In Marvel comics and movies, Ant-Man is a super-hero who can change his size using a special suit and "Pym particles." When giant, he's...giant. But when he's tiny he keeps the same density as a regular human, giving him the ability to lift and move things much bigger...
This is a guest post by Manali Kumar, incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland). Her research focuses on prudence in statecraft, and India’s national identities and...
This is a guest post from Hina Khalid and Ashley Fox. Hina Khalid, PhD, MPP is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Information Technology University, Lahore,...
This post is part of the Bridging the Gap channel at the Duck. Danielle Gilbert is a PhD candidate in political science and a fellow with the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at the...
This is a guest post from Eric Van Rythoven (PhD) who teaches International Relations and Foreign Policy at Carleton University, Canada. His work has been published in Security Dialogue, European Journal of International Relations, and Journal of Global Security Studies, among others. He is the editor (with Mira Sucharov) of Methodology and Emotion in International Politics: Parsing the Passions (Routledge, 2019). As governments around the world grapple with the Covid-19 crisis several are reaching for the metaphor of war to convey the urgency and gravity surrounding the pandemic. ...
Last night, I taught another session of our Dissertation Proposal Workshop class, and the topic was the methodology section of one's proposal. That is, how am I going to research this question and how do I justify the choices I made? This is after going through the other pieces--the question, the proposed answer, what other folks have said about this or have said about other stuff that you want to bring to this project, the theory, and the hypotheses. How does one test the hypotheses was the question du jour (or nuit). Before I start, to be clear, no one should expect...
This is a guest post from Ben Bellows, PhD (UC Berkeley, epidemiology), currently a researcher at the Population Council in Washington DC and a co-founder and the Chief Business Officer at Nivi Inc., a digital health company empowering consumers in emerging markets. Nivi is supporting the COVID-19 response here. Background: the problem Disease outbreaks are as much a social phenomenon as a biological one. Rumor, innuendo, and public sentiment drive disease transmission dynamics. Covid-19 is no different; the fact checking website, Snopes.com, has a dedicated “covid-19” tag to run the...
Steve Saideman’s recent Duck piece on international relations scholars’ relative silence on issues of pandemics, and public health more generally, has ruffled feathers[1]and generated a lot of discussion: about marginalization of certain research outlets and methodologies, about the value of interdisciplinary work in a self-identifying-as-such-but-still-not-all-that-interdisciplinary discipline, and about what it means to say “IR as a field has little to say” vs. “individual IR scholars having said quite a bit.” This all hits pretty close to home. As an IR scholar whose main area of...
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to many useful discussions about public health, social responsibility, and tips for online learning. See the many great posts that have gone up here. One thing that hasn't been discussed enough, in my opinion, is work-life balance. Given all the pressures of the modern University, how do we ensure the expansive demands of remote learning don't swamp us and--for those of us with families--undermine our commitments to our kids or an equitable marriage? I'll start with my situation. My wife has been home with our kids (2&4) and was actually planning on going...
This is a guest post from Peter Verovšek, a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Politics/International Relations at the University of Sheffield The Coronavirus has turned us all into amateur epidemiologists. This desire for greater understanding makes sense in the face of a threat as novel and as dangerous as COVID-19. The shutdown of massive sections of the economy and state-mandated orders to engage in social – or, more accurately, physical – distancing has left the majority of us stuck at home, wondering when things will go back to normal and worrying that they never will. As a result of...
* I have changed the title as I got plenty of pushback on twitter--that there is plenty of IR on Pandemics, not just in the major journals. And I will add an update at the bottom later to address the criticisms later. People are wondering why there has not been much scholarship on the international relations of pandemics in the mainstream journals. out of curiosity, looked at how many times the term “pandemic” has appeared in top IR journalsIO: 0APSR: 0JCR: 0WP: 0AJPS: 3EJIR: 6JPR: 8JOP: 8IS: 13ISQ: 17— Seva (@SevaUT) March 15, 2020 Not a scientific survey of the literature, but it gives you...
This is a guest post from Karen A. Grépin, Associate Professor, School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong As cases of COVID-19 soar globally, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan have garnered accolades from the international community for having kept their epidemics relatively under control through mid-March - despite the incredible threat they all faced earlier in the year of imported cases from China. With all of the praise flowing to Hong Kong, one might expect citizens to also have good things to say about their government’s handling of the outbreak - but you would be wrong. In fact,...