The Duck of Minerva

Alexis Henshaw

Recent Posts

Let’s Talk About Contingency (Part 2)

by | 8 March, 2017 | ,

In my previous post, I started a discussion about full-time contingent faculty in the profession. Given that contingent faculty work is very much gendered, I wanted to continue that discussion today with a focus on how the discipline at large can better serve the growing ranks of faculty working off the tenure track. Most of the data I presented in my last post came from the American Political Science Association (APSA) and examined the outcomes for job-seekers on the U.S. job market. As you may recall, one of the big takeaways was that early career scholars on the job market are now more...

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Let’s Talk About Contingency

by | 16 February, 2017 | ,

Ah, the spring semester: When the thoughts of many turn to the promise of summer, while the thoughts of panicked ABDs turn to the question of what they’re going to be doing beyond the end of this academic year.   Right on schedule, the jobs boards are filling up with this year’s crop of “visiting” professor positions--inviting young (and not-so-young) ABDs and early-career faculty to gamble on a choice that will uproot their lives without any promise of permanent or even long-term employment. Having spent my early career off the tenure track, I wanted to take this opportunity to make a...

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El Salvador’s Restless Peace at 25

by | 17 January, 2017 |

Amidst all the political drama this week, one could be forgiven for not noting the 25th anniversary of the Chapultepec Peace Agreement. Chapultepec was the agreement that brought a negotiated end to El Salvador’s civil war, a 12-year conflict between a repressive military government and leftist rebels united under the banner of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The Salvadoran conflict was notable for its tremendous human cost. By the conflict’s end, over a million people had been internally displaced or fled abroad and an estimated 75,000 Salvadorans were killed, many of...

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No More Vietnams? Reforming the Selective Service

by | 8 December, 2016 |

When I was young, I dreamed of Italy. Once in a while, my father would pull out the slide projector and show us pictures from his life on a mountain near Colle Isarco, not far from Italy’s border with Austria. He taught me to speak a little in both Italian and German, which I loved. My father, though, is not Italian, and his sojourn at a mountaintop telecom site (still the only time he’s ever been outside North America) came all-expenses-paid courtesy of the U.S. Air Force, which he joined after being drafted during the Vietnam War. That period of conscription, which ended in 1973, was the...

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