According to economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, "gender smarts" were key to ending the recent congressional deadlock. She argues: "Unlocking gridlock in government, it turns out, depends on precisely the mechanism that unlocks competitive strength in the private sector: a diverse team (laden with gender smarts and cultural fluency) managed by leaders whose aggregate of experience motivates them to manage inclusively." A new "ism": motherism, or...
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“Breaking Bad”: Through a Literary Lens
“Breaking Bad” has achieved something akin to artistic immortality, crowned by critics near and far as the finest television show in history. Such is its outsized achievement that it has taken up its perch in that rarefied stratosphere where only giants roam and even the creative gods bow down. Once Breaking Bad reached such heights it could no longer be evaluated in mere entertainment art terms. Just as Dylan is now revered with the poets,...
Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy #4
[Note: This is a guest post by Jerel A.Rosati of the University of South Carolina and James M. Scott of Texas Christian University. It is the final installment in our forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy. You can follow more of the conversation at #TeachForPol.] Teaching US Foreign Policy with The Politics of United States Foreign Policy (6th ed, Cengage: 2014). By Jerel A. Rosati and James M. Scott Using The Politics of United States Foreign...
Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy #3
[Note: This is a guest post by James M. McCormick of Iowa State University and is the third post on the Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy] "Teaching American Foreign Policy in the 21st Century" by James M. McCormick, Iowa State University In teaching the American foreign policy making course over the past several decades, I have always had three major goals. First, I want students to become familiar with the values and beliefs that...
Friday Nerd Blogging
Via Bad Lip Reading. Outtakes here.
What Makes a Great Scholar?
I attended a celebration of the life of Kenneth Waltz held at Columbia University last weekend. The service was organized and hosted by Robert Jervis, Robert Art, and Richard Betts and included sixteen speakers -- family members, scholars, and former students who gave wonderful tributes based on their own personal reflections on his life, research, and teaching. It was clear that Waltz was gifted intellectually. His book Man, the State, and War...
The Politics of “Fitting” Feminist Theory in IR
(Note: This post is cross-posted at The Research Centre in International Relations at King's College, London's Blog) Feminist theorists have long made and substantiated the argument that gender "matters" in International Relations (IR) theory and practice, and that it matters in complicated and hybrid ways. Gender analysis has been used (in my view effectively) across a wide spectrum of theoretical approaches, issue areas, and contemporary...
The Birth of a Sports Rivalry
How do we communicate ideas to our audience? What steps can we take to introduce advanced concepts to our students or the general public? Scholars work for decades on the content of their arguments but spend very little time thinking about how to translate their ideas for specific consumers of information. In Phil Arena’s review of Braumoeller’s new excellent book, he makes a baseball reference, later noting that he does not even like sports. ...
Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy #2
[Note: This is a guest post by Steven W. Hook from Kent State University and is the second post on the Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy] “Teaching U.S. Foreign Policy in an Age of Uncertainty,” by Steven W. Hook (Kent State University) Students of U.S. foreign policy face a unique intellectual challenge: to understand state policy making at the intersection of domestic and global governance. Their instructors, who face the same task,...
Thursday Morning Linkage – Apocalypse Averted!
Yay, pointless self-inflicted global catastrophe avoided. In between all the gnashing of teeth about whether the United States Congress would act to forestall a default on the country's national debt and actually reopen the government, some other things were happening around the world. I've been meaning to write about the energy and environment front for weeks, but my attention has been captured by the awful spectacle that was the U.S....
What’s Wrong with FETs? Thoughts from Gendering Global Conflict
(Note: This post is cross-posted at the Columbia University Press Authors' Blog) Over the last couple of years, the US military has begun to employ FETs (Female Engagement Teams) in Afghanistan, characterizing their purpose as "to engage the female populace" of the country. The mission of these groups of female soldiers seems to be divided between victim services, trust building, influence seeking, and intelligence gathering. Many feminist...
Duck Forum on Teaching US Foreign Policy
Duck of Minerva is pleased to announce the start of a four-part series of posts on teaching US Foreign Policy. The forum includes contributions from the authors of major undergraduate textbooks on U.S. foreign policy: Bruce Jentleson (Duke University), Steven Hook (Kent State), Jim McCormick (Iowa State), and James Scott (Texas Christian) and Jerel Rosati (University of South Carolina). Bruce Jentleson initiated and coordinated the forum --...