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Academia
A Gilded Age of Social Science: Big Data Governance, Neopositivist Social Science and Covid-19
As an American living in London, I wake up every morning and check statistics: the number of positive cases reported the prior day in both the UK and US, the number of deaths, hospitalizations and...
Elite Experiments: Strengthening Scholarship while Bridging the Gap
This post was written by Simone Dietrich, Heidi Hardt and Haley J. Swedlund. Simone Dietrich is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the...
We want you to write for us!
This post from our partners at Bridging the Gap is written by BTG Fellows Danielle Gilbert and Erik Lin-Greenberg, who are now the new editors of the BTG Duck channel, coordinating contributions...
More Academia Posts
No Supply Without Demand: A Response to Stephen Walt
This is a guest post by Sarah Detzner, a Ph.D Candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Her research is focused on international security, particularly post-conflict stabilization/reconstruction and security sector reform. In addition, she serves as Director of the Fletcher Graduate Writing Program, as a Fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies and the Institute for Human Security, and as a consultant for the World Peace Foundation. Previously, she served in the Obama Administration as a speechwriter for former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, campaigned as an Obama 2008...
The Tyranny of the Big 3? Which Journals Count Most May Be Increasingly Problematic
In recent days, there has been much discussion about the so-called Big3 journals in Political Science: the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. Each is the standard-bearer journal for their respective associations--the American Political Science Association, the Midwest Political Science Association and the Southern Political Science Association. Over the years, these three journals have become seen as the most prominent journals in the discipline. For some American universities, for the purposes of hiring, tenure and...
Social Media is Bad For Your Career? Maybe Not, a 2018 Ignite Talk
Today, there was a twitter conversation about whether doing public engagement, especially blogging and twitter, are penalized or not. The timing is good since my Ignite talk at the Duckies was very much on this stuff. So, I thought I would share what I presented at the Online Media Caucus reception at the annual meeting of the ISA in San Francisco. The basic theme was: there are things people tell you not to do, so let me know show how I did them. I did start by acknowledging my privilege--that a white male straight tenured prof can get away with more stuff than other folks (thanks,...
What’s in a Syllabus? A New Dataset of Graduate School Readings in Political Science
This is a guest post by Heidi Hardt (University of California, Irvine) and Amy Erica Smith (Iowa State University) Syllabi and comprehensive exam reading lists are often graduate students’ first major exposure to political science. In the field of IR, they tell students what scholarship matters for the field and - by omission – what doesn’t matter quite as much. What students read as graduate students likely influences some of what they cite later in their academic careers. What then exactly is in these important documents? Our new dataset GRADS – the GRaduate Assignments DataSet aims to...
Reactionary World Politics
This is a guest post from Joseph MacKay, a Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations at Australian National University, and Christopher David LaRoche, a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. Growing nationalist and populist parties and movements across the developed West and elsewhere are prone to a common nostalgic rhetoric: the political consensus of recent decades has eroded national boundaries, traditions, and identities. The past, they argue, was better than the present. And what is most needful now is a return to that...
Academic (S)mothering
As a new mother of a baby boy I am enjoying a slightly different kind of golden shower than Donald Trump. So, between the 3 AM feeding and 4 AM diaper change I was scrolling through Twitter and stumbled on news about the Stanford white sausage fest that somehow qualified as a conference on applied history. Niall Ferguson managed to organize a conference and not feature a single woman or person of color. Let me walk you through some thoughts about why there aren’t more women in (political) science. I should note right away I am speaking from a place of relative (white) privilege. I do not...
The State of the Field in Climate and Security
After nearly fifteen years of study, what do we know about the relationship between climate change and security? I recently attended a Woodrow Wilson Center event organized by the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) on the state of the field. Along with Geoff Dabelko, Halvard Buhaug, and Sherri Goodman, I offered my take on the field (the video is embedded below). In this blog post, I wanted to focus on five different causal pathways that I think represent the frontier of research on the study of climate and conflict, which include agricultural production and food prices, economic growth,...
Pinker’s Enlightenment and Liberal World Order
“There is not one civilized nation in the world that ought to rejoice in seeing India escape from the hands of Europe in order to fall back into a state of anarchy and barbarism worse than before the conquest.” ~Alexis de Tocqueville, in correspondence with William Nassau Senior in 1857, regarding the Sepoy Rebellion in India. Psychologist Steven Pinker’s new book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, has caused quite a stir. The book itself provides the reader with an optimistic narrative about how the contemporary period is the best time to be a human;...