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Academia
Visualizing the Gender Publication Gap: 1999-2019
This is a guest post from Laura Breen, a PhD student with research interests in international law, global governance, and emerging technology; Gaea Morales, a PhD student with research interests in...
Will Eastern Mediterranean tensions matter to IR if there is no war?
We open each of my undergrad classes with a discussion of current events. In the past four years, there have been several times that students have wondered whether a war may be about to break out:...
Meet Our Guest Ducks (Again)
With the coronavirus, it has been hard for many of us to just keep going, let alone set aside time to blog (certainly not as much as we otherwise might!). So, we wanted to acknowledge that by giving...
More Academia Posts
Climate Change and #APSA2016
With the G20 set to commence in Hangzhou, the United States and China today ratified the Paris Agreement, making it increasingly likely that it will enter into force by year's end. This is a momentous occasion in climate diplomacy and speaks to the increasing political salience of this topic. Yesterday, here at APSA, there was a fantastic roundtable on what political science has to say about this issue. The roundtable included some of the leading up and coming scholars writing about climate change including Jennifer Hadden, Johannes Urpelainen, Jessica Green, David Konisky, and Steven...
Twitter auto-post attempt #2
Are we in business? Believe so. See you at APSA. Join us for the Tweetup!
APSA Tweetup
As has become a tradition, political scientists who are active on twitter are meeting up at the APSA: Thursday, 7pm at Pennsylvania 6, a nearby bar. The idea is to get a chance to chat with people you may "know" online but have not met in person. I hope to see you there.
Improvised Explosive Robots
A common argument made in favor of the use of robotics to deliver (lethal) force is that the violence used is mediated in such a way that it naturally de-escalates a situation. In some versions, this is due to the fact that the “robot doesn’t feel emotions,” and so is not subject to fear or anger. In other strands, the argument is that due to distance in time and space, human operators are able to take in more information and make better judgments, including to use less than lethal or nonlethal force. These debates have, up until now, mostly occurred with regards to armed conflict. ...
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...