A distinctly unoriginal take on the pathologies of overvaluing academic “novelty.”
Get off my lawn! Are journal demands for “novelty” creating a culture of low-level academic dishonesty?
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Academia
Elite Experiments: Strengthening Scholarship while Bridging the Gap
This post was written by Simone Dietrich, Heidi Hardt and Haley J. Swedlund. Simone Dietrich is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the...
We want you to write for us!
This post from our partners at Bridging the Gap is written by BTG Fellows Danielle Gilbert and Erik Lin-Greenberg, who are now the new editors of the BTG Duck channel, coordinating contributions...
Is “Camp Qual” really our best option?
This is a guest response to Simon Frankel Pratt's musing on methods. Lucas Dolan is a PhD Candidate at American University's School of International Service. In a recent contribution, Simon Frankel...
More Academia Posts
On Writing the IR Dissertation
Partly in response to Steve Saideman’s post today with advice on dissertation topics, and partly also in response to a pretty enthusiastic discussion of advice to graduate students on Twitter yesterday, I thought I’d write a few things about getting started on the path of researching a dissertation in a field as unwieldy (and a job market as uncertain) as IR. Here is where my perspective comes from. I finished my dissertation in 2016 and got a job. I am preparing to have a publishable version of the book emerging from the dissertation ready to market to publishers in the next few months. I...
Beware of Irrelevant Topic? Advising Phd Students to Surf the Wave
In the past couple of days, an academic issue has played out on twitter: are advisers doing a disservice to students and to the creation of knowledge by warning them off of topics that are deemed less relevant, less in the moment? Damned if I know. On the one hand, I have heard plenty of tales of former/current students elsewhere that say that they were interested in a topic, but their adviser told them it was not so relevant or interesting, and then the world changed. One reason I don't remember telling students not to do a topic (besides the fact that I have a lousy memory) is that I am...
Happy New Year
If anybody is planning to collude with some Russians for New Year's (but not in order to swing an election), I compiled a brief checklist. Originally, I wanted to take apart an article from a prestigious newspaper that described "a Christmas encounter with a Russian soul", but then I decided against it. After all, if you don't buy "the case for colonialism", then you probably also won't think that "Russians do not share the ethical heritage of the West, but moral intuition exists everywhere, and is able to be inspired". But enough with the narcissistic white bigotry, let's learn about...
2018 Duckies
This is a guest post from Laura Seay, among other things chair of the Online Media Caucus for ISA. It’s Duckies time! ISA 2018 is right around the corner. The Online Achievement in International Studies Reception and Awarding of the Duckies will take place on Friday, April 6 at 7:30pm. We’ll feature three speakers in the ever-popular Ignite series and enjoy honoring our winners together. The ISA Online Media Caucus (OMC) appreciates the generous support of SAGE Publishing in sponsoring the awards. Now is the time to submit your nominations for the 2018 Duckies. Send your nominations...
The emperor has no clothes moment for realism
Earlier this month the Washington Post ran a piece detailing increased efforts by Charles Koch’s eponymous foundation (hereafter CKF) to fund foreign policy programs in the United States (h/t to Josh for posting to Twitter). Notwithstanding one’s perspective on the Koch brothers’ politics, increased money for academia is a good thing, right? And all the CKF wants is to “ask questions about America’s proper role in the world and how we move forward”…to ‘broaden the debate’ about US foreign policy. All noble aims, and so I am sure the CKF is distributing money to institutions large and small...
Pondering Planet Politics: A Response to Peltonen
I was fascinated by a brilliantly written, and well-thought out, guest post here on Duck, by Hannes Peltonen, posted over the weekend. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, you won’t be disappointed. Peltonen presents an argument that digs into recent debates about the seemingly ubiquitous “anthropocene” and its relationship to world politics—and particularly the ways that IR theory should approach issues relating to humankind’s interconnectedness with natural/planetary processes. I’d like to take the opportunity to engage with Peltonen’s argument, with an eye toward extending the...
The ultimate guide to stop procrastination
I must confess. I have not been very productive this last month in the Duck of Minerva. I have been thinking about the topic for my next post and postponing it “till tomorrow”. I have been procrastinating. Procrastination comes from the Latin pro, meaning “forward, forth, or in favor of,” and crastinus, meaning “of tomorrow”. The Oxford English Dictionary defines procrastination as a postponement, "often with the sense of deferring though indecision, when early action would have been preferable," or as "defer[ing] action, especially without good reason." According to psychologist Pychyl,...
Contentious Politics on College Campuses: Where does Political Science fit in?
This is a co-authored post with Carrie Booth Walling, Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at Albion College. She is the author of All Necessary Measures: the United Nations and Humanitarian Intervention and articles on human rights trials, mass atrocity crimes, and the Security Council. About a year ago, we started having frequent, intense conversations about how we could most effectively respond to increasing political polarization, heightened racial tensions, and recent bias incidents on our college campuses. The more we talked, the more we realized that political...