This is a post by Erin Jenne, from Central European University. A security problem at RelationsInternational forced us to close accounts, so the author byline here is incorrect. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Why is book publication important to scholars? Publishing one’s research in the form of a monograph has long been the coin of the realm in much of the social sciences and humanities—helping one to score a good tenure-track job, secure tenure, and literally forge the scholar’s academic reputation in his or her research community. It is certainly still true for most scholars of international relations and comparative politics that one’s reputation hinges on publishing excellent books at prestigious presses.
With a long record of cultivating scholars and award-winning academic books, Roger was a great guest speaker on the topic of academic publishing. Here are some of his best tips on turning one’s dissertation into a book, summarized below (see Roger’s full-text handout here, which he adapted from Emily Andrew, at UBC Press):
“Big Data” is the new hot topic in academia and in the public. With the increased ability to collect and analyze information there is a quest to mine the great sources of data that are out there in the wild. The deeper question is not if this is a positive or negative development; but just what the data means. Does our ability to analyze and display greater amounts of information actually make us more knowledgeable, and potentially more secure? I would suggest that in the cyber security field, big data is perhaps trivial, and at worst, fear inflating without careful analysis and theory.
Many if not most of us live some portion of both our professional and social lives on Facebook. Among my friends and colleagues, a significant amount of attention is paid to how to ensure privacy on Facebook, but less attention is paid to self-expression and self-description options. That’s certainly true of me. That’s why my latest discovery has me thinking.
Facebook has a bunch of gender options, apparently rolled out in early 2014. Its been a while since I’ve updated my profile, so I didn’t notice until now. My first reaction is to be like a kid in a candy shop – which one do I pick? Can I have them all? I’d previously decided not to display a “gender” on Facebook because the options were limited to male and female. Granted, this list still blurs the sex/gender dichotomy and doesn’t make the pronoun “ze” available, and while I can ‘be’ a number of genders, I can still only be ‘interested in’ male or female (or both). Still, upon my initial encounter with this list, I was too elated with all the options to be particularly concerned about those remaining shortcomings.
I could identify as (and this is in alphabetical order now): agender, androgyne, androgynous, bigender, cis, cisgender, cis female, cis male, cis man, cis woman, cisgender female, cisgender male, cisgender man, cisgender woman, female to male, FTM, gender fluid, gender nonconforming, gender questioning, gender variant, genderqueer, intersex, male to female, MTF, neither, neutrios, non-binary, other, pangender, trans, trans*, trans female, trans* female, trans male, trans* male, trans man, trans* man, trans person, trans* person, trans woman, trans* woman, transfeminine, transgender, transgender female, transgender male, transgender man, transgender person, transgender woman, transmasculine, transsexual, transsexual female, transsexual male, transsexual man, transsexual person, transsexual woman, and/or two-spirit. If any are missing, I can suggest a new one. And I don’t have to pick just one. I can pick up to ten! I don’t go wild – I only pick four, then I almost hit the logout button.
Then it occurred to me – does this translate? Is it available everywhere in the world? Is it available in all of the languages that Facebook is available in? Are translations based on English words, or local ones? These questions lead me to other questions – what privileges are a condition of possibility for my joy and excitement at the discovery of the ‘new’ Facebook genders? Who does facebook’s new genderqueer face benefit?
Living in Scotland, the most frustrating thing about the independence debate for me has been the lack of evidence to back up foreign policy claims. Both the Yes and No campaign make sweeping claims about the needs and desires of the Scottish people in relation to foreign policy. The Yes campaign wants to be free of British control over foreign policy and makes the removal of the Trident nuclear weapons a cornerstone of their campaign. The No side suggests that Scotland cannot possibly go it alone without the protection of Britain and starting a new military, intelligence service, and cyber force would be too costly. Neither side is really engaged in is examining what the Scottish or English people want.
The International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFjP), in conjunction with Taylor and Francis, created the Enloe Award in honour of Cynthia Enloe’s pioneering feminist research into international politics and political economy, and her considerable contribution to building a more inclusive feminist scholarly community. The Award is given annually, after an open competition judged by a committee of eminent feminist scholars drawn from the IFjP Board. It recognizes exceptional quality in a paper submitted to IFjP by an emergent scholar. The winning entry is published in the journal as the Enloe Award Essay and the author given an honorarium (currently US$500) on publication.
Those eligible for the Award include postgraduate students nearing completion of their PhD thesis and postdoctoral scholars who are within five years of the award of their PhD at the time of the competition deadline will be eligible to enter. Papers should fall within the rubric of IFjP, which as a journal seeks to publish lively, original research at the intersection of international relations, politics and gender studies. They should also be no longer than 8000 words long, including notes, and conform to IFjP house style, details atwww.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/rfjpauth.asp. The deadline for submissions for the Enloe Award 2014 is July 5 2014. Please submit papers to ifjp@ufl.edu, marking them clearly as intended for consideration by the Enloe Award Committee.
PS: If you are eligible for the Enloe Award and your paper is currently under consideration in the normal journal process, just let us know and we will consider it for the Enloe Award as well.
I couldn’t have come up with a sillier title to this post, I realize, but it is an important point, so I figured I’d dedicate a post to it. The last thing that you want to happen to you is to be caught by surprise by a contrast between what your professional record looks like and what you want it to look like or need it to look like for a particular professional goal.
What do you want your CV to look like when you go on the job market the first time? What do you want it to look like when you have a probationary review? Or a tenure review? What do you want it to look like when merit raises are considered? What positions (in your department, in the field, or in professional organizations) do you see yourself occupying, and what do you need your CV to look like to make that happen? What does your CV need to look like to give you the mobility you want? The promotion ability that you want? The income that you want? The opportunities that you want? The free time that you want?
Its not going to magically look like that. And you can’t answer those questions a month before you need particular things on your CV, wish for it, and make it happen. Instead, these things are planned. A note on what I don’t mean by planned: I don’t mean that you shouldn’t be flexible, open to new projects and grant opportunities, willing to leave behind things that do not work, and willing to adapt to a changing field and a changing profession. What I do mean is getting a sense of what you want your career to look like, and trying to make that happen actively and while you still have enough time to do it. For example … Continue Reading →
This isn’t really a lesson I learned “the hard way” – in fact, in a lot of ways, it is a lesson I learned “the easy way” – but I figured I’d keep the post series title alive. And I did learn some lessons of co-authoring “the hard way” – though, thankfully, very few. I am a big fan of co-authoring – I think, often, the sum of perspectives and skills is better than the parts. Add to that the fact that co-authoring is becoming more and more accepted in the discipline, and what could go wrong?
ertainly, I mean that tongue-in-cheek, and plenty could go wrong. But I think that the adventure is worth it. I have co-authored and co-edited with colleagues, mentors, students, and former students, and the overwhelming majority of these co-authoring relationships have been amazing. I call them relationships for a number of reasons: first, many of them have spanned a number of years and a number of projects; second, a lot of relating is actually necessary to producing quality product in co-authorship with someone else; third, it is important to think of co-authoring as a relationship to know that one is getting into a long-term professional involvement with even co-authors with whom one writes once; and, finally, I think that, for me, many of those relationships have easily been more than a sum of their parts. I could gush about how lucky I have been in the co-author (and co-editor) department for a whole post – but that isn’t great advice.
Instead, the rest of this post is going to talk about picking co-authors, some of the potential pitfalls of co-authorship, and some of the ways that I think good co-authoring relationships can be very helpful to a career in political science/International Relations.
Russia, as we’ve all noticed, has developed a habit recently of nibbling off small chunks of neighbouring countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union. Crimea is different from the earlier nibbles in that Russia is claiming formal sovereignty over it, rather than supporting ostensibly independent puppet states. But the habit can be traced back two decades, to Russian military support for Transnistria.
Russia generally justifies its actions with claims of democratic legitimacy, that because the locals want to be close to or part of Russia rather than part of Ukraine/Georgia/Moldova, and because after all modern sovereignty is based in the popular will, the territorial adjustments should be seen as normatively acceptable by the community of sovereigns. On the one hand, this is a reasonable claim, albeit one the application of which depends on who counts as ‘the people.’ On the other hand, use of this claim in the past has led to conflictual outcomes, most clearly in German expansion leading to the second world war (I figured I might as well get Godwin’s Law out of the way as early as possible).
This is a guest post by Jonathon Whooley, a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Florida currently lecturing at San Francisco State University.
As the rumors, machinations, and punditry weigh in on the current strife in Iraq, many of us who have been avidly observing the consistently deteriorating progress of the Government of Iraq (GOI) have been sadly waiting for all of the old arguments about the state of the country to return: ancestral hatreds, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), terrorism, etc. It was with no surprise and much fanfare therefor that the latest bloodletting and domestic strife.
Over the last five years since Thomas E. Ricks authored his prescient work The Gamble (2009) many Middle East observers have been waiting to see whether stakes that the Us government in its Petraeus-era policy of community policing would work or, if the Iraqi central government, seeking no greater goal than elevating its own status, would ultimately fall apart. While no fan of the American intervention in Iraq in 2003, and far and away dubious about current calls for American intervention in Iraq, one is left slightly agape at the limited historical recall of the punditry and the dramatic steps taken by the GOI that have led to the current state of affairs in the country. Ricks’ argument, that the progress of Iraqi stability and security was fundamentally rooted in an argument toward the Iraqi populace that with legitimate elections, relative security, and the sharing of natural resources, an uneven but faintly credible construction of government in Iraq was possible, this concept was oddly ignored by most leading pundits and policy makers in recent days.
There is a literature out there about norms of sovereignty, that tends to draw on grand historical narratives and old, well-trodden examples to support its arguments. But rarely do we see norms of sovereignty addressed in discussion of current international politics. We see the term sovereignty used in a unidimensional way, as a stand-in for related concepts, such as internal control or international legal personhood. But we tend not to see the idea that norms of sovereignty change over time examined in the context of contemporary events, nor do we often ask what effects current events and political decisions are likely to have on norms. But to the extent that norms of sovereignty define the context of international politics, we should be asking how current events might affect them. There follows a series of three posts to help remedy this lacuna. This post is about policy toward Syria, the second is about Russia’s recent tendency to nibble off corners of its neighbours, and the third is about China’s maritime claims.
Two weeks ago Bashar Assad cruised to an easy and expected victory in Syria’s presidential elections. Why bother, when nobody sees the election as credible? Because it adds, however marginally, to the impression that Assad is the legitimate ruler of Syria. We would expect him to try to reinforce this impression. We would not necessarily expect the United States government to do so. But US policy during the chemical weapons crisis last year did just this.
