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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Recent Posts
Episode 3: Catherine Sanger
Catherine Sanger talks about the challenges and opportunities of moving teaching online.
Public Health and Religious Freedom in Korea’s COVID-19 Response: A Government Torn between Two Values
This is a guest post from Yongjin Choi, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Public Administration at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany. His research...
Emerging Lessons from the South Korean Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic
This is a guest post from Heeun Kim, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Public Administration at Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany. Her research focusses...
More Recent Posts
New Subnational African Education and Infrastructure Dataset
Todd Smith, Anustubh Agnihotri, and I have put together a new resource of subnational education and infrastructure access indicators for Africa, released as part of the Climate Change and Africa Political Stability (CCAPS) program at the University of Texas. This dataset provides data on literacy...
What are the “Big Issues” of International Politics, and How Should Journals Address Them?
A common complaint among international-relations scholars is that our journals don't sufficiently engage with big, new, and pressing issues of world politics. Those that do, on the other hand, often get criticized for a lack of rigor. I've made this complaint before, in the context of the...
Tiwesdæg: the Left-hand of Linkage
Just a handful of things today.... Michael Krepon: "inferred vs. demonstrable deterrence." Election fraud, the 1862 election, and the outcome of the Civil War. Matt Fay likes the new Lieber and Press article on nuclear terrorism. "Prisoner's Dilemma" is a metaphor, but I suppose it was only a...
About Those Israel Academic Study Trips…
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Kavita Khory, Professor of Political Science at Mount Holyoke College. Last spring the Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) of Boston invited me to participate in a weeklong study tour to Israel. Designed for scholars of international relations, political...
Mechanical Turk and Experiments in the Social Sciences
Amazon created a platform called Mechanical Turk that allows Requesters to create small tasks (Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs) that Workers can perform for an extremely modest fee such as 25 or 50 cents per task.* Because the site can be used to collect survey data, it has become a boon for...
Thinking About the Seven Year Post-Doc
This piece is really interesting. It is written by Radhika Nagpal who was on the tenure track at Harvard but treated the experience like a seven year post-doc. That is, she didn't focus on what it took to get tenure there, because, well, most folks don't get tenure. Instead, Nagpal focused on...
The Interdisciplinarity Shibboleth: Christakis Edition
Andrew Gelman provides a nice rejoinder to Nicholas Christakis' New York Times op-ed, "Let's Shake up the Social Sciences." Fabio Rojas scores the exchange for Christakis, but his commentators provide convincing rebuttals to Rojas. Once again, I suspect reactions to the column are driven by...
Tobias Gibson Reviews The Thistle and the Drone
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Tobias Gibson of Westminster College. In recent days, there have been reports of U.S. drone strikes in North Waziristan, Pakistan. According to the New York Times article, these strikes killed at least two people. This remote area of Pakistan has long been...
How Would Al Gore Have Fought the Iraq War?
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Elizabeth Saunders who is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. In this year of Iraq-related anniversaries, this summer marks the 10-year anniversary of the emergence of the insurgency, when many Americans realized the...
Monday Morning Linkage
Good morning... Salman Adil Hussain reviews Deepa Kumar's Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire. Hussain writes, "Kumar shines a bright light on liberal Islamophobia, and shows how the Obama administration’s emphasis on homegrown terrorism generated a lot of talk about ‘terrorists in our midst’...
First-World Nerd Problems: A Nintendo 3DS Bleg
Last week I purchased a Nintendo handheld (on steep discount) for the express purpose of playing Okamiden. Okami is one of my most favoritist games evah; even though Okamiden is basically more of the same, I'm cool with that. Yesterday we had to buy off the wee one--we did, in fact, have a pretty...
Posthumous Justice
My initial reaction is that this is a spot of good news: Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker who took his own life after being convicted of gross indecency under anti-homosexuality legislation, is to be given a posthumous pardon. The government signalled on Friday that it is prepared to support a...