Professor Jarrod Hayes joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Jarrod was born in Colorado, but moved to Utah at a young age and grew up there for a bit before relocating with his mother to just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. In high school, he found he enjoyed doing...
PTJ and Dan discuss Cynthia Weber’s 1994 book, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State an…
The blogosphere peaked somewhere in the mid-2000s, so why would anyone start blogging in 2023?
Professor Debbie Lisle of Queens University, Belfast, grew up in North Vancouver, in an environment of 'liberal feminism' which gave her a sense of possibility in life, but it was an...
Musgrave’s identification of dangerous ideas is correct, but his metaphor risks entrenching the fundamental problem: the (inevitable) weaponization of “scientific objectivity.”
Perhaps the problem isn’t that theories leak from the lab, but efforts to seal the lab in the first place. If political scientists spent more time observing the policy world, me might get both better and more careful theories in the first place.
Political Science isn’t sterile laboratory. The discipline is riddled with politics and deeply influenced by policy concerns.
Some political-science lab leaks are more difficult to control than others.
Paul Musgrave has written an important piece discussing how ideas developed within academia can have profoundly negative effects when they escape into the wild of the policymaking world. For someone like me who has been involved for many years in the Bridging the Gap project, whose goal is to better connect academics and policymakers, this argument is important and cautionary. (In addition to Musgrave’s recent Foreign Policy piece, Michael Desch provides a long and extensive history of academic ideas leading to bad policy in his book The Cult of the Irrelevant.) I was...
Today we're kicking off a new symposium on Paul Musgrave's Foreign Policy article, "Political Science Has Its Own Lab Leaks." In it, Musgrave likens academic disciplines to labs; academic theories that exercise political influence, in his metaphor, are like viruses. Perhaps, his piece suggests, international-relations scholars should exercise a bit more caution in their drive to “bridge the gap” between theory and policy. The contributors to the symposium include scholars who share an interest in, and experience with, the relationship between international-relations scholarship and the...
What we know about reputation and credibility doesn’t track with the claims of doomsayers. But it also doesn’t accord with those who argue that there’s “nothing to see here.”
We’re in the middle of a political struggle to define “defeat” in Afghanistan. What does that mean?