Navigating Political Science:
Professional Advancement & Success in the Discipline
Edited by Kent Worcester
Navigating Political Science brings together some of the most noteworthy discipline-focused contributions to APSA journals published over the past couple of decades. It offers a wide-ranging compendium of 28 chapters by 45 contributors, on topics ranging from peer reviewing, mentoring, and faculty governance to blogging, data collection, and digital media in the classroom.
The volume is organized into five sections: Tasks and Responsibilities, The Classroom, Field Research, The Profession and the Public, and Self-Conceptions. While it proceeds from pragmatic concerns to theoretical debates, the earlier sections address substantive issues, and the latter sections are attentive to the practical and institutional implications of various theoretical and methodological claims and positions.
Navigating Political Science includes narrative essays, how-to essays, empirical studies, and presidential speeches. In addressing the day-to-day work of the profession—teaching, writing, editing, advising, field research, and so on—the book should prove relevant for political scientists across the board, from aspiring ABDs to seasoned PhDs.
Contents
Introduction
Kent Worcester, editor
Doing a Literature Review
Jeffrey W. Knopf
How To Be a Peer Reviewer: A Guide for Recent and Soon-to-be PhDs
Beth Miller Vonnahme, Jon Pevehouse, Ron Rogowski, Dustin Tingley, and Rick Wilson
Publishing as a Graduate Student: A Quick and (Hopefully) Painless Guide to Establishing Yourself as a Scholar
Timothy S. Rich
Women Also Know Stuff: Meta-Level Mentoring to Battle Gender Bias in Political Science
Emily Beaulieu, Amber E. Boydstun, Nadia E. Brown, Kim Yi Dionne, Andra Gillespie, Samara Klar, Yanna Krupnikov, Melissa R. Michelson, Kathleen Searles, and Christina Wolbrecht
Do Political Science Majors Succeed in the Labor Market?
Gregory B. Lewis
Fostering Scholarly Discussion and Critical Thinking in the Political Science Classroom
Michael P. Marks
Turning the Classroom Upside Down: Experimenting with the Flipped Classroom in American Government
Wendy N. Whitman Cobb
Learning Through Discussions: Comparing the Benefits of Small-Group and Large-Class Settings
Philip H. Pollock III, Kerstin Hamann, and Bruce M. Wilson
Born Digital: Integrating Media Technology in the Political Science Classroom
Linda K. Mancillas and Peter W. Brusoe
Conflict in the Classroom: Considering the Effects of Partisan Difference on Political Education
April Kelly-Woessner and Matthew Woessner
Fieldwork in Political Science: Introduction
Roselyn Hsueh, Francesca Refsum Jensenius, and Akasemi Newsome
Navigating Fieldwork as an Outsider: Observations from Interviewing Police Officers in China
Suzanne E. Scoggins
Positionality, Personal Insecurity, and Female Empathy in Security Studies Research
Vasundhara Sirnate
The Fieldwork of Quantitative Data Collection
Francesca Refsum Jensenius
Data Collection, Opportunity Costs, and Problem Solving: Lessons from Field Research on Teachers’ Unions in Latin America
Christopher Chambers-Ju
Knowing When to Scale Back: Addressing Questions of Research Scope in the Field
Akasemi Newsome
Confronting a Crisis of Research Design
Jody LaPorte
Political Science and the Public Sphere Today
Rogers M. Smith
Disenchanted Professionals: The Politics of Faculty Governance in the Neoliberal Academy
Timothy Kaufman-Osborn
The Most Important Topic Political Scientists Are Not Studying: Adapting to Climate Change
Debra Javeline
An Interesting Bias: Lessons from an Academic’s Year as a Reporter
David Niven
The Political Scientist as a Blogger
John Sides
Complicating the Political Scientist as Blogger
Robert Farley
Political Science as a Vocation
Robert O. Keohane
American Politics and Political Science in an Era of Growing Racial Diversity and Economy Disparity
Rodney E. Hero
Left Pessimism and Political Science
Jennifer L. Hochschild
Restructuring the Social Sciences: Reflections from Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science
Gary King
Restructuring the Social Sciences? A Reflection from the Editor of Perspectives on Politics
Jeffrey C. Isaac
ISBN 978-1878147592