The following is a guest post by Cullen Hendrix of the University of Denver. If you’ve read or seen Moneyball, the following anecdote will be familiar to you: Baseball is a complex sport requiring a diverse, often hard-to-quantify[1] skillset. Before the 2000s, baseball talent scouts relied heavily on a variety of heuristics marked by varying degrees of sanity: whether the player had a toned physique, whether the player had an attractive...
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Open Foreign Policy Thread Tonight on GOP Debate
I will be live-tweeting the foreign policy dimensions of the GOP debate tonight here. Readers may want to chime in here on this open thread with the pre-, during, and post-debate reactions. It may be the silly season in the GOP primary, but with the Iran deal pending before Congress, these are consequential times. Yesterday, I live tweeted President Obama's address on Iran and will be synthesizing my observations on the deal and the politics...
The Duck-Cat of Minerva
I want readers to know that I would never, ever link to a Buzzfeed video. Unless, of course, the video included footage of Ifrit. He receives about three seconds of fame — starting at about a minute in. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP8RbfSgZtw
Gearing Yourself Up For the Academic Job Market: Before You Go on the Market
In our last installment, I indicated that this edition of Gearing Yourself Up would include a discussion of how to put together your job market packet. I think I jumped-the-gun a bit, however. Before putting together your packet, before trying to log on to APSA and navigate eJobs, before telling your family/friends that you are looking for jobs in academia[1], you need to do one crucial thing: You need to have a heart-to-heart with your...
What’s an expert?
Yesterday’s post Confidence and Gender in International Relations got me thinking. The post draws on the excellent survey data from the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project at William and Mary’s Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations and notes that in the snap polls conducted by the project over the last year, women international relations scholars choose the response “I don’t know” more often...
Confidence and Gender in International Relations
The following is a guest post by Rachel Merriman-Goldring, Susan Nelson, Hannah S. Petrie at William and Mary's Institute for the Theory & Practice of International Relations. For decades, survey research has suggested that women lack confidence in their answers, responding ‘don’t know’ or ‘maybe’ at significantly higher rates than their male counterparts. Initially, this trend on political surveys was attributed to topic-specific political...
Understanding the Emotional Impacts of Ebola: moving beyond crisis and stats to stories
This is a guest post by Dehunge Shiaka, researcher and gender expert in Freetown Sierra Leone What are the emotional and psycho-social impacts of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa? With much of the media attention on the medical, international, and civil-military response to Ebola, this is a question that has largely been unaddressed. Yet it is inevitable that a virus that ravaged communities, halted economies, and killed thousands in a region...
PETA’s Shock Tactics: Irresponsible Advocacy or Strategy and Positioning?-Part 2
[As two fellow NGO researchers, Wendy and Maryam are going to collaborate on some posts to provide contrasting views on hot-button issues related to NGOs. Think of us as the Siskel and Ebert of NGOs - we definitely agree on certain things, but clearly not on others (and don’t ask who’s who). Our points of view will not always reflect what we personally think of an issue--we need drama and suspense!--but we will always provide food for thought.]...
PETA’s Shock Tactics: Irresponsible Advocacy or Strategy and Positioning?
[As two fellow NGO researchers, Wendy and Maryam are going to collaborate on some posts to provide contrasting views on hot-button issues related to NGOs. Think of us as the Siskel and Ebert of NGOs - we definitely agree on certain things, but clearly not on others (and don’t ask who’s who). Our points of view will not always reflect what we personally think of an issue--we need drama and suspense!--but we will always provide food for thought.]...
A Storify post on Cecil the Lion
People who follow this blog know that I'm not jumping on the wildlife conservation bandwagon. I taught a course on global wildlife conservation and have blogged about it repeatedly here on the Duck. So, here are my thoughts on Cecil the Lion, the lion killed by an American hunter in Zimbabwe, where I wade in to advocacy, sport hunting, the value of animal life compared to human life, why we have an emotional reaction to iconic wildlife but not...
Viva La In-Text Tables and Figures Revolution!
I try to save paper these days by reviewing manuscripts via PDFs on my computer or my tablet. It also makes it easier to read stuff while traveling--both to read on a plane and to carry less paper around. The biggest challenge in doing this is the habit/standard of people putting their tables/figures at the back of the document and having endnotes and not footnotes. I know most of the blame for this goes to journals which require such...
#BringBackOurGirls, Feminist Solidarity and Intervention – Part One
As a new Duck, who (like Cai & Tom) took a while to consider what to blog about, I finally decided - long-winded academic that I am - to write a series of posts on the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign. To this end, I draw on materials for a keynote I just delivered at the University of Surrey's Center for International Intervention's conference on "Narratives of Intervention: Perspectives from North and South" (#cii2015). Here I go: On...