This is the audio (in m4a format) from the Speculative Fiction and Pedagogy panel at the International Studies Association-Northeast 2012 convention. The panel featured Henry Farrell, Dan Nexon, Jennifer Lobasz, and PTJ. Notes: The new feed for Duck of Minerva podcasts is here. I will continue to post Duck of Minerva podcasts at the old feed for the time being, but I suggest switching over the new one sooner rather than later. Podcasts will...
One nice thing about a status-quo election: it doesn't leave international-affairs experts with a great deal to prognosticate on. It will be interesting to see if the administration does, indeed, show more "flexibility" on BMD cooperation with Moscow and if it makes a push on Israel-Palestine. We should see a fresh wave of talent coming into the administration. While the money right now is on John Kerry for Secretary of State, I'm more...
It was sort of sad watching conservatives play the same game that we did in 2004. Poll aggregation + 1; bubblethought -15.
Amazing how the Simpsons is still pretty funny after 25 years… In the interest of full disclosure, I thought I’d list the reasons why I voted the way I did. I know conservative media regularly accuse professors of politicizing the classroom, but an honest discussion of why one chooses the way one did can also be useful exercise of citizenship. (See Drezner for an example of what I was thinking of.) So with that goal, not demagoguery, in...
One reason we decided to move to WordPress is superior podcast support. Of course, there's a learning curve involved. So this is a test run of the new podcast feed. If it works, you should have the option of playing my interview with Janice Bially Mattern directly from this post. That's all, folks.
US citizens who haven't voted early should exercise axiological rationality and cast their ballots. If you live in Maryland, please consider voting "yes" on Question 6. John Sides takes umbrage at Michael Gerson's attacks on political science. If you squint hard enough at Gerson's arguments then his criticisms of qualitative-content analysis might make sense. Regardless, it seems to me that Gerson has it backwards: more mathematical and...
Electoral Outcomes For obvious reasons, I'm much less confident of my predictions in 2012 than in 2008. I think there's a good chance that Florida, Colorado, and Virginia might go the other way. North Carolina and New Hampshire could as well. Regardless, it looks pretty likely that Obama is going to win re-election. I'm betting the hispanic vote pushes Obama over the top in Nevada (uncontroversial) and Colorado (more controversial); that his...
My good friend and awesome protest/network scholar Michael Heaney at the University of Michigan has released a documentary film, THE ACTIVISTS: WAR, PEACE, AND POLITICS IN THE STREETS. The film is with Melody Weinstein and Marco Roldán and, in addition to the central message of the film, shows the power of releasing academic work in a format that can reach a larger audience. For a limited time, Michael's film is available for free viewing (just...
Laleh Khalili's Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, 2012) looks fascinating. An interesting piece by Karen Burhnam (at SF Signal) on what the discovery of a rocky planet around Alpha Centauri means for human deep-space exploration. Alexandra Gheciu at CIPSBlog on intervention in Mali. Suparna Chaudhry takes a retrospective look at the the Sino-Indian war of 1962. John Holbo discusses the "Year of the MOOC"...
The first posting of some of the audio from this weekend's ISA-Northeast conference is up over on my syndication site. This one is from a panel called "Whither Constructivism?" featuring Nick Onuf, Mike Barnett, and me, chaired by Sammy Barkin. I'll get the audio from the methodology workshop up in the next couple of days, and Dan has the audio from our "science fiction and IR pedagogy" panel because my recorder crapped out and didn't record it...
On Interstate 71, south of Columbus; Ohio’s most famous sign So it’s election time, which means CNN, etc. will be filled with pundits with only the vaguest credentials – never any PhDs - telling you why the outcome inevitably had to be such-and-such. (Retrodiction is so insufferably smug.) And they’ll explain it as if these tired clichés are real insights and not the same flim-flam they pedal every November. So let me predict the future:...
As this election is, by many accounts, "too close to call," I've generated different opening paragraphs for November 7. Each, I hope, confirms the retrospective "conventional wisdom." 1. If Romney wins a decisive victory In a surprisingly decisive victory that will draw inevitable comparisons to Ronald Reagan's 1980 defeat of Jimmy Carter, Mitt Romney defied the pollsters and statisticians to become the 45th President of the United States....