New Journal – Call for Papers

An announcement:

The School for International Training (SIT) is debuting an academic journal for the publication of research on the world’s most critical global issues.

The new Journal of Critical Global Issues, a peer-reviewed, open-access digital journal, will contribute to SIT’s mission to educate future scholars and professionals to address critical issues in pursuit of a more sustainable, peaceful, and just world. The journal aspires to support respectful communities, foster intercultural understanding, advocate for social justice and inclusion, and promote sustainability.

The Journal of Critical Global Issues invites proposals from researchers and scholars to contribute to an online roundtable discussion in May focused on the following areas: climate and the environment; development and inequality; education and social change; geopolitics and power; global health and well-being; identity and human resilience; and peace and justice. Roundtable presenters will have the opportunity to publish work related to their roundtable presentation in the inaugural issue of Journal of Critical Global Issues. We seek contributions from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives to join us for this event.

Event information:

Location: Virtual
When: May 15-17, 2023
To submit a proposal for a roundtable discussion, please submit a 500-word abstract of your presentation here by February 15.

Questions? Contact university.relations@sit.edu.

Call for Editor(s): Journal of Political Science Education

The American Political Science Association is seeking applications and nominations for editorship of the Journal of Political Science Education. Applications can be from individuals or teams, and are due by September 1. Full details are here.

A big thank you to the outgoing editorial team for their excellent management of this journal over the last few years.

Call for Reviewers

The Journal of Political Science Education (JPSE) is looking for manuscript reviewers. JPSE, one of the four main journal of the American Political Science Association, publishes articles on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), political science instruction, reflections on teaching and the academy, and reviews of educational resources.

Manuscripts submitted to JPSE as examples of SoTL discuss empirically-based research and contain a rigorous qualitative or quantitative analysis. Political science instruction manuscripts explain how to use the pedagogical technique being described, but they do not need to include evidence of effectiveness like SoTL pieces. All submissions, regardless of topic area, need to be evaluated with a critical eye for rigor, clarity, and style. Reviewers must be willing to reject manuscripts that do not merit a revise and resubmit. They also need to complete their reviews in a timely manner.

Continue reading “Call for Reviewers”

Advice From Journal Editors

This post is based on an APSA TLC 2020 presentation by the editorial teams of the Journal of Political Science Education and European Political Science. Any errors are my own.

Prior to submitting a manuscript, authors should check whether its subject matter and length corresponds to the aims and scope of the journal. JPSE will publish material that fits into any one of four clearly-defined categories: SoTL, political science instruction, reflections on teaching and the academy, and reviews of educational resources. EPS has a similar list of the types of articles it publishes. A manuscript on a topic that falls outside of a specified category of interest will likely be rejected before it is sent out for review.

From my own experience, skimming through the contents of a journal’s recent issues can be very helpful in determining whether that journal is an appropriate choice for a manuscript submission.

Similarly, volunteering to act as an anonymous reviewer for JPSE or EPS gives one some insight into what others are submitting and what in the end appears in print. Both journals need more potential reviewers to accelerate the review process. Please contact their editorial boards to volunteer.

Journals often receive many submissions about certain topics but few to no submissions about others, making it difficult for editors to publish diverse content. For JPSE, these topics include civic engagement and intersectionality. The editors encouraged people to submit manuscripts that present innovative approaches to these subjects.

Environment & Society – Call for Abstracts

Credit: Chad Raymond

Environment & Society has issued a call for abstracts on mega-projects:

Small is no longer beautiful. Small is out-dated, old-fashioned, inefficient and ugly. The future now consists of an ambitious series of massive plans and schemes for new infrastructure projects, beltways, roadways, railways, investment corridors, disaster-proofed cities and countries, carbon capture and storage, reforestation, wall building, migration fostering, terra-formation, space exploration, global sports events and so much more. The proponents of mega-projects resurrect modernist dreams of yesteryear, yet they offer utopian visions of an uncharted future. Although many of these mega-projects are still being planned or are in nascent stages, it is clear they have the potential to transform everyday life for many people and as a result they are likely to provoke resistance.

In this issue of Environment & Society we invite any papers which explore different aspects of mega-projects. This could include their environmental or social consequences, politics surrounding their planning and/or realization, and the visions and/or assumptions that animate them. It could entail exploring the organized collective opposition to these schemes, such as protest events, campaigns and social movements, or subtle acts of refusal. It could also examine the futures that mega-projects promise, their consequences and the alternative futures they foreclose. It could focus on highly visible lumpy schemes that are territorialized and driven by governments. Alternatively it could examine massive and far-reaching systemic changes in technology or social trends that reshape how large groups of people think or behave but which arise from consumer choice, political action and private entrepreneurship as well as state guidance. Continue reading “Environment & Society – Call for Abstracts”

JPSE Special Issue – Call for Submissions

The editors of the Journal of Political Science Education invite submissions for a special issue dedicated the use of simulations and games in teaching political science. Submissions can be systematic studies (quantitative or qualitative) on the pedagogical use of simulations and games, narrative descriptions of simulations and games that authors have created for use in their own classrooms, or reflective essays on the opportunities, accomplishments, and/or challenges inherent in incorporating this type of active learning methodology into one’s teaching. The deadline for submitting a manuscript for the special issue is 1 February 2018. Full information on submitting to JSPE is here. The editors also welcome submissions on other topics related to the teaching of political science, broadly construed, for inclusion in regular issues of the journal.

Call for Submissions: Special Issue

The Journal of Political Science Education has issued a call for submissions for a special issue: Dealing with Explosive Issues in Today’s Classroom.

“Teaching political science can be challenging for many reasons.  We often discuss topics that students have a vested interest in, subjects that can be very upsetting for some students, or topics about which students may vociferously disagree. For this special issue of the Journal of Political Science Education, we are looking for submissions (systematic quantitative or qualitative studies, case studies, or reflections) that investigate how political science educators can deal with a variety of explosive issues that arise in classroom discussions or are at the core of political science syllabi. Specifically, we are looking for manuscripts about novel, effective approaches to these issues, and about how educators deal with classroom challenges that arise organically from:

  • Teaching about race, sex, gender, and discrimination.
  • Teaching during a time of fear or political contentiousness.
  • Teaching when our methods go awry (or show unexpected results).

If you are interested in submitting a manuscript, or have questions or suggestions, please contact the editors at jpse@apsanet.org. Deadline for submissions is March 1, 2017.”

Journal of Political Science Education

Today we have a post from Victor Asal, University of Albany – SUNY:

Dear ALPSblog readers and writers,

All the news that’s fit to print.

I am writing to you as the new editor in chief of the Journal of Political Science Education (JPSE). The team of editors — myself, Mitchell Brown, Shane Nordyke, Joseph W. Roberts, Mark Johnson, and J. Cherie Strachan — would like to encourage you to submit manuscripts to the journal. The journal has become a important outlet for sharing ideas and knowledge about pedagogy in political science since its inception, and we would like to encourage further growth as the journal moves into being an Association-wide journal of the American Political Science Association.   We also would like to make readers aware that the types of manuscripts that JPSE is looking for has widened and we believe that the variety of sections we now have in the journal will be of great interest to you both as readers and as contributors.  We are continuing the tradition of JPSE of publishing articles devoted to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, but we are expanding the reach of the journal to include case studies, examples of useful approaches to teaching, and reflections on teaching from a variety of perspectives. Specifically we are looking for:

  • Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (editors: Mitchell Brown and Shane Nordyke): Submissions should use the highest standard of evidence in writing about evidence-based approaches to teaching practices and encourage assessment of such teaching and practices. Submissions can be diverse in terms of topic, analytic approach, and levels of analysis, but must maintain systematic methodological approaches. Length of manuscript may range from 3,000-8,000 words, and research notes between 2,000-5,000 words. Authors of accepted papers will be required to make datasets publically available online through their choice of venue or provide a compelling rationale if they are unable to do so.
  • Political Science Instruction (editor: Joseph Roberts): Submissions should focus on innovative teaching cases that discuss useful pedagogy, including strategies, games, and experiential learning in teaching political science to diverse audiences. They should also be organized around real classroom problems and potential solutions.  Submissions may range in length from 2,000-4,000 words.
  • Reflections on Teaching and the Academy (editor: Mark Johnson): Submissions should be from experienced scholar-teachers that focus on reflections on timely and important teaching topics that include transitioning between institutional types, teaching under-prepared students, training graduate students for teaching careers, and other issues. Submissions may range in length from 1,000-2,000 words.
  • Books, Teaching Tools, & Educational Resources (editor: J. Cherie Strachan): Submissions should help readers identify available new books, software and resources, and to improve classroom and co-curricular learning experiences through reviews of textbooks, pedagogy tools and other related resources. Submissions may range in length from 500-2,000 words.

If you have any questions, such as whether a topic is appropriate for the journal, feel free to email me or the editor of the section you think is the best fit for a submission.

Being a Research Consumer: The Article Sort

Becoming a competent consumer of political science scholarship is almost always an objective of my courses, especially general education courses intended to expose students to the social scientific way of thinking. To support this objective, a long ways back I wrote a document called “Reading and Understanding Political Science,” which is an undergraduate’s guide to types of scholarship in political science, the parts of an empirical article, and questions to ask oneself while reading quantitative, qualitative, and formal modeling publications. We typically read this for the second day of class, when most are still struggling to obtain textbooks in this new order-by-mail world. After a brief review of the typology and parts, we engage in The Great Article Sort.

To begin, we brainstorm a list of key words and other ways to tell what type of article an item is. Then I pair students off, have them introduce themselves, and distribute 2-3 articles from a pile that I’ve prepared to each pair. Their task is to classify as many articles as they can in 5-8 minutes; extras (and ones that pairs have finished) go in a stack up front for recirculation. The pair with the most correct classifications at the end gets 2 bonus points, so they make two copies of their findings – one to turn in at the conclusion of the sort period, and one to keep for discussion. At the conclusion of the work period, I collect a copy from each group and we review their responses as a class – both what they decided and how they knew. The whole activity, including debrief, takes about 20-25 minutes, depending on how many items they want to discuss.

Preparation for this activity took about 45 minutes and consisted mostly of using JSTOR and the internet to access publications where I knew I could find articles of various types (literature reviews, empirical, op-eds, modeling and other theoretical pieces, etc.) across the various subfields of political science. For longer items, usually I printed only the first 4 pages; printing two pages to a sheet and both sides of the paper meant that they’re still only one piece of paper in the stack. Sometimes I was able to reuse items I had in my personal collection that I no longer needed (e.g., spare copies from something distributed in a previous term). I had about 25 items labeled with letters, and usually two copies of each so that we had enough to go around. This wasn’t enough for a 35-person class. If I were prepping this activity again, I’d aim for 40 items and number them, and be very selective in the debrief discussion.