It’s no surprise that current events regularly lead us to update our syllabi. That doesn’t mean we can’t make “surprise” an important feature of our courses.
Our syllabi should be full of surprises
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Academia
Want to Improve Equity and Inclusion in Political Science? Address White Supremacy
Last week, the American Political Science Association released a milquetoast statement on the January 6 white supremacist attack at the U.S. Capitol that got buried in the onslaught of news...
Uncomfortable Conversations at a Distance: Lessons from Teaching the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Daniel J. Levine is Aaron Aronov Associate Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Alabama, where he divides his time between the Departments of Political Science and Religious...
On Inconvenient Findings
This post was written by Marie Berry and Milli Lake, co-founders and principal investigators of the Women’s Rights After War Project. Dr. Berry is Associate Professor at the Josef Korbel School of...
More Academia Posts
Preparing Files for Reappointment and Tenure: Some Sharp Guidance
This is a guest post by James Goldgeier, Professor of International Relations and former Dean at the School of International Service at American University, building on a twitter thread that addressed tenure and reappointment and the narratives people write that go into their packages. At many universities, the end of summer marks the beginning of the internal review process for faculty on the tenure track. (Most departments and schools sent condensed faculty files out for external review earlier.) Some scholars have two reappointment reviews before coming up for tenure, usually in their...
Calling New Ducks
As the fall semester approaches, we're looking for a few good Ducks. 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...
Two legs or One. It has nothing to do with planets- just pants.
Sometimes when we look for a rallying call to join us as humans around a common cause or to show us our equal vulnerability, we say these trite sayings like “ Common-sense says that all men put their pants on one leg at a time.” This is supposed to reassure us that we are all equal in the most “animalistic” of ways (because you know, animals wear pants). Here is the problem and the reality though: I cannot buy jeans that are not skinny jeans... shocking. What does that mean for the one-leg mantra? Well… as a woman- and a woman living in a world that tells most women that they have to be...
In Memorium: Peter Berger (1929-2017)
In a 2014 interview, Nick Onuf argued that IR has lost coherence as a field and should instead be considered “as a species of social relations and [to] abandon IR theory for social theory.” Were that to be the case, the work of Peter Berger would certainly contend for space at the top of the list of required reading. Berger, who passed away late last month, is well known to constructivist (and sympathetic) scholars for his 1966 book co-authored with Thomas Luckmann The Social Construction of Reality. That book, named by the International Sociological Association as the fifth most influential...
Gauging Public Opinion in the Age of Trump
This a guest post from Robert M. Eisinger, a political science professor at Roger Williams University. He is the author of The Evolution of Presidential Polling (Cambridge University Press). Many of us recall reading the website 538 just prior to election day, and noted that there was a 71.4% probability that Hillary Clinton would garner more than 270 Electoral College votes than Donald Trump. Despite Secretary Clinton’s amassing 2.9 million more popular votes, Mr. Trump won the Electoral College and the presidency. The liberals and progressives’ zeitgeist had been disrupted and dislocated....
Writing Women Back In
This is a guest post from Anjali K. Dayal (Assistant Professor, Fordham University), Madison V. Schramm (PhD Candidate, Georgetown University), Alexandra M. Stark (PhD Candidate, Georgetown University) The gender citation gap in international relations is an important part of today’s disciplinary conversations about diversity: research indicates that scholarship by women is less cited in academic articles; less likely to be cited by men; less likely to appear on graduate course syllabi, especially in courses with male instructors; and less likely to appear in media reports about politics....
Emancipation through Song: What Can We Learn from Rock Music?
This is a guest post from Sean Kay, Robson Professor of Politics and Government, and Director of International Studies, at Ohio Wesleyan University. The interview quotes appear in his new book Rockin’ the Free World! How the Rock & Roll Revolution Changed America and the World (2017). There is power in rock and roll – an art form that has modernized American values and helped them to ripple around the world – advancing freedom, equality, human rights, and peace. Over the last several years I was fortunate to interview about sixty major rock and roll artists, songwriters, producers,...
Further Thoughts on Autism in Academia
This is a guest post from Brendan Szendro, a PhD Student in Political Science, Binghamton University and follows a previous post on the topic of autism On April 19, William H. Moore, a Political Science professor with what he termed “borderline Autism,” committed suicide after writing a lengthy note on his blog. In it, he detailed his frustrations with his perennial outsider status, his inability to communicate his talents professionally, accusations of arrogance by those around him and the fact that he had a strong desire to produce more than he consumed, but no longer found joy in...