This post would be much more interesting if it concerned the nexus of its three subjects. Sadly, it does not. I'm working on a forum piece with Vincent Pouliot on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) -- one written from the explicit perspective of outsiders. We've been puzzled...
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I am now chief interviewer for the New Books Network's SF and Fantasy channel. I've got some exciting authors lined up for launch, and a few more who have agreed to...
 This is a guest post by Michael C. Horowitz, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.Who can see the future? For us mere mortals, it’s hard, even for so-called...
I could use some help. As I did in the spring, I'm teaching a seminar on "Science Fiction and Politics." I'm working on some significant changes to the syllabus. The class will now meet twice a...
I'm looking for good histories of Taiwan; I'm particularly interested in political histories.Cross-posted, in various forms, at Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.
My big work-related task this month is to pull together my focus group findings into something approximating a theoretically relevant conference paper. I like to start with visualizations.This chart is derived from a code scheme we developed to categorize human security practitioners' responses in focus groups to the question: what factors facilitate or inhibit the emergence of new issues on global policy agenda? Answers fell into five broad buckets, and this is an overview of the contents of the various buckets and how they relate to one another and to the extent literature on advocacy...
I've been doing some car shopping this past week and it appears as if one of the best bargains around is the 2010 Nissan Altima Hybrid. The base car's invoice price is a bit less than $26,000. However, Nissan is offering $5000 (!!) cash back in some areas of the country -- $4000 that has been available for many months, $500 that is a generic Nissan incentive over the next month, and $500 more for the holiday weekend. That means that
At the invitation of an old friend, my daughter and I will be traveling to Thailand the first two weeks of July, and I've been commanded to bring only vacation reading. It's been awhile since I did any of that and I could use suggestions for humorous, smart, non-war-crimes related non-fiction or other good beach reads.In the past I've enjoyed humorous science writing like Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; funny, twisted memoirs like Augusten Buroughs' Running With Scissors or Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle or social-science-for-laypersons books like More Sex is...
It may come as a surprise to you that, having spent most of my career in a policy school, I have never taught a doctoral seminar surveying the field of IR theory. Until now. Frankly, I'm pretty daunted by trying to squeeze the empirical, substantive, methodological, epistemological and theoretical complexity of the entire field into a semester. I've settled on making sure they have a basic foundation on which to begin the IR comp reading list: a grasp of relevant international history, parameters of debate between major theoretical schools, familiarity with the substance of the key...