by Megan MacKenzie | 16 Oct 2011 |
My second option for a title was: 'How to teach masculinities by looking at pictures of handsome men.' (Note: this photo was sent to me as a humor-gift from one of my students...I didn't do it myself!)Feminist Ryan Gosling, a website featuring photos of actor Ryan Gosling posed next to intelligent quips about feminist politics is a perfect tool to use in a lecture on gender- no really. Why has this website gone viral (it was even re-posted on...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 16 Oct 2011 |
Although the majority of the offerings in the European Consortium on Political Research's inaugural Winter School in Methods and Techniques (to be held in Cyprus in February 2012) are pretty firmly neopositivist, at the risk of sound like a shameless self-promoter I'd like to call your attention to course A6, "Knowing and the Known: Philosophy and Methodology of Social Science," which I am teaching. The short description of this course is:"The...
by Josh Busby | 16 Oct 2011 |
Supporters of action on climate change are under siege in Washington. House Republicans are attempting to cut appropriations on all things related to climate change. Even Democrats appear to want to downplay talk of the issue. The "green jobs" agenda, in light of Solyndra solar's woes, is now mired in controversy. Despite Al Gore's recent effort to refocus attention on the problem with his new Climate Reality campaign, an economy wide...
by Charli Carpenter | 14 Oct 2011 |
And this week, in problematic-representations-of-indigenous-populations-on-children's-television, Lucasfilm brings you Nomad Droids: Well I guess some foreign policy subtext in TV for eight-year-olds is a step up from 99.7% of what's on American prime-time. Thanks to Clone Wars, my kid is quickly becoming fluent in such concepts as strategic depth, diversionary warfare and humanitarian mission creep. Last week he learned, for example, that real...
by Brian Rathbun | 14 Oct 2011 |
I used to watch all of the presidential debates when I was in my late twenties and early thirties. Even though my party allegiance was never in doubt, I wanted to know the contours of the debate even for the other side, what there substantive differences were, where the daylight between the candidates was, etc.I don't do this any more. Obviously one reason is that they are just not informative. None of the candidates truly embrace policy ideas,...
by Megan MacKenzie | 13 Oct 2011 |
With the rugby world cup semi-final only a few days away, it would take something like a broken ship dumping tons of oil and chemicals onto the country's beaches to get the country to talk anything besides the All Blacks... Wait... New Zealand is all about environmental protection, green energy, clean air (and funny guys like Jemaine Clement from Flight of the Concords) isn't it? I mean, what is a ship with oil even doing near this...
by Alana Tiemessen | 12 Oct 2011 | Featured
Nothing risks inviting cynicism and despair like teaching and learning about failed states. For the second year I'm teaching an upper level International Relations course titled "Weak and Failed States" in the Poli Sci Department at UMass Amherst. Much to the confusion of my students, I introduce the course by explaining that "weak and failed states" is a highly contested concept, driven more by policy agendas than empirical consistencies, and...
by Charli Carpenter | 12 Oct 2011 |
One of the few items recently that has caused me to emerge from my nothing-but-Friday-nerd-blogging temporary hiatus was this article on civilian war deaths by Michael Spagat and his collaborators. I wrote a post with some praise and some questions, and recently received a thoughtful response by email from Michael and his crew in which they further detail the coding methods used in the project. Since the original thread generated some interest,...
by Vikash Yadav | 11 Oct 2011 | Featured
And now for something completely different... Feminist Ryan Gosling...
by Steve Saideman | 11 Oct 2011 |
Colonel Gian Gentle, a confirmed counterinsurgency [COIN] skeptic, raises questions for Col. Paul Yingling about the role of generals as COIN seems to be falling short in Afghanistan. Yingling made much noise in 2007 by attacking American generals for poor leadership in 2007, as the US was losing in Iraq at the time. Gentle is essentially pushing Yingling either to call Petraeus a bad general now (since Afghanistan is not such a happy place)...
by Jon Western | 10 Oct 2011 |
Long-time Bosnia watchers Vlado Azinovic, Kurt Bassuener, and Bodo Weber from the Democrtization Policy Council in Sarajevo issue a warning to the EU and NATO to restore a deterrence capability in the country:The deterioration of the prevailing political dynamic is not only continuing, but accelerating one year after the general elections of October 2010. The mix of variables makes political miscalculation all the more likely. The costs of such...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 10 Oct 2011 | Featured
I remember well the first time I ever encountered the concept of "fair trade": it was on a poster in the cafeteria of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn, where I spent time during the summer of 2002 doing research in the "Archives of Social Democracy" for my first book. The poster proudly proclaimed that the coffee served in the cafeteria was fair trade coffee, and explained the basic principle -- growers were paid a decent wage for their...