It’s no surprise that current events regularly lead us to update our syllabi. That doesn’t mean we can’t make “surprise” an important feature of our courses.
Our syllabi should be full of surprises
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Academia
Is there a middle ground in the study of ideas in international relations?
I'm working on a new project about the use of religion in power politics (part of which I'll be presenting "at" APSA this week). I'm finding good evidence, but the framing is tricky. Religion as a...
Teaching Race and International Politics: Notes from a Canadian Classroom
Eric Van Rythoven (PhD) is an Instructor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His research focuses on the intersection between the politics of...
We all suffer if the field is parochial
David C. Kang is Maria Crutcher Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the Korean Studies Institute. His latest book, coedited with...
More Academia Posts
Jolie-Pitt, Trump and Bono Walk Into a LSE Classroom: why dedication and commitment isn’t expertise
Oh man, I really didn't want to write about Angelina Jolie Pitt  (AJP) and her damn LSE appointment. When I heard the news it just made me feel tired. But there has been an interesting/frustrating  debate emerging and I just can't keep my yap shut- even on maternity leave. In his post on the topic, Dan Drezner asks us to all calm the F down; he assures us that policy schools have always been opportunistic and brought in pretty unqualified but interesting folks to teach (well, he sort of says that). The Aidnography post, Why you should be critical of Professor Angelina Jolie Pitt's LSE gig...
Selling Out to the Enemy of Open Access
Yesterday, news quickly spread that the Social Science Research Network was bought by Elsevier. This quickly caused an uproar on twitter. Why? The SSRN was established to provide a place for social scientists to share their work in progress. Elsevier is one of the most rapacious rent-seeking profitable publishers of academic journals. Elsevier charges large amounts of money to universities so that universities can provide access to bundles of journals (the de-bundling movement in cable might remind folks that bundling is not an altruistic strategy by those facing little competition). ...
Whose Academy Is It Anyway?
Recently there has been a lot of talk about one of those issues academics (at least in the U.S.) obsess about: how to get tenure and the job security as well as license to (supposedly) speak truth to power that comes with it. This round of conversations started when Stephen Walt gave some, rather generic, advice in his Foreign Policy piece "How to Get Tenure". As a long-time professor at Harvard, Walt certainly has experience - but with a very particular kind of (highly privileged) institution and hence, while not wrong per se, his advice certainly is limited in a number of ways. One such...
So, You Want to be a Liberal Arts College Professor: Life inside the Liberal Arts edition, Part II
[Note: This is the second of two guest posts on life in the Liberal Arts Colleges from Sarah Stroup and Amy Yuen, both Associate Professors of Political Science, Middlebury College] According to the 2014 TRIP survey, at least one in six IR faculty in the United States teach at a liberal arts college.[1] If you want one of those jobs, how do you get it? In this second post (part I here), we identify a few steps, gathered based on our own experiences and those of colleagues at other colleges, that are likely to help you in the liberal arts pool. There are at least three things to know about...
Adaptability or Compliance? Modular Weapons and the Rules of International Law
As many who read this blog will note, I am often concerned with the impact of weapons development on international security, human rights and international law.  I’ve spent much time considering whether autonomous weapons violate international law, or will run us head long into arms races, or will give some incentives to oppress their peoples.  Recently, however, I’ve started to think a bit less about future (autonomous) weapons and a bit more about new configurations of existing (semi-autonomous) weapons, and what those new configurations may portend.  One article that came out...
8 Strategies For Men To Combat Gender Bias
This is a guest post by Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham (@kgcunnin), Associate Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. Foreign Policy recently published our article on women and the tenure process in International Relations. The article centers on the challenges women face and offers some suggestions on how to manage them for pre-tenure women based on our experiences. We conclude the article, in part, with a call to allies (i.e. people who are not, or are no longer, affected by these biases or are in a position to address them). Here, I offer 8 ways that such...
Distance and Death: Lethal Autonomous Weapons and Force Protection
In 1941 Heinrich Himmler, one of the most notorious war criminals and mass murders, was faced with an unexpected problem: he could not keep using SS soldiers to murder the Jewish population because the SS soldiers were  breaking psychologically.  As August Becker, a member of the Nazi gas-vans, recalls, “Himmler wanted to deploy people who had become available as a result of the suspension of the euthanasia programme, and who, like me, were specialists in extermination by gassing, for the large-scale gassing operations in the East which were just beginning. The reason for this was that the...
Tweeted and Deleted by APSA: Gender and Race in the Academy
I’ve been wanting to write a Duck post about the experience of a woman with visible minority status in IR for quite some time now. I was waiting for the right moment. So thanks to the American Political Science Association (APSA), the professional association for US-trained political scientists, the moment has come. Yesterday morning, an email came from a friend with a screenshot. The screenshot showed an attractive Asian woman in a frilly top who looks like she’s having a good time looking into the camera. I was confused. Then I read the blurb next to it: this was a promotion from...