Daryl Morini, an IR PhD candidate at the University of Queensland whom I know, has put together an interesting global survey for undergraduate and graduate students of international relations. It looks pretty thorough and might make a pretty interesting student...
Even the Evil League of Evil has peer review.One of the laziest sneers directed at us social scientists who use math and statistics in our research is that we suffer from "physics envy."Ha! It...
Technically, "because I didn't have observational data."Working with experimental data requires onlycalculating means and reading a table. Also, thismay be the most condescending comic stripabout...
There are a few things that make me really hot under the collar. The first is the unending 100+ degree summer heat in central Texas. The second is the unending debate on the "state of the field", in...
I had every intention this evening of writing a cynical commentary on all the hoopla surrounding Open Government, Open Data and the Great Transparency Revolution. But truth be told, I am brain-dead at the moment. Why? Because I spent the last two days down in Williambsurg, VA arbitrating codes for a Teaching, Research and International Politics (TRIP) project (co-led by myself and Jason Sharman) which analyzes what the field of IR looks like from the perspective of books. It is all meant as a complement to the innovative and hard work of Michael Tierney, Sue Peterson and the TRIP founders...
I thought I would offer my take on the series of posts below on how to reform the peer-review system. Part of the problem is bad reviews. We can remove the anonymity of them, but that raises the obvious problems (bad blood, retaliation, pulling punches, speaking truth to power, etc). A better solution would be to rely on the expertise of editors. A really stupid review is obvious to even non-experts. And if one reviewer says X and the other says 'opposite of X', then you should know that you have to get a third opinion, not just reject the piece for not garnering sufficient support from the...
I have found an interesting counter-example to my earlier lament about disciplinary norms restricting open reflection by IR scholars about their personal trajectory and history as it relates to their work. It is Robert Keohane's recent interview on UC-Berkeley's "Conversations with History" series in which he expounds the myriad personal, cultural, social influences that have informed and shaped his research.Keohane's willingness to expound on his personal relationship to his subject matter is not limited to public interviews, of course, but constituted a chapter in his book International...
This is none too pithy, but tonight (this morning?) I’m just going to toss up a whole stream of ideas that have been percolating since the first BioNote discussion and took shape while I was attending the ISA conference in San Francisco. They relate to a very problematic final chapter I’m struggling over now in which I attempt to account for the role I’ve played (by researching a non-barking dog) in inadvertently getting the dog to bark. Many of us do this of course - interface with the real world in ways that put us inside the subject matter we’re studying – but there are not good formulas...
I quite liked an article I read in International Studies Review a couple of years back, a conversation between Ersel Aydinli and James Rosenau, published under the heading "Courage vs. Caution: A Dialogue on Entering and Prospering in IR." One of the most thoughtful exchanges in the "Dialogue" has to do with academic norms regarding full disclosure of our identities as scholars / persons. Rosenau argues, defending a "commitment to explicitness" exemplified in his concluding Distant Proximities chapter, that scholars should situate themselves in the world they are writing about so as to allow...