MPSA Blog
Teaching Tactics: A Simple Hack for Maintaining Personal Connections to Students
By Matthew Charles Wilson, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina This blog was originally published by the Incubator for Teaching Innovation at the College of Arts and Sciences/University of South Carolina:…
Adjusting/Adapting Assignments for Flexibility and Engagement in Online Instruction
By Diane E. Schmidt, Ph.D., California State University, Chico, Political Science Online instruction, especially with students who are unfamiliar with online learning, requires balancing teaching across the familiar to the unfamiliar so that assignments are challenging but also support/reinforce…
Measuring the Quality of Management of Federal Agencies
by James Thompson and Alejandra Medina, University of Illinois – Chicago In normal times, elected and appointed government officials pay relatively little attention to the question of how well public agencies are managed. During times of emergency and recovery however, management capacity…
Do Millennials Exist? Generations, Social Science and the Trouble With De-Bunking
by Michael A. Smith, Professor of Political Science, Emporia State University The host of TV’s “Adam Ruins Everything,” Adam Conover is easy to identify by his quirky hairsyle and clothes, energetic presentation, and strong intellect. His signature style is the use of humor and research to…
NHA’s New Toolkit: Documenting the Impact of Your Humanities Program
By Cecily Hill, NEH for All Director of Community Initiatives As of this writing, colleges and universities around the nation have closed their doors; most have shifted to online learning. In-person public programs are on pause, indefinitely. For the majority of us, large components of our work…
Coping with COVID-19: A Graduate Student’s Reflections
By James Steur, a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign About one month ago, I wrote a blog post about strategies for networking at the 2020 MPSA Conference. To be frank, given the last few weeks, my post about networking and my own research seem…
Understanding and Reducing Biases in Elite Beliefs About the Electorate
by Miguel M. Pereira, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. A central question in the process of representation is how elected officials gauge and respond to voter signals. As office-seekers, politicians have strong incentives to be…
How the Pandemic Became Partisan: A Story of Parties, Science and Professionals
by Michael A. Smith, Professor of Political Science, Emporia State University How did the Coronavirus pandemic become partisan? The partisan divide on responses to the pandemic is only the latest iteration of a story that has been steeping for more than a decade. Put briefly: the political…
To Networking & Beyond: Strategies for Successful Networking
By James Steur, a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign As MPSA 2020 fast approaches, my colleagues have talked to me about the part of conferences they dread more than their presentations: networking. Someone I know remarked, “I feel like an…
Study the Humanities: Articulating Career Pathways
By Scott Muir, Study the Humanities Project Director, National Humanities Alliance Commentators have offered a variety of explanations for the widely observed decline in humanities majors and enrollments. Evidence suggests the primary cause is a dramatic reordering of student priorities away from…