Last week, I helped run a session on time management for PhD students. A quick summary thread of the big discussion points, in case others might find them useful: 🧵 1/ FIRST, not everyone works the same way. Some people can, & should, write every day. Some can’t! I am a “burst” writer, in that I churn out large pieces of writing in concentrated chunks of time & then do nothing for days. (Thanks to @RChloB for the “burst” language!) 2/

First submission: December 2020
Publication: July 2023

This one has been a journey, folks, but here we go: “Racism By Designation Making Sense of Western States’ Nondesignation of White Supremacists as Terrorists.”

Here’s what it’s about. 1/ tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108… Worldwide, very few white supremacist orgs are officially listed by govs as "terrorists," & none before 2016. This limits the policy instruments govs can use against them, but more fundamentally, it signals what kinds of violence are deemed aberrant and which are acceptable. 2/

This term, my students are doing “think-alouds”: 15–minute audio recordings of their reflections on the first few weeks of content. Listening to these has taught me a lot about how they view their academic work. 🧵 1/ 1. On the whole, students struggle to view assignments as interconnected or building on each other. They seem to see these as discrete tasks—almost tickbox exercises. Students in the past have told me things like “I only need 1 week of class for a specific essay prompt.” 2/

Writing my first lecture of spring term today, and while I don’t think I’m an expert by any means, there’s a process I’ve found to make it easier that I’ll share in case it’s helpful for others.

It’s not like we’re taught how to do this! 1/ Caveats first: we’re going to bracket the “are lectures an effective pedagogical tool” discussion for another time. I usually lecture to groups of 50–75 third-year politics students. Everyone's style is different & what works for me may not work for you.

Alright, onwards. 2/

There are lots of threads in this story. Let's pick them out:

-massive involvement of former soldiers & others w/ military training—Germany has a massive problem w/ white supremacist sympathies in its security forces w/ this being just the latest case. 1/ nytimes.com/2022/12/07/wor… -involvement of COVID conspiracy theorists—in German, Querdenken, or "lateral thinkers"—has been reported alongside QAnon-inspired conspiracists. Links b/n these groups & the broader far-right are well-known. 2/ tagesschau.de/investigativ/r…

When white supremacy is called out, it fights back. All too often, those fights show up as scholarship.

Let’s talk about white people, and specifically white men, and then an article. 1/ White people react so extremely to discussions of white supremacy as a threat because we look at the most violent white supremacists and see shadows of ourselves, and that terrifies us. 2/

It's that time of yr when PhD students start thinking about the next academic job market cycle. I made a bunch of resources last yr to help me process my experience, so I'll re-up them here in case they are useful to you.

Geared toward US poli sci, but some things generalize. 1/ First, an overview of how to prep for the market: what docs you need to prepare, what the timeline's like, all the basics to get you started. 2/ docs.google.com/document/d/1FL…

Hey grad students: if you're still on the academic job market this year, I was in your shoes at this point last year. I see you. None of this is your fault.

If you’re a faculty member working with a grad student in this situation, some tips from my own experience: 🧵 1/ Please do not say “you’ll get a job!” You don’t know that. Hearing this made me feel like a failure for not having already gotten one, and it also made me feel like my faculty mentors had no idea how the market actually worked. In short, it made me feel alone. 2/

My visceral reaction to the tweetstorm attacking @RossMittiga and his article was anger—not at the many commentators who clearly hadn’t read the article (though c’mon, folks) but rather at the microcosm of so much that is exclusionary about US political science. 1/ 1. Conceptual territorialism, and the unwillingness to accept flexibility and creativity with ideas we have come to see as sacrosanct instead of contingent (democracy is an idea, not a cult);

Words that mean different things in US and UK academia: a thread for confused academics on both sides of the pond, or, Anna writes the dictionary she wishes she'd had. 1/ “Faculty”

US: Professors
UK: Like a college at an R1 in the US sense; the “Faculty of Social Sciences” would be all social science departments 2/

Welcome to a late-night thread about data, terrorism data, and what we think we’re measuring when we’re measuring terrorism. 1/ This thread was sparked by Benjamin Allison’s new article on coding inconsistencies in the CSIS and New America datasets on terrorist attacks in the U.S. As a frequent critic of the CSIS data in particular, I’m sympathetic to the goal here. BUT… universiteitleiden.nl/binaries/conte… 2/

So the Biden admin released its Interim National Security Strategic Guidance, which de-prioritizes international counterterrorism in favor of great power balancing and statecraft.

Here is a Saturday night thread on why those are actually not separate things. 1/ What this thread is NOT: an argument for expanding the counterterrorism umbrella to include yet more policy areas. It is, however, a plea to observe how the 20+ yrs of "war on terror" discourse have exacerbated problems & expanded the idea of terror whether we like it or not. 2/

Six years ago, I visited the PhD department that I’ll graduate from this summer. In light of that, here is a thread on Visiting R1 Departments When You Did Not Attend an R1 for Undergrad. 1/ First and foremost: you will meet a lot of fellow prospective students from R1s. That world is so different, & the training they received, the skills they already have, & the knowledge they’ve picked up about academia might feel intimidating to you. It definitely did to me! 2/

The "black militant" mentioned here as taking refuge in Cuba is Assata Shakur. In 2013, she became the first woman on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list. It is not a coincidence that she is also Black, nor that this happened almost 40 years after her alleged crime. 1/

https://twitter.com/AP/status/1348726592848199681

Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), a Black Panther splinter group. She was found guilty of killing a state trooper in 1977, though the facts of the case are disputed. This NPR interview is a decent overview. 2/ npr.org/2013/05/07/181…

I study white supremacy in institutions and the perpetuation of white supremacist violence. Here is a thread of terms other white scholars have suggested I use instead of white supremacy. 1/ White entitlement: "Do we really have to use the term 'white supremacy'? Is that merited?" If we don't use it to describe *actual white supremacist violence*, then what are we doing? 2/

I went to an #APSA2020 panel on applying for jobs at teaching-oriented institutions—something many R1 grads want but that R1 faculty aren't always equipped to advise them on. Here's a thread with what I learned: 1/ 1. Apps for teaching institutions need to look different from apps at R1s. You need to center teaching in your cover letter & CV—don't bury either. Def. don't put teaching at the end of your cover letter like you might for an R1. 2/

I've been moving furniture & subsisting off of applesauce all day, so join me in my delirium & let's talk about how New Zealand designates terrorist organizations, shall we?

(No really, this tells us a lot about counterterrorism, secrecy, & state power.) 1/ Much like the US, NZ maintains a list of organizations legally designated as "terrorist." It is a criminal activity to provide material support to or try to join these orgs. Unlike the US, NZ views its list as an obligation under UNSC resolutions. 2/

This is less significant than it might appear. Here’s why. 1/ nytimes.com/2020/04/06/us/… First, some outlets are reporting the designation of the Russian Imperial Movement, misleadingly, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) designation. This is incorrect. It’s a Specially Designated Global Terrorist designation. These are different mechanisms. 2/

Many grad student TAs are doing a ton of extra, uncompensated work right now to keep courses afloat, often with minimal institutional support.

They’re also doing a ridiculous amount of emotional labor. I’ll explain. 1/ In a 300-person lecture class, the prof isn’t the 1st point of contact for a student going through a crisis. It’s the TA. Every semester, TAs are the 1st ones to hear about personal hardships, lost jobs, Title IX cases, health emergencies, and so on. 2/

It is 10:38 PM CST on Wednesday, Feb. 19, not even an hour after Elizabeth Warren dominated the Democratic debate, so here is a thread of the current homepages of a number of major U.S. newspapers. 1/ .@washingtonpost mentions some of Warren's comments, though not those about sexism, racial justice, and environmental justice. The coverage centers around Bloomberg and Sanders.

It's not going to get better from here, folx. 2/

English-language outlets are reporting that the city of Dresden has declared a "Nazi emergency". I'd like to break down what that actually means (thread). 1/ bbc.com/news/world-eur… First, as shown in the actual text, the motion is not for an explicit declaration of a "Nazinotstand" (public emergency; think about this like declaring climate change a national/global emergency), but rather to debate whether that term is appropriate. 2/

https://twitter.com/ChrisCldtz/status/1189643799171080199?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1189643799171080199&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zeit.de%2Fpolitik%2Fdeutschland%2F2019-11%2Frechtsextremismus-nazinotstand-dresden-stadtrat-gewalt