The way that APSA leaders handled the Claremont Institute situation was troubling… will APSA, as an organization, be committed to some broadly liberal democratic values?
The way that APSA leaders handled the Claremont Institute situation was troubling… will APSA, as an organization, be committed to some broadly liberal democratic values?
As I was traveling back from APSA on Sunday, I completed all of the journal reviews that I had on my desk, ran some regressions for new projects, and then completed all the revisions my coauthors...
Well, the main APSA hotel at the Marriott last night caught fire last night in what might be an act of arson, but we really don't know. For those of us staying at the Marriott, we awoke at 1am to...
I'm sure most of you have seen this nice Change.Org petition concerning the dates of the annual APSA meeting.  I really like all the reasons given for changing the date of the meeting and am glad we...
So, I ran into Dan Drezner in the trendy-food part of the West Loop in Chicago tonight, as you do when you are at APSA. Dan asked if I was planning to respond to his post on networking, which is critical of my earlier post. Honestly, it was not high on my agenda, but who can resist networking as a motivation to write a post on networking? In my post, I suggest that networking can have efficiency, career opportunity, and political benefits, with the caveat that it is not easy, does not always come naturally, and can actually be harmful if it goes awry. Dan suggests that neither myself nor...
In my grad class every semester, I always ask the students if IR is really the best field for studying human security. Undoubtedly, I get some students who respond that political science is the best discipline and IR is the best field – or even the only field – to really study human security. However, I usually also get a large minority of the students who acknowledge off the bat that most of the phenomena we study could be similarly examined in other social sciences or  -gasp!- could even be looked at by people in the humanities. This is definitely the case for the study of human security...
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, Professor and Department Chair of Political Science at the University of Iowa. It is Part 1 of a 2-part discussion. Many recent posts (e.g., posts here by David Lake, Dan Nexon, and Laura Sjoberg, and elsewhere by Christian Davenport and Steve Saideman) have discussed professional networking in political science. Given my belief that academic experiences are not universal, a viewpoint articulated by Will Moore (https://willopines.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/some-dimensions-over-which-the-return-to-networking-is-not-uniform/), I...
It’s almost APSA time and it seems all my friends are busy planning really wonderful sporting engagements for times they aren’t in panels. This always puts me in a bind – I thought we became academics because we were bad at sports! I can’t throw a Frisbee and soccer requires too much coordination. So, I’ve compiled a list of the fun and somewhat aerobic things I plan to do at APSA, none of which require much coordination but all of which provide some thrill if carried out correctly: Push all the buttons in the Palmer House Hilton elevator. Bonus points for doing this 5 minutes before a...
If you belong to APSA, you probably got the email announcing the last-minute closure of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute because of the Coburn (left) amendment. Undergraduate programming like this is obviously pretty vulnerable. It doesn’t have the cachet of high-profile, ‘big think’ research. But it does obviously endanger the discipline in the long-term by cutting into our future replacements (almost certainly one purpose of the amendment). It would be no surprise if some of this summer’s bright students got turned off our discipline because of these shenanigans, or missed a seminar or...
With respect to my prior post....In all seriousness, it would not be difficult to do the following:Put up presentations as, say, 10 minute m4a files -- straight audio, audio with slides added by hand, or audio-video derived from lecture-capture applications;Post audio comments from discussants, their notes, or both;Associate them all with a dedicated feed or feeds; andProvide a place for listeners to comment on each virtual panel.We could do this at the Duck. We could create a dedicated blog. We could impress upon APSA that this might make a worthwhile experiment and that they should host...
I skipped APSA this year in favor of BISA/ISA. In fact, I haven't renewed my membership this year.Still, I wonder if we can't make lemons out of lemonade.How about a virtual APSA? If you are an IR/CP scholar who has bailed on APSA let us know (in comments) and consider posting an abstract of your presentation.Heck, if there's enough interest maybe people can make power points available for discussion.UPDATE: it appears that virtual is the only option (I retain the lovely yellow from the apsanet.org site).2012 APSA Annual Meeting Canceled President G. Bingham Powell announces the cancellation...
THE CANARD "All the fake news that's fit to print." --New Orleans The god of tolerance struck down with fury yesterday, unleashing a mighty hurricane headed for New Orleans that forced the American Political Science Association to cancel the first day of its annual conference. The organization had thumbed its nose at the god, choosing to convene their enormous meeting in a city that is in a state that discriminates against gays and lesbians by refusing them the right to marriage. Now it appears they will suffer the consequences. With its short courses shelved, a year’s worth of knowledge...