LATE UPDATE: PTJ blogs about undergrad education
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Lamenting The Loss of the Light, The Ebbing of Grand Theory and The Decline of Old Boy Networks
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have written a piece that is critical of the supposed move to hypothesis testing and the failure of IR folks to do grand theory. I have many reactions to this development that I thought I would engage in a bit of listicle: My first reaction was: Next title: why too much research is bad for IR.... As folks pointed out on twitter and on facebook discussions, it seems ironic at the least that someone who made a...
Saturday Afternoon Linkage
Promotional and Disciplinary Peter Henne's guest post -- in which he asks questions about peer reviewing from the perspective of a junior scholar -- has been getting a lot of traffic. But it's a pretty big tell that no one has attempted to answer his questions. Iver Neumann's not the first scholar to be interviewed for both the Duck Podcast and Theory Talks, but he may be the first to have the latter interview released the day after he...
What next for Venezuela?
My colleague, Javier Corrales, has an excellent summary of the internal political dynamics in Venezuela on the news yesterday of President Hugo Chavez's deteriorating health condition. Corrales reports that the "Venezuelan government is busy preparing for the re-inauguration of the country's beloved president, Hugo Chávez, and also for his funeral." The timing of all of this makes for significant confusion: Venezuela's constitution offers some...
Podcast No. 17 – Interview with Iver Neumann
The seventeenth Duck of Minerva podcast features Iver Neumann, then of the London School of Economics.
Award Ballot
As promised, this is my post announcing that we've sent an email out with the ballot for the 2013 OAIS awards.We believe that we sent one to everyone that requested one before the deadline, as well as to a list of people that we generated internally. If you did not receive one and requested one, my apologies. Please email us about getting one (but check your spam filter first). As the voting period lasts until January 31, we can also accomodate...
Thoughts on Peer-Review Standards from a Junior Reviewer
This is a guest post by Peter S. Henne. Peter is a doctoral candidate at Georgetown University. He formerly worked as a national security consultant. His research focuses on terrorism and religious conflict; he has also written on the role of faith in US foreign policy. During 2012-2013 he will be a fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. So I’ve reviewed several manuscripts for journals in the past year, probably the result...
Friday Morning Linkage: Austerity Edition
Is the tide turning on the idea of austerity? Philip Pilkington takes issue with this week's New York Times feature story on how well the Latvians are enduring austerity. The IMF thinks Latvia has gone too far. Last week, IMF Director Christine Legarde warned Germany to go slower in making cuts. And, yesterday, it (the IMF) acknowledged in a new paper that "“Forecasters significantly underestimated the increase in unemployment and the decline...
The Least Stressful Job of 2013: University Professor
That's what Forbes claims in an article that's generating much mirth in academic social-media circles. University professors have a lot less stress than most of us. Unless they teach summer school, they are off between May and September and they enjoy long breaks during the school year, including a month over Christmas and New Year’s and another chunk of time in the spring. Even when school is in session they don’t spend too many hours in the...
The Right to Mindlessly Look at You-Tube Videos
Happy New Year! I hope you are still enjoying a wonderful break. The holidays for me always mean one thing: a lack of Internet access. As a duck-ling who is from Deliverance/mayonnaise/4-H country, I’m particularly attuned to the argument UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur, Frank La Rue, made a couple of summers ago about the human right to Internet access. Of course I need unrestricted access to my favorite websites – how else am I...
Afternoon Miscellany: Latour, Podcasts, and Big Data
This post would be much more interesting if it concerned the nexus of its three subjects. Sadly, it does not. I'm working on a forum piece with Vincent Pouliot on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) -- one written from the explicit perspective of outsiders. We've been puzzled by the apparent lack of theorization of "the body" in Latour. For example, if social relations must be 'fixed' by physical objects, why isn't the human body one such object? If any...
Trotskyite Reactionaries
Partisanship Blogging Warning. This post contains no academic content. What follows is a series of block quotes designed to illustrate the title of the post. This is simply remarkable.... First, Erick Erickson at RedState: The McConnell Tax Hike raises taxes on people making over $400,000.00, but it also raises taxes on the middle class. “More than 80 percent of households with incomes between $50,000 and $200,000 would pay higher taxes.”* Not...