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Academia
Fare thee Well Sean Kay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKQ4-AHgFEs I opened up my twitter feed two weeks ago to some terrible news: our friend Sean Kay died suddenly. I literally cried out "Oh no" and wept for my friend....
Can IR Have Its Own “Big 3” Journals?
This is a guest post by Krista Wiegand, Director of the Global Security Program at the Howard Baker Center for Public Policy and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of...
Ignoble Lies? The Problem of Prosocial Lying in the Economics Profession
Photo credit: pixy.org under Creative Commons license. This is a guest post by George DeMartino, professor of international economics at the Josef Korbel School of International...
More Academia Posts
Are You Ready for Some ISA?
Many of us are Baltimore bound for ISA, and other than the Duckies this Thursday night, what are you looking forward to? What panels, receptions, events, new books have caught your attention? Mike Horowitz winning the Karl Deutsch prize? PRIO folks, Ida Rudolfsen and runner-up Jonas Nordkvell, winning the Jacek Kugler paper award on demography and geography for work on food price shocks and unrest and rainfall and conflict? Exciting stuff. (I mostly want to use this post to test our new Facebook auto-post image, but serious responses, including self-nominations most welcome). I've got an...
Fighting, Dancing and Thumb-Biting: Developing a typology of citations
This is a guest post by Paul Beaumont, PhD Candidate at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). Previously, he worked as an academic writing advisor at NMBU and as a Junior Research Fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI). Some time ago, back when Duckpods still happened, Nicholas Onuf talked to Dan Nexon about the impact of World of Our Making (WOOM). Onuf’s masterpiece is rightly credited with founding Constructivism in International Relations. Yet as the two reflected upon the course 1990s constructivism embarked upon, Onuf acknowledged that his...
Perverse Incentives and Academia
What's wrong with the current use of metrics in academia? This is the best summary that I've ever seen. Here's the horrifying key table from the paper Siddhartha Roy co-authored on perverse incentives in academia. #AAASmtg pic.twitter.com/sdrUlPmXs7 — Mike 48% Tⓐylor (@MikeTaylor) February 18, 2017 I will be discussing the publishing part of the equation on my Saturday panel at ISA.
Academic Freedom
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017 President Trump tweeted this on Friday. Even before he issued this egregious tweet, I had prepared a thread on Twitter of my observations from a recent trip to DC. This builds on my post from earlier in the week on how to defend democracy from the perch of the Ivory Tower. After my trip to DC, it occurred to me that academics, particularly tenured ones, have the freedom to resist this administration and speak out in...
Let’s Talk About Contingency
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...
Trump and Truth: Or What Arendt Can Teach Us about Truth and Politics
Today’s revelation that Mike Flynn resigned from his post as National Security Advisor is another strong sign that the struggle between Truth and Politics is not a foregone conclusion. Indeed, we ought to actually celebrate the fact that when Flynn lied about speaking with the Russian ambassador, and the lie was made public, he was forced to resign. This victory notwithstanding, we still must be extremely vigilant against the Trump administration’s attack on Truth. For the administration apparently knew that he lied some time ago, and it was only with increased public scrutiny that Flynn...
Defending Democracy from the Ivory Tower
What is the role of the academic in defending democracy at a moment like this? I am 46 years old and have lived through some politically searing times in U.S. and world history, but the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States feels different. It feels like an existential threat to world order and American democracy like nothing else. It has turned all of us in to news junkies hanging on every inflammatory, norms-busting tweet from POTUS at the expense of productivity and mental health. This is not about partisanship. It is about country (if you are American) over...
Trump Wants People to “Study the World!” IR Scholars Can Jump All over This.
"Study the world!" brayed Trump on Twitter last week, in defense of his travel ban. Dan Drezner, who studies the world for a living, shot back: "I have studied it, and I can tell you with some certainty that your words and actions have harmed US national security." On Facebook, I've seen friends and colleagues with PhDs in international relations post their own versions of Dan's tweet: Andrew Moravcsik: "I have studied the world, and people who say they are going to change history generally repeat it." Richard Price: "Those who seek power by dividing ultimately succumb to those who unite to...