we wanted to thank our previous slate of guest Ducks and welcome some new guests. Thanks to all of our guests from last year. Lisa Gaufman and Dillon Tatum are staying on as guests, and we are delighted that our partnership with Bridging the Gap will continue with the BtG channel. We also have a fantastic slate of new guests Ducks including Jill Hazelton, Peter Henne, Sahar Khan, Luke Perez, and Kai Thaler. We have a strong slate of security-minded guests this year. They cover a range of topics from counterinsurgency to religion and the Middle...
Ignorance of the Ivory Tower: What Do the Profs Know About the Military
I woke up to find a piece that castigates the academic world for being ignorant about the armed forces. My reaction was: I love how broad this brush is. "I talked to some folks who are profs and they say some dumb stuff, so let's suggest that this is a broader thing" Confirmation bias much? https://t.co/jWhcaniD2B — Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) September 20, 2018 Tom Ricks, who posted this questionable piece, pushed back: I'm throwing a penalty flag here, professor. If you think he is wrong, tell us why. Is he? https://t.co/bTvRQiMekX — Thomas E. Ricks (@tomricks1) September 20, 2018 I will...
Quack! Quack! Quack! A Call for New Guest Ducks
The fall semester is upon us, and with APSA in the rear view window, we’d like to bring on a new slate of guest Duck bloggers to continue to bring IR-related insights to bear on important real world problems, to explore important debates in the academy, and to do some professional introspection. We’re especially keen on having gender balance and increasing representation of voices from beyond North America and other important perspectives. Here is the general policy for guests and our wider set of policies (such as they are). Guest Bloggers: Guest Bloggers get posting privileges for a period...
The most frequently used ranking of IR journals is heterogeneous
This is a guest post by Andreas Pacher who initiated the Observatory of International Relations (OOIR), a website which tracks Political Science and IR journals to continually list their latest papers. Follow OOIR on Twitter: @ObserveIR. You may have noticed that the Impact Factors of IR journals are sometimes followed by a statement that it ranks “nth out of 85 journals in the category ‘International Relations’”. For instance, International Organization ranks “1st out of 85 journals in the category ‘International Relations’”, while Alternatives ranks “76 out of 85 journals in the category...