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Five Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me in Graduate School: Summing Up
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academia
Building Safe Space for Depression in Academia
The following is a guest post by Emily Hencken Ritter, Assistant Professor at the University of California, Merced. Like so many, my heart and mind aches for the loss Will Moore’s death represents...
For Will: Some Reflections on Sorrow
The following is a guest post by Jana von Stein, Senior Lecturer of Political Science and International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington. Will Moore’s suicide carries with it a...
Researcher Trauma and Our Discipline
The following is a guest post by Cyanne Loyle, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Indiana University. With the devastating passing of Will Moore, many of us in Conflict Studies have begun...
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The (American) Job Market and Interpretive Methods in Political Science
M. David Forrest, a soon-to-be-assistant-professor of American politics, forwarded the following letter to the "interpretation and methods" listserv. He agreed to let me post it at the Duck. Given the methodological heterogeneity of our readership, I thought it would be of interest. It reads: [I am an American Politics scholar who primarily uses interpretive methods and methodologies (IMM) and recently came off the Assistant Professor job market. Several weeks back I shared some thoughts about my market experiences with Peri (Schwartz-Shea) and Dvora (Yanow), who most of you know. At their...
Walter Russell Mead Defends, Badly, the NSF cuts to Political Science
I’ve defended Mead before on this site. I think he is a bright conservative who stands out in a sea of Fox News ideological bleh, like NewsMax or Drudge. He has a far better sense of the importance of religion in many people’s lives than academics do, and he has a good feel for western classical history that adds historical depth to a lot of his blogging. I read him regularly, where I stumbled on this defense of the coming NSF cuts in political science. Money quote: Political scientists should know better: university faculties ultimately depend on taxpayers and their representatives for many...
About Those Israel Academic Study Trips…
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Kavita Khory, Professor of Political Science at Mount Holyoke College. Last spring the Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) of Boston invited me to participate in a weeklong study tour to Israel. Designed for scholars of international relations, political science, and public policy, the purpose of the educational tour was to provide an “in-depth firsthand exposure” to Israel and promote a “deeper understanding” of its politics and society. The faculty study tour, now in its fourth or fifth iteration, is billed as the cornerstone of the organization’s...
Thinking About the Seven Year Post-Doc
This piece is really interesting. It is written by Radhika Nagpal who was on the tenure track at Harvard but treated the experience like a seven year post-doc. That is, she didn't focus on what it took to get tenure there, because, well, most folks don't get tenure. Instead, Nagpal focused on pursuing the most fulfilling seven years so that she would be in a good position at the end of the "post-doc." This led her to some conclusions, which I consider below. But before I do so, it is important to note that this advice of hers applies everywhere but to greater or lesser degrees. There...
The Interdisciplinarity Shibboleth: Christakis Edition
Andrew Gelman provides a nice rejoinder to Nicholas Christakis' New York Times op-ed, "Let's Shake up the Social Sciences." Fabio Rojas scores the exchange for Christakis, but his commentators provide convincing rebuttals to Rojas. Once again, I suspect reactions to the column are driven by homophily rather than network effects. But all this aside, Christakis makes an interesting claim about the evidence for stagnation: In contrast, the social sciences have stagnated. They offer essentially the same set of academic departments and disciplines that they have for nearly 100 years: sociology,...
Summer Teaching – Why Teach and What Makes It Different
Recently, I finished teaching a month long summer course on International Relations to mainly first and second year undergrads at the University of Missouri. Although I’ve taught summer courses before, this was actually one of my first experiences with having to –for the love of all things holy! – do what my public school teaching spouse does and ACTIVELY TEACH IN A CLASSROOM WITH THE SAME STUDENTS EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK. This summer class got me thinking – for most people, how different is the summer teaching experience from the the typical semester teaching experience? Like any good...
Graduate School After Peace Corps
In 1998, while I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, I decided to apply for a PhD program in political science. I had no idea what I was doing. Though I had majored in political science at UNC-Chapel Hill, graduating in 1993, I had a limited understanding of the "discipline." I barely knew what journals were. I had limited access to information about programs, with no access to the internet on a regular basis (I had a dial-up connection once a month or so if I took a two hour bus ride). In the end, two of the four programs I applied to required prior Master's and I didn't get in to those...
Become the Survey Participant! New Survey on Teacher Evaluations
In case you are interested in expanding our knowledge of the use/misuse of teacher evaluations, Lisa Martin of Wisconsin-Madison has a short survey that is worth taking: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KDWNCXS Results may make it into what looks like a very exciting APSA panel on "Minding the Gender Gap in Political Science."