The English version of Assistant Professor of Political Science Helen Murphey’s article “Revisiting cultural relativism in the context of contemporary anti-gender movements” was published this week with the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs. It had previously been published in Spanish earlier this year. The article highlights how contemporary challenges to international human rights frameworks have increasingly adopted populist anti-elitist narratives. The article is available open access here.

Seven Southwestern students — economics and studio art double major Asin Allavudeen ’27, economics and business major Cody Diez Jennings ’27, biochemistry major Jade Cindy Foka ’28, computer science and psychology double major Alyanna Martinez ’27, computer science and economics double major Juan Martinez Varela ’27, political science major Emma Sanchez ’29, and economics and business major Elias Sarwana ’27 — were selected to compete in the 2026 HSI Battle of the Brains (BOTB), held September 28–October 2 in Austin. This national interdisciplinary competition challenges student teams to tackle a complex business and technology problem in just 24 hours, requiring them to research the problem, develop an innovative and technically feasible solution, and create a business plan and presentation. The week also includes company visits, professional development, and recruiting opportunities with major employers, including Dell Technologies, Thrivent, CrowdStrike, eBay, The Home Depot, and Electronic Arts. Solutions are evaluated by industry experts on both their business and technical merits, with the seven highest scoring teams advancing to the finals. Southwestern was selected as one of those finalists and earned the highest business score in the competition! In addition, Diez Jennings received a scholarship from eBay, marking the second consecutive year a Southwestern student has received an eBay scholarship through the competition. The team was supported throughout the selection, preparation, and competition process by the Office of Student Life, Office of Academic Affairs, Director of the A. Frank Smith, Jr. Library Center & Head of Distinctive Collections Megan Firestone, Director of Student Engagement Jacorey Patterson, Assistant Dean of the Faculty & Professor of Spanish Laura Senio Blair, Board of Visitors Member Zoe Thompson, and team advisors: Director of the Center for Career & Professional Development Adrian D. Ramirez, Associate Professor of Spanish Abby Dings, and Professor of Business Debika Sihi.

Tower-Hester Chair and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder served as discussant for “Leadership in the Public Eye” and chair of “(Anti-)Feminisms in Law and Labor” at the Women and Politics in East Asia Workshop, held at the University of Texas at Austin on September 1. Co-organized by UT Professors Tiffany Barnes ’04 and Amy Liu, the workshop supported early-career faculty and Ph.D. students working on women and politics in East Asia.

Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder presented his paper “Six Myths about the Fall of the Afghan Government in 2021” at the International Studies Association’s conference at the University of Pretoria in South Africa in late June. It will be published as a book chapter in Handbook on Afghanistan.

Professor Emeritus of Political Science & Emeritus Lucy King Brown Chair Eric Selbin was an invited speaker at the “Social Movement Studies in Intense Times: A Conference to Honour Donatella della Porta” at Scuola Normale Superiore’s Centre on Social Movement Studies. His remarks, “Strange Activism in Intense Times,” were meant as a theoretical provocation, suggesting social science frameworks are insufficient for understanding contemporary activism and “strange activism” as an analytical lens that takes seriously the unexpected, unconventional, and symbolically disruptive forms of protest in these “intense times” of democratic backsliding and authoritarian revanchism. The methodological proposal is of a “theoretical folksonomy of resistance” built on entanglement, anarchiving, and collective biography and for students of radical collective behavior to embrace strangeness, defamiliarize our methods and assumptions, and open ourselves to activism that is increasingly creative, symbolically rich, and resistant to standard categorization. The strange is here; our frameworks need to catch up.

Professor Emeritus of Political Science & Emeritus Lucy King Brown Chair Eric Selbin was honored to serve as a member of political science and government graduate Jean-Marc Pruit’s ’13 dissertation committee at the University of Virginia, which he (very) successfully defended on June 11. Titled “‘The dialectic had stopped’: Black Radicals and the End of History, 1968-1989,” the dissertation was co-directed by UVA professors Lawrie Balfour and Kevin Duong.

Professor Emeritus of Political Science & Emeritus Lucy King Brown Chair Eric Selbin published an article titled “Reframing Resistance: Why Do We Say ‘Resistance’ When We Mean Struggle?” in the Journal of Political Power. This is one of a set of three (two more are forthcoming) pieces related to resistance and social movements. This article questions the analytical and empirical dominance of the term “resistance” and contends that the term may, at times, obscure the proactive, enduring, and often existential dimensions of political action which might be better captured by the term “struggle.” A “folksonomic” approach is proposed in place of the common top-down, taxonomic knowledge production, prioritizing instead the vocabularies and imaginaries of political actors themselves. Drawing on a combination of entanglement, anarchiving, and collective biography together offers a framework for rethinking how scholars engage with both people’s political practices and lived experiences. More information is available here.

Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder and Professor Sarah Wiliarty of Wesleyan University have received a book contract from Routledge for their co-authored book project, provisionally titled Postwar Japan and Germany. The project grew out of the jointly developed course “Japan and Germany: Losers of World War II?,” which the authors teach collaboratively at Southwestern and Wesleyan. The manuscript is scheduled for delivery in late 2027, with publication anticipated in 2028.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Zoe Moss’ piece “The Televisual is Political: Hermeneutical Justice, Consciousness-Raising, and Bad Sex on TV” was published in the edited volume The Ambiguity of Consent: Consent Puzzles in Film, Public Discourse, TV, and the Law from Routledge.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Zoe Moss published an article titled “Bad Sex and the Evolution of Heteropatriarchal Power in the Post-#MeToo era” in the journal Feminist Theory. The article uses interviews with young women and the testimony of Stormy Daniels at the civil trial of Donald Trump to theorize the experience of “Bad Sex,” or sex that is legally permissible, yet also morally and politically harmful.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Alex Norris published an essay in Liberal Currents on the Trump administration’s approach in Iran and Venezuela, titled “The Moral Arc of the Universe Bends Toward Finding Out.” It can be read here.

Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder presented “Pathways to Inclusion: How Historical Legacies, Left Party Strength and Conservative Leadership Have Shaped Immigration Policy in Japan and Germany” (co-authored with Dr. Sarah Wiliarty) at the Western Political Science Association Meeting in San Diego, CA on April 2. She also served as the panel chair of “Gender and Politics in Global Contexts.”

Political science major Sam Hoffman ’27 presented his paper “Truman’s Recognition of Israel: Strategic Interests or Domestic Politics?” on the panel “U.S. Foreign Policy and Public Opinion” at the Southwest Social Science’s annual conference in Nashville, TN on April 2. The work uses famed political scientist Robert Putnam’s two-level game theory to help explain the impact of international and domestic factors on President Harry Truman’s decision to recognize the newly-created state of Israel in 1948. The paper grew out of Hoffman’s work in Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder’s 2025 “U.S. Foreign Policy” class.

Communications and Latin American and border studies double major Mia Santoscoy ’26 and political science major and Latin American and border studies minor Natalia Morales Robles ’27 presented, along with Associate Professor of History and Latin American and Border Studies Jethro Hernández Berrones, at the Southwestern Council of Latin American Studies 73rd Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, NV. Their presentation, titled “Mapping Midwives from Mexico City: A Visualization Project Introducing Undergraduates in the United States to the History of Reproduction in Mexico,” described the methodology to produce historical digital maps and a website showcasing the history of the Free School of Obstetrics and Nursing in Mexico City in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as the work of some of its graduates. Students discussed their contributions to the project and the impact this work has had on their academic experiences and skill development. The website can be viewed here.

Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder’s article “Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Not Transactional. It Is Tributary.” appeared in the online magazine Open Canada, which is published by the Canadian International Council.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Alex Goodwin and co-author Michael J. Nojeim had their book chapter, “The Prairie View Paradox: Age, Race, and the Evolving/Changing Landscape of Student Voting Rights at an HBCU in Texas,” published by De Gruyter in the edited volume Youth Voting Rights: Civil Rights, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, and the Fight for American Democracy on College Campuses. The chapter examines the decades-long fight for student voting rights at Prairie View A&M University, focusing specifically on the Symm v. United States (1979) Supreme Court case.

Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder served as a panel chair for two panels at the Southern Political Science Association Meeting held in New Orleans, LA from January 15–18. She chaired the panel “Parties, Leaders, and Candidates” and stepped in as an impromptu discussant when the scheduled discussant was unable to attend. She also chaired the panel “Comparative Perspectives on Feminist Movements.”

Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder and co-author Dr. Sarah Wiliarty published “Leadership in Crisis: Comparing Prime Minister Abe’s and Chancellor Merkel’s Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic” in the interdisciplinary journal Contemporary Japan on December 22. This article argues that Merkel was more effective in managing the first stage of the Covid-19 crisis compared to Abe due to new institutions created to coordinate between the local and national level as well as the execution of a policymaking narrative that focused on science and solidarity. Abe’s approach was hampered due to long-established structural inefficiencies in the bureaucracy as well as a policymaking narrative that called for cooperation and self-restraint without responding to public concerns. This comparison adds to our understanding of the impact of leaders on public policymaking in times of uncertainty as well as to the important relationship between leaders and institutions.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Alex Goodwin and his co-author Ronald Goodwin had their book chapter “Comparing American Presidencies: Leadership in the First Hundred Days of Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden” published in an edited volume titled America in Crisis: Presidential Power, Populism, and the Global Struggle for Truth published by Springer International Press.

Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder had his paper “The Myth of Trump’s Transactional Foreign Policy” accepted for publication in the International Journal. It shows that Trump’s foreign policy has been more tributary than, as often characterized, transactional.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Alex Goodwin and Dr. Tony E. Carey, Jr. published an article titled “With All Due Respect: Respectability Politics and Black Support for Police Defunding and Abolition” in Political Behavior. This article examines how respectability politics shapes Black Americans’ views on policing and support for institutional reforms.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin was an invited participant at Harvard University’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies 30th Anniversary Symposium. Selbin was invited by the Center’s Director, Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies, and Professor of Government Steven Levitsky to interact with former Chilean President (2006-2010; 2014-2018) and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (2018-2022) Michelle Bachelet Jeria, former Member of the National Assembly of Venezuela Maria Corina Machado (2011-2014), and former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000). It was also an opportunity for Selbin to reconnect with an old friend, Dora María Téllez, Nicaragua’s famous Comandante Dos, who, since her 2023 release as a political prisoner, has been the Richard E. Greenleaf Distinguished Chair in Latin American Studies at Tulane University and is currently the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor of Latin American Studies at Harvard.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin published a chapter titled “International Political Sociology & Resistance: Whither Revolution” in The Oxford Handbook of International Political Sociology, edited by Stacie Goddard, George Lawson, and Ole Jacob Sending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025). This is the third piece in a three-year trilogy calling for a refiguration of revolution and with these provides the basis for a current book project.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin served as the external member on the doctoral dissertation committee of Katalin Amon, who successfully defended “The Mortgage Debtor, the Neighbor, the Homeless Citizen, and the Family: Understanding Citizenship and Housing Through Citizen Imaginaries” at Central European University in Vienna. Selbin is also currently serving as an external member on dissertation committees at the University of Cambridge and the University of Virginia.

Senior Aidan Gomez ’25 presented a poster titled “The Rules of Quotas Matter: Female Representation in the Italian and Japanese Legislatures” at the ASIANetwork Conference in San Antonio on March 29. The poster emerged from a paper written in Professor of Political Science and Vice President for Academic Affairs Alisa Gaunder’s Women in Politics in Europe and Asia course.

Assistant Professors of Sociology Adriana Ponce and Amanda Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexander Goodwin, Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma, and Assistant Professor of English Sonia Del Hierro published “Teaching with Color: Thematic Hires and the Politics of Teaching in Texas,” in the journal Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. This article joins a growing conversation in the humanities and humanistic social sciences on ways faculty of color shoulder the burden of thinking about our shared futures as racialized, intersectional, and collaborative. You can find the article here.

Professor of Political Science and Vice President for Academic Affairs Alisa Gaunder presented a paper titled “The Japanese Gender Parity Law: Why Symbolic Legislation Passes and How It Faces Resistance” at the Southern Political Science Association Meeting on January 9.

On October 18-19, Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin, one of the founding members of the Resistance Studies Network, presented a chapter in progress at the 20th Anniversary meeting of the Resistance Studies Network at the University of Göteborg, titled “Why do We Say “Resistance” When We Mean Struggle? An Entangled Anarchival Approach.”

On October 16, Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin presented a pedagogical chapter in progress at Umeå University’s Department of Political Science Pedagogy and Practice Seminar, “everythingisconnectedtoeverything: People as the Makers of His/Her/Theirstory and his/her/theirstory.”

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin attended the Living Democracy Symposium at the University of Maryland on October 10 and participated in the Decentering Whiteness Workshop, inspired in part by his co-authored book with Meghana Nayak ’97, Decentering International Relations.

Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder gave a virtual talk titled “Women in Executive Office: Constraints and Opportunities for Success” to students at Centro Universitario Anglo Mexicano (CUAM), a preparatory high school in Mexico, on September 11.

Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder presented his paper “The US and Iran: Understanding the Breakdown in Relations” at the International Studies Association’s conference at the University of Rijeka in Rijeka, Croatia in June.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Amanda Hernandez, Assistant Professor of Sociology Adriana Ponce, Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexander Goodwin, Assistant Professor of History Bryan Kauma, and Assistant Professor of English Sonia Del Hierro had their abstract “Teaching With Color: Thematic Hires and the Politics of Teaching in Texas” accepted as a special feature for the 10 Year Reflection Special Issue on pedagogy and hope in the Journal for the Sociology of Race & Ethnicity. The article will be both a pedagogical reflection on hope in the classroom and on thematic hires. The issue will be available in early 2025.

Former Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katie Aha, Catherine Hiebel ’22, and Linsey Jensen ’23 co-authored an article, titled “Turning to the Radical Right: Examining Subnational Variation in Radical Right Support after Ethnic Minority Success in East Central Europe,” which has been accepted for publication in Electoral Studies.  This article started as a 2021 SCOPE project. Jensen is currently in a dual M.A./M.Sc. program, recently completing a M.A. in European History, Politics, and Society at Columbia University, and starting a M.Sc. in Culture and Conflict in a Global Europe at the London School of Economics in the fall. Hiebel will be starting a M.Sc. in International Politics at Trinity College Dublin in the fall.

Sierra Rupp ’23 had her Senior Seminar paper, “From Fields to Frontlines: The Relationship Between Drug Trafficking & Armed Conflict,” directed by former Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, published in The Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics.  Rupp is currently in Kyrgyzstan on a Critical Language Scholarship for Russian and this fall will be on a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Spain. Her generous acknowledgements recognize the role of the political science department in general and her various professors in this process. You can find the article here.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexander Goodwin was the keynote speaker for the Georgetown Juneteenth Celebration on June 15. This was the 72nd Annual Celebration of Juneteenth in Georgetown sponsored by the Georgetown Cultural Citizen Memorial Association (GCCMA). Juneteenth is a recognition and celebration of June 19, 1865 as the day that the enslaved people in Texas were informed that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed on January 1, 1863 to free them from slavery. On June 17, 2021, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law making Juneteenth a national holiday.

Recent political science grad and newly elected Phi Beta Kappa member Sierra Rupp ’23 has earned one of the State Department’s prestigious Critical Language Scholarships to study Russian this summer in Kyrgyzstan. Sierra is also one of SU’s two winners of the State Department’s 2024-2025 Fulbright U.S. Student Program fellowship for an English Teaching Assistantship to Spain. Previously, she was also the winner of a CLS Spark award for Summer 2024 to study beginning Russian. Congratulations to Sierra for such outstanding accomplishments!

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katie Aha presented a paper at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, held from April 4-7 in Chicago. The paper, “Gestational Surrogacy and Party Politics in Europe,” was part of a panel on “European Political Parties.” She also served as a discussant for a panel on “European Executive and Parliamentary Politics.”

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, Gerald Jones ’25, and Adrian Gonzalez ’25 presented their collaborative project, “Unraveling State Identity in the United States,” at the Midwest Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting April 3-5 in Chicago, IL. They were joined at the conference by SU alumna Alesha Lewis ’21, a current PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who presented her first-year graduate paper “Does Racial Trauma Influence Political Behavior in Marginalized People?”

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor and former Senior Director of Integrative Learning Sarah Brackmann recently published a piece in Inside Higher Ed Jobs  about how to engage in nonpartisan voter engagement efforts in today’s polarized political climate. They were invited to write the piece based on their presentation on the SU Votes coalition’s strategies for increasing voter registration and engagement at the AAC&U conference in January 2023. It can be found here.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin presented a paper at the most recent International Studies Association-Global South Caucus Conference in Bangkok entitled “Global South Stories of IR: An Entangled Anarchival Prosopographic Approach.” He also served as Chair for a panel titled Exploring Synergies: Revealing the Dynamics and Impact of South-South Cooperation.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katie Aha attended the Southern Political Science Association Annual Conference in New Orleans. Her paper with Linsey Jensen ’23, “Patterns of Radical Right Support in Czechoslovakia’s Successor States,” was part of a panel titled Left, Right, and Center, and she also served as chair and discussant for the panel European Political Institutions.

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor and her co-author, Lauren Santoro of the University of Texas at Dallas, published their article “Blind Trust, Blind Skepticism: Liberals’ & Conservatives’ Response to Academic Research” in American Politics Research. The article shows that individuals make assumptions about the ideological position of different major U.S. universities, and their likelihood of believing political (or politicized) research produced at those universities is dependent on whether their own ideological positions “match” those of the institution.

Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder had his paper titled “Realist or Just Anti-Liberal? Trump’s Foreign Policy in Retrospect” accepted for publication in the journal International Journal. It demonstrates that the Trump administration’s foreign policy of retrenchment was motivated less by the purported goal of reducing costs than by the desire to weaken liberal international practices, which had similar domestic ramifications.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin presented a paper entitled “The Grenadian Revolution: The Paris Commune of the West Indies” at a conference, “Grenada, 1973-1983: Beginnings of a Revolution, Invasion and After.” The Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library convened the conference on the 40th anniversary of the United States invasion of Grenada and the destruction of the Grenadian Revolution.

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor and her coauthor, Emily Pears (Associate Professor, Claremont McKenna College), received the 2023 John Kincaid Best Article Award from the Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations Section of the American Political Science Association for their article “The Correlates and Characteristics of American State Identity.” They are currently extending the arguments made in the article into a book-length manuscript.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin’s chapter “Revolution” was published in Mlada Bukovansky et al., eds. The Oxford Handbook on History and International Relations Oxford University Press. This is the middle of three pieces (the first came out last year, and the next is due out next spring) where Selbin is trying to resituate revolution in some sort of modernist formulation fundamentally predicated on the marriage of macro-, even meta-level thinking—how can we change the world—with a profoundly micro approach: the granularity of actions people take to change their world. This essay considers how and where current academic thinking about revolution might be situated and where, if anywhere, it might be going, and recasts it as an entangled, figurative zone of awkward engagement(s) both (deeply) ingrained in a (still) useful ‘generational’ analysis as well as how our analyses might be evolving outside of that or beyond definitions at all.

Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder presented “The Fall of Afghanistan: An American Tragedy” at the International Studies Association’s conference at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, in June.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katie Aha presented on “Gestational Surrogacy and Party Politics in Europe” at the Southern Political Science Association Summer Conference in June.

Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder published a book review of Women and Political Inequality in Japan: Gender Imbalanced Democracy by Mikiko Eto in Social Science Japan Journal, 2023.

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor and her 2022 SCOPE students, Andrew Parker ’23, Adelaide Armen ’24, and Abigail Skelton ’25, presented their paper, “The Effects of Protest Coverage on American Attitudes,” at the Midwest Political Science Association’s annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois. Sydnor also presented her paper, “50 Nifty United States? Understanding Variation in State Identity Across America,” which is co-authored with Emily Pears (Claremont McKenna College) and served as a panel chair. Political science student Megan Kelly ’23 presented her honors project, “Effects of Defense Mechanisms on Contentious Political Discussions,” as part of an undergraduate poster session at the conference.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin’s chapter “El Che: The (Im)possibilities of a Political Symbol” was published in Benjamin Abrams and Peter Gardner, eds. 2023. Symbolic Objects in Contentious Politics. Ann Arbor: the University of Michigan Press. Dedicated to our late colleague Professor of History Daniel Castro (¡presente!), this chapter recognizes that “writing about Che ‘is like dancing about architecture,’ a nearly senseless, even absurd exercise” even as he is “a remarkably universal symbol, he—or his spirit or incarnation—…’ the inescapable symbol of everything that dreamers think a revolutionary should be” (Donovan 2020). Those in need of sleep can find the chapter here.

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder published the second edition of her book Japanese Government and Politics with Routledge in February 2023. The second edition includes new information on party realignment, elections since 2017, the effects of the global pandemic, and Japanese foreign policy.

Professor of Biochemistry and Garey Chair of Chemistry Maha Zewail-Foote, Cargill Endowed Associate Professor of Education Alicia Moore, and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder co-presented a virtual session for the Association for American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) 2023 Conference on Diversity, Equity and Student Success. The mission of the AAC&U conference was to explore the complexities of truth within higher education while examining institutional structures and beliefs that impede diversity, equity, and inclusion goals. The presentation, titled “Cross-Institutional CONNECTions: Mentorship, Truth, Belonging, and Retention,” provided an overview of Southwestern’s ACS-funded FOC CONNECT project, which seeks to dismantle barriers to success experienced by early-career faculty of color (FOC) in the academy. The project supports a cross-institutional faculty mentoring program that connects these scholars with senior faculty of color from other ACS institutions.

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor and Sr. Director of Integrative and Community-Engaged Learning Sarah Brackmann co-presented at AACU’s Annual Meeting. Their presentation, “Building a Campus-Wide Integrated Voter Engagement Effort,” highlighted Southwestern’s success in building and institutionalizing a voter registration, education, and engagement program that spans the student experience.

Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder participated on a panel titled “Fostering Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Faculty Evaluation Processes” at the 2023 American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) annual meeting in San Francisco, CA, January 18-20, 2023. The panel included deans and faculty development and assessment professionals from Furman, Rhodes, Rollins, and Southwestern who shared how the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) addressed the following challenge: how do we honor the complexity of faculty work, the principles of DEI, and the distinctiveness of institutional context while implementing faculty evaluation processes that are, on the one hand, robust, rigorous, and systematic, and on the other, holistic, developmental, and fair? The ACS tackled this challenge through an Arthur Vining Davis grant devoted to improving faculty evaluation processes to, among other things, mitigate bias in student evaluations of teaching, adopt multiple measures of teaching, and assess faculty workloads for equity. The panel shared key lessons learned from developing a faculty evaluation toolkit and some of the strongest resources that support more holistic, authentic, transparent, and equitable faculty evaluation.

Professor of Spanish Katy Ross, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katie Aha, and Catherine Hiebel ’22 published an article in Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Their article, “Populism and Surrogacy in Spain,” can be found here.

Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder had his paper titled “An American Tragedy: The Fall of Afghanistan” accepted for publication in the journal Small Wars & Insurgencies.

Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder and her co-author Karine Moe published the lead essay “So You are Going to Be a New CAO: Strategies for Success” in the fall edition of The ACAD Leader sponsored by the American Council of Academic Deans.

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, Emily Tesmer ’20, and Breely Peterson ’20 published an article titled “Confronting Politics: The Role of Conflict Orientation in Shaping Political Debate” in the Journal of Deliberative Democracy.

Associate Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor presented her work “Uncivil Boundaries: Contesting the Civility of Protestors and Political Elites” at the 2022 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting & Exhibition, held September 15–18 in Montreal, Canada. She also served as a panel chair and discussant for several papers on incivility in American politics and presented the best dissertation award.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin participated in a conference titled “Critical Margins. Politicizing the Crisis” sponsored by the European Sociological Association Research Network 25 on Social Movements, the European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on Participation and Mobilization, the University of Trento Department of Sociology and Social Research, and the University of Trento Research Group on Collective Action, Change, and Transition. Selbin presented a paper titled “Revolution as Idea and Practice Today,” chaired a session titled “Reactions to Collective Actions,” and served as a discussant for the panel “Constructing and Displaying Collective Identities.” The conference was held June 15–17 in Trento, Italy.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katharine Aha presented a paper titled “Diverse Yet Durable? Interethnic Coalitions and Government Formation” as part of a panel on government formation, stability, and responsiveness at the 2022 European Political Science Association Annual Conference, held June 23–25 in Prague, Czech Republic. She also served as chair and discussant for a panel on party competition and the environment. 

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder presented a paper titled “Leadership in Crisis: Comparing Prime Minister Abe’s and Chancellor Merkel’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic” with coauthor Sarah Wiliarty of Wesleyan University at the 28th International Conference of Europeanists, held June 29–July 1 in Lisbon, Portugal.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin published the chapter “All Around the World: Revolutionary Potential in the Age of Authoritarian Revanchism” in Handbook of Revolutions in the 21st Century: The New Waves of Revolutions, and the Causes and Effects of Disruptive Political Change, edited by Jack A. Goldstone, Leonid Grinin, and Andrey Korotayev (Springer). Selbin was also an invited participant in a roundtable titled “Ideology and Authoritarian Resilience in the Global South” at the 2022 Canadian Political Science Association Annual Conference, held virtually May 30–June 3.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti gave an invited lecture at Texas Christian University on April 13. Her talk drew from her recently completed book manuscript titled Contemplative Democracy: Embodied Social Change as Ordinary Political Theory, currently under review with Oxford University Press.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, Rachel Berger ’23, and Alaina Dixon ’24 presented their faculty-student project “Destructive or Democratic? Perceptions of Civility and Protest Attitudes” at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, held April 7–10 in Chicago. They were joined at the conference by Antonio Esparza ‘22, who presented his research “Climate-Fueled Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: A Comparative Case Study of the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand.” Esparza’s work, which he developed under the supervision of Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder, was part of the undergraduate poster session titled “Politics in a Time of Crisis: COVID-19 and Climate Change.”

Professor of Spanish Katy Ross, visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Katie Aha, and Catherine Hiebel ’22 presented a panel titled “Populism and Surrogacy in Spain” at the XXIX Congreso Internacional de Literatura y Estudios Hispánicos, held March 8–10 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Ross presented “Surrogacy in Spain: the Bioethical and Feminist concerns”; Aha presented “Populism and Surrogacy”; and Hiebel presented “Spanish Populist Parties and Their Positions on Surrogacy.” The three were told that their presentation was the most coherent and organized panel the audience heard.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti co-organized a fourth annual mini-conference as part of her work cochairing the Western Political Science Association’s Embodied Social Change and Healing Justice virtual community. This year, the mini-conference took place virtually on March 11 and featured roundtables and author-meets-respondents panels for three books: Farah Godrej’s Freedom Inside? Yoga and Meditation in the Carceral State, Rima Vesely-Flad’s Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation, and Sokthan Yeng’s Buddhist Feminism: Transforming Anger Against Patriarchy. Mariotti also cochaired the final roundtable where an interdisciplinary community of academics and practitioners discussed connections between these three recent books. 

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor and Senior Director of Integrative and Community-Engaged Learning Sarah Brackmann are thrilled to share that the 2020 National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement reports, which present national voter turnout data for students at colleges and universities as well as specific data for member schools, have been released.

The 2020 voting rate on SU’s campus was 70.8%–higher than the national average (66%) and a 20% increase over our voting rate in the 2016 presidential election (50%). These successes wouldn’t be possible without the efforts of several SU students. Eugenia Agobe ’23, alex bell ‘21, Erica Burley ’22, Antonio Esparza’22, Anna Franklin ’22, Emily Gilby ’21, Alesha Lewis ’21, Juan Mojica ’22, Maureen Rendon ’21, Rachel Thompson ’23, and Josh Tenorio ’23 worked to register and turn out their classmates in spite of the pandemic and ever-changing Texas voting laws. 

Southwestern University was well represented at the 11th Race, Ethnicity, and Place Conference, held October 20–23 in Baltimore, Maryland. The SU Racial History Project presented a panel featuring research from both 2020 and 2021 SCOPE projects. The panel included:

• Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson: “The Southwestern Racial History Project: An Overview”
• Kristine Velez ’22 (Anthropology): “McKenzie College: A Plantation on the Edge of Indigenous Territory”
• Saul Zuniga ’22 (History): “Soule University, Slavery, and the Confederacy”
• Juan Mojica ’22 (Anthropology): “Hispanics, Methodism, and the Reproduction of Whiteness”
• Rini Mannankara ’22 (Political Science and Anthropology): “The Presence and Representation of Blackness in the 1960s and 1970s at Southwestern University”

In addition, SU alumna Esther S. Ramos-Garcia ’19 (Latin American and Border Studies), who is currently a graduate student at the University of Texas in the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies program, presented “Accompanando Ninos Migrantes ‘No Accompanados’: A Feminist Geopolitical Perspective on Central American Unaccompanied Minors in U.S. Long-Term Foster Care (LTFC)” as part of a panel titled “Asylum in Crisis.”

Professor of Political Science Bob Snyder’s paper titled “Ideology and Global Conflicts: Revolutionary Actors and Their Opposition to Liberalism” was published in the journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor published “Empowering and Engaging Students through Civically Engaged Research” in the journal PS: Political Science and Politics. The article, in which Sydnor argues that students gain valuable democratic skills from conducting research in conjunction with community partners, was coauthored with colleagues at Houston Community College and Queens College of Charlotte who have implemented civically engaged research projects in their classes. It is also part of a symposium in PSthat is the result of the American Political Science Association’s newly launched Institute for Civically Engaged Research. 

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, Senior Director of Integrative & Community-Engaged Learning Sarah Brackmann, and students Antonio Esparza  ’22 and Eugenia Gabrielle Agobe  ’23 presented at the 2021 Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Meeting. During their session, titled “Developing Skills and Breaking Down Barriers to Voter Engagement: Lessons Learned from the 2020 Election,” the group offered insights into their experiences encouraging student engagement through SU Votes in the lead-up to the 2020 election as well their goals for keeping the momentum going in 2021 and 2022.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin was invited to write a blog post for a forum inspired by George Lawson’s recent book, Anatomies of Revolution (2020). The Progress in Political Economy blog is hosted by the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney. Political economy is a rather storied field, perhaps most commonly associated with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and Max Weber in an era before the social sciences fragmented into fields such as politics, sociology, and economics. Selbin’s first attempt at a professional blogpost went predictably awry, with a grammatical error and his usual mishmash of words. C’est la vie or la guerre or somesuch; Mary Tyler Moore has a cameo. Those inclined may consider themselves warned and find it here. 

Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder published an essay titled “Potential Positive Legacies of the Global Pandemic” in the April 2021 issue of the ACAD Leader, a publication produced by the American Conference of Academic Deans (ACAD). The idea for the essay was sparked by a discussion in Gaunder’s Women and Politics class in fall 2020 and further informed by a roundtable discussion Gaunder led at the ACAD conference in January 2021.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin, a faculty associate at Observatorio de la Relación Binacional México–Estados Unidos, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, was part of a roundtable discussion “Entre las Promesas y las Acciones: Los 100 Días de Joseph Biden en la Casa Blanca.” Selbin was specifically asked to address the topic “America’s Society: Fall and Revindication.” This event was organized by La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, La UNAM-Los Ángeles, and La Programa de Estudios de América del Norte de la Universidad Veracruzana.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor was a panelist, presenter, chair, and discussant for several sessions at the (virtual) Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting. The highlights included presenting her work on students’ physiological reactions to controversial speech on campus, a collaborative project with Emily Tesmer ’20 and Associate Professor of Psychology Erin Crockett ’05, and participating in a roundtable on “Polarization, Animosity, and Violence in American Politics.” Senior political science major Emily Gilby ’21 also presented her honors thesis, “Institutional Barriers to Youth Voter Turnout,” at the conference.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin has been reappointed to the scientific advisory board for a major international initiative on revolutionary mass mobilizations. The initiative is based in Sweden (University of Gothenburg) and the U.S. (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) under the auspices of the Resistance Studies Network, the Nonviolence and Peace Movements Commission of the International Peace Research Association, and the Nordic Nonviolence Study Group.

At last week’s annual meeting of the International Studies Association (ISA), Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin served as chair and discussant for the panel “The Evolution of Revolution,” was a panelist on a roundtable on “Anatomies of Revolution,” and, at the request of the ISA’s Committee on Professional Development, was honored to cochair a roundtable for young scholars on encountering and countering privilege (in an array of senses) in academia titled “(En)countering Privilege in Academia.”

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti was invited to present a paper at a roundtable at the recent virtual meeting of the Western Political Science Association conference. The panel was titled “WPSA’s Experiment with Virtual Communities: Successes, Failings, and Future Prospects,” and the participants spoke about their experiences chairing virtual communities over the past year. Mariotti cochairs the virtual community on Embodied Social Change and Healing Justice. Other panelists spoke about their work with virtual communities in other areas of study that have tended to be marginalized in mainstream political science, such as planetary justice, critical disability studies, critical whiteness studies, decolonizing political science, and inclusive teaching and pedagogy. You can read more about all the virtual communities here, and you can read about the Embodied Social Change and Healing Justice community here. The good news: at this meeting, we also learned that the WPSA executive council decided to make the virtual communities a permanent, staffed, and funded part of the association.

Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder received a book contract for the second edition of Japanese Politics and Government  (Routledge, 2017). The second edition will address recent developments in Japanese politics, especially related to the global pandemic, domestic political party realignment, the legacies of Prime Minister Abe’s long tenure in office, and the changing dynamics of Japan’s foreign relations. The manuscript is scheduled for delivery to the press in summer 2022.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor  and SU alumna Madison Flores  ’20, Megan Nair  ’20, and Meredith Rasmussen  ’19 recently published a chapter titled “Civility through the Comparative Lens: Challenges and Achievements” in the book Political Incivility in the Parliamentary, Electoral, and Media Arena  (Routledge, 2021). The authors particularly enjoyed learning about what counts as civil and uncivil behavior in other countries; for example, Taiwanese parliamentarians see brawls and throwing chairs at each other as acceptable ways to show their constituents they are (literally) fighting for their cause.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin  was invited by the Manchester, UK–based Rethink Rebuild Society to speak on the 10th anniversary of the Syrian Revolution. The invitation grew out of a book group which read the Arabic edition of Selbin’s book Revolution, Rebellion, and Resistance: The Power of a Story  ( الثورة والتمرد والمقاومة: قوة الحكاية ). Over 700 people from around the world attended on Zoom and Facebook Live, and it has since been viewed by several hundred more people. The Rethink Rebuild Society is primarily focused on Great Britain’s Syrian exile community and provides assistance and support to improve lives; promote the aspirations of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants in the UK; and raise awareness on issues related to refugees and other immigrants within the UK through policy and media work. The talk, “ Revolution in the Real World ,” is available on Facebook. It begins at about the 12-minute mark, runs for 30 minutes, and is followed by about an hour of Q&A.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor gave a talk as part of American University’s Government Department Speaker Series on March 12, 2021. The lecture focused on Americans’ identification with their states (for example, how Texan do you feel?), the factors that influence people to hold stronger state identities, and the impact of this identification on trust in state government.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti  was invited to review Thomas Dumm’s recent Home In America: On Loss and Retrieval  (Harvard University Press, 2019). Theorizing the spaces and places of “home,” Dumm explores environmental apocalypse and the Anthropocene, slavery and racial injustice, settler colonialism, mass incarceration, and the ideology of the patriarchal family. Mariotti turned the book review into an article-length essay that explores how these meditations on home in the “before times” have changed in the “after times” of the coronavirus pandemic. Her essay focuses on how the pandemic has newly illuminated a long-standing crisis of caretaking and spotlighted the undervalued work of social reproduction that is still primarily the work of women in ways that are raced and classed, giving dramatically different meanings to what it means to be “at home” in this country. Her essay is forthcoming in the journal American Political Thought .

Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder led a roundtable titled “Some Potential Positive Effects of the Global Pandemic on Higher Ed” at the annual Dean’s Institute sponsored by the American Conference of Academic Deans on January 20, 2021. The discussion highlighted how some recent responses to the pandemic, including new ways of community building, a renewed commitment to student learning, and the value of incorporating technology, are likely to have a lasting impact on higher education.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti was invited to participate in a roundtable on the theme of “Embodying Your Curriculum,” on January 8, 2021. The panel explored how embodied and trauma-informed practices can be useful in the classroom, even (especially?) for distance learning, in an era marked by pandemic, protests, and political crisis.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor has shared her expertise in American political behavior through a wide range of outlets in the past few weeks, including a pre-election interview with KUT and postelection discussions with Bloomberg News and the Georgetown edition of Community Impact. She was also a contributor to U.S. Election Analysis 2020, a report capturing the immediate thoughts, reflections, and early insights on the 2020 presidential election by more than 115 leading U.S. and international academics. In her entry, Sydnor discussed the narratives of civility and incivility throughout the presidential campaign and argued that Biden’s call for a return to civility may gloss over real systemic and nationwide concerns. Sydnor also published a post on the American Political Science Association’s RAISE the Vote site, a blog dedicated to amplifying and increasing students’ civic engagement and voting. The post outlined Southwestern’s university-wide collaboration around voter education and turnout, as well as our on-campus polling place, as an example for other schools who are also interested in increasing their student engagement.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor and political science majors Maureen Rendon ’21 and Sarah Bowen ’22 presented “Uncivil Boundaries: Contesting the Civility of Protestors and Movements on Instagram” at the American Political Science Association (APSA) Political Communication Preconference on September 8. The presentation was based on work conducted as part of SCOPE 2020. At the APSA annual meeting, Sydnor also participated in a roundtable on teaching civic engagement and received the Craig L. Brians Award for Undergraduate Research and Mentoring from the APSA Political Science Education section.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor is the recipient of one of the American Political Science Association’s prestigious Centennial Center Special Projects Fund grants. The Special Projects Fund is an initiative that provides grants of up to $25,000 to support member-led collaborative projects aimed at advancing the discipline of political science. Sydnor is one of the principal investigators on the taskforce project “The Components, Processes, and Implications of Conducting Civically Engaged Research in Political Science,” which you can learn more about here.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti is cochairing a new group within the Western Political Science Association (WPSA): the Virtual Community on Embodied Social Change and Healing Justice. The WPSA’s Virtual Communities have two goals: (1) To keep scholarly connections strong and increase access—through small conferences, book groups, panels for works in progress, and mentoring and solidarity—during a time when traditional conferences are being revised and reimagined out of both necessity and choice. (2) To focus on areas of study that have tended to be marginalized in mainstream political science, such as planetary justice, critical disability studies, critical whiteness studies, decolonizing political science, and inclusive teaching and pedagogy. You can read more about all the Virtual Communities here, and you can read about the Embodied Social Change and Healing Justice Virtual Community here. 

Avery Beam ’19 had her paper “Women’s Representation in the Post-Soviet Space: Latvia and Lithuania” accepted for publication in Reinvention: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research. The paper is based on Beam’s final research paper for Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder’s Women and Politics in Europe and Asia course. It examines the role electoral systems play in affecting the greater representation of women in post-Soviet democracies. Beam is currently a research assistant at the Congressional Research Service in Washington, D.C.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor and three coprincipal investigators received a $25,000 grant from the American Political Science Association Special Projects Fund to advance the public impact of political science research. The grant will fund a series of workshops on civically engaged research, building a cohort of faculty whose research is designed collaboratively with community partners to produce mutually beneficial results and more closely align the academic field of political science with the practice of politics and governance.

Conner Joyce ’19  had his paper, “A Path-Dependent Explanation of Divergent Nuclear Trajectories,” accepted for publication in the Pi Sigma Alpha Undergraduate Journal of Politics. The paper is based on Joyce’s honors thesis in political science in 2019. It examines why some countries attempt to acquire nuclear weapons and others do not. Joyce is currently in a master’s program at the LBJ School at the University of Texas. 

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin helped organize and served as a “mentor” for the International Studies Association’s (ISA’s) Second Emerging Global South Scholar Workshop. The workshop brought together 20 Global South scholars from Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Portugal, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and the U.S. (selected from more than 250 applicants) with seven “mentors” from Egypt, India, Mexico, South Africa, the U.S, and the U.K. During the workshop, Selbin specifically cochaired a session on publishing strategies for peer-reviewed journals. Originally scheduled for Ifrane, Morocco, the workshop was funded by the ISA’s Committee on the Status of Engagement with the Global South, who, along with the Global South Caucus of the ISA, sponsored the event.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti  worked with several friends to organize a Racial Justice March in solidarity and partnership with Black Lives Matter in the community of Alamo Heights. The march took place Saturday, June 6, and more than 500 people turned out to protest against White Silence and support Black Lives Matter. One goal was to begin a community conversation about white privilege as it relates to racial injustice and police violence. Media outlets covered the march and interviewed Mariotti; you can read the Texas Public Radio article here , as well as an article by the San Antonio Express News  here .

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor talked about her recent book, Disrespectful Democracy: The Psychology of Political Incivility, the concerns raised by calls for civility, and who the most conflict-avoidant president might have been on the podcast Politics in Question. The episode is available here.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti coorganized the second annual interdisciplinary Politics of the Mindful Revolution miniconference as part of the Western Political Science Association conference. She helped organize three author-meets-critics roundtables. One panel features law professor and mindfulness teacher Rhonda Magee speaking with commentators about her book The Inner Work of Racial Justice. Another panel features religious studies professor Ann Gleig speaking with commentators about her book American Dharma: Buddhism beyond Modernity. A third panel features the sociologist, yoga teacher, and poet Becky Thompson speaking with commentators about her book Teaching with Tenderness: Toward an Embodied Practice. Our panels are all open to the public and will take place on Zoom throughout the day on Thursday, May 21. You can find the full program here.

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder’s article “Conservative Women in Germany and Japan: Chancellors versus Madonnas,” coauthored with Sarah Wiliarty, appears in hard copy in the latest issue of Politics and Gender (vol. 16, pp. 99-122).

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin has been appointed by International Studies Association (ISA) President Helen V. Milner and approved by the ISA Governing Council as one of the nine members of the ISA Publications Committee. The committee is responsible for overseeing the eight journals the association publishes. As a member of the Feminist Theory & Gender Studies, Global Development Studies, and Theory Sections and the Global South and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, & Allies Caucuses, as well as being affiliated with the Women’s Caucus, Selbin intends to work to further the groups’ respective agendas as well as to be a voice for small liberal-arts college faculty in the publication process.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti published an invited article for the volume A Companion to Adorno, edited by Peter Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Pensky. This volume is part of the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy  series and, with 40 essays, is the largest collection of essays by Adorno specialists ever gathered in a single volume. Her piece is titled “Adorno’s Democratic Modernism in America: Leaders and Educators as Political Artists.” Bridging disciplinary divides, this essay brings the lens of artistic modernism to bear on Adorno’s writings on democracy in America to illuminate the distinctive contributions of a political theory that might only appear partial and preliminary when analyzed through the lens of conventional politics. Adorno’s understanding of “democratic enlightenment” resonates with the modernist concept of epiphany and represents a translation of artistic modernism to the political realm. She shows how Adorno’s lessons on the meaningful everyday practice of democracy speak powerfully and practically to people in the U.S. today.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor  was interviewed about her recently published book, Disrespectful Democracy: The Psychology of Political Incivility  (Columbia University Press, 2019), as part of the National Institute for Civil Discourse’s podcast series. The conversation ranged from the specific findings of the book to broader debates about the role that civility and incivility have in democracies. The interview is available here .

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin published a review of the redoubtable Margaret Randall’s Exporting Revolution: Cuba’s Global Solidarity(Duke University Press, 2017) in the Canadian journal Left History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti published an article titled “Zen and the Art of Democracy: Contemplative Practice as Ordinary Political Theory” in the journal Political Theory. This piece explores resonances between the radical democratic theory of Jacques Rancière and Zen works by Shunryu Suzuki and others, showing how meditation can be understood as an aesthetic practice that cultivates modes of experience, perception, thinking, and feeling that further radical democratic projects at a basic level. The article also shows how meditative practice can supplement democratic projects today focused on abolitionism and social justice, care work and dependency work, and reclaiming experience to work against the appropriation of the “attentional commons.” This piece draws from a current book project exploring contemplative practices as modes of embodied social change that can enact and extend the ordinary practice of democracy in everyday life.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin ’s book Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power of Story  has been published in Turkey as Devrim, Isyan, Direnis: Hikayenin Gücü  by the publisher Abis Yayincilik. This edition joins previously published translations in Arabic, German, and Spanish along with an Indian-only English language edition.

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder published a book review of The Abe Administration and the Rise of the Prime Ministerial Executive by Aurelia George Mulgan in the latest issue of Monumenta Nipponica 74 (1): 157–160.

In the wake of every election, Tufts University’s Institute for Democracy and Higher Education produces reports detailing overall college student turnout rates and campus-specific turnout for hundreds of college campuses. The 2018 reports came out September 19. Below are some highlights from Southwestern’s report:

• The 2018 voting rate on SU’s campus was 51.7%! That surpasses both the 30% goal Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor encouraged the student organizers to set and the 50% goal they wanted to work toward.
• Southwestern showed a 33% increase from the voting rate at SU in 2014 and held steady at the rate SU voted in the 2016 presidential election (50% in 2016). As you might imagine, this is unusual for a midterm election.
• SU’s rate was substantially higher than those of other institutions across the U.S.: 12.6% higher than the average across all institutions. SU’s was also higher than the national rate, which was 49.3%.
• While turnout was up across the country in 2018, Southwestern’s impressive increase in voting rates was in part the result of concerted get-out-the-vote efforts by Sydnor, Senior Director of Integrative and Community-Engaged Learning Sarah Brackman, Teresa Cropper ’20, Laura Rativa ’20, Camille Martin ’19, Caroline Haywood ’18 and the Office of Community-Engaged Learning. 

This week, Columbia University Press released Disrespectful Democracy: The Psychology of Political Incivility, the first book by Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor.The book demonstrates that incivility shapes people’s attitudes and emotional reactions to politics, but it does so differently based on how they as individuals respond to conflict and confrontation. Using data collected both at the University of Virginia and at Southwestern, the book shows that for some people, incivility can lead them to share more specific policy opinions and feel more positively about politics. 

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnorpresented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and at the APSA Political Communication Preconference, which were held in Washington, DC, August 27–September 1. Her pre-conference paper, “Confronting Politics: The Role of Conflict Orientation in Shaping Political Debate,” was coauthored by Emily Tesmer ’20 and Breely Peterson ’21. The conference paper, “Stressing Incivility: Physiological Arousal and Incivility,” reported findings from a joint project with Tesmer and Associate Professor of Psychology Erin Crockett. Both papers would not be possible without great research assistance from Ashton Eggers ’21, Madison Flores ’20, Emma Lopez ’21, Camille Martin ’19, and Olivia Montreuil ’20.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor  was interviewed by KXAN and the Williamson County Sun  about a new Texas law that prevents mobile polling locations during early voting. She discussed the effects of polling locations on voter turnout, particularly among college students.

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder  argued against the resolution: “Japan needs a two-party system” in an article published in the Center for Strategic and International Studies newsletter Debating Japan . Debating Japan  is “a platform for scholars around the world to address pressing issues in Japan’s policy debate and U.S.–Japan relations.” Each author is asked to take a particular position on a policy issue. This issue of the newsletter focuses on the party system in the wake of the recent upper house parliamentary election on July 21, 2019.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin and journalist, editor, and singer Helen Cordes published “Singing Resistance, Rebellion, and Revolution into Being: Collective Political Action and Song,” the lead chapter in the anthology Sonic Politics: Music and the Narration of the Social in the Americas from the 1960s to the Present, edited by Olaf Kaltmeier and Wilfried Raussert and published by Routledge. The publication is accompanied by a webpage and a YouTube channel with playlists created for the individual chapters, providing the opportunity to listen to the songs under discussion while reading the essays, thus making the topic acoustically more “tangible.”

Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Political Science Alisa Gaunder was the program cochair for the Deans’ Program at the Annapolis Group Annual Meeting, June 17–19, 2019. The Annapolis Group of Liberal Arts Colleges comprises approximately 130 leading national liberal-arts colleges. The Annapolis Group provides a forum for member institutions to “share best practices, seek higher levels of excellence, and advance the cause of liberal arts education on a national scale.” In addition to serving as program cochair, Gaunder also served as a panel participant in the session on Curricular Innovations.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti was invited to join the editorial board of American Political Thought: A Journal of Ideas, Institutions, and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin published an article titled “Resistance and Revolution in the Age of Authoritarian Revanchism: The Power of Revolutionary Imaginaries in the Austerity–Security State Era” in Millennium, one of the U.K.’s top international relations journals.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor presented her paper, “Uncivil Boundaries: The Effects of Online Civility Contests on Perceptions of Protest,” at a workshop on race, gender, and toxicity online at The University of Texas’ Moody School of Communication on April 25–26, 2019. The workshop was sponsored by the Social Science Research Council’s Program on Media and Democracy.

Avery Beam  ’19 presented her honors thesis in political science, “Ideology in Russia’s Clash with the West,” at the Midwestern Political Science Association’s annual conference, in Chicago, IL,  April 7.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti presented a paper, “Everyday Democracy and Meditative Practices: Tactics to Resist the Appropriation of the Attentional Commons,” at the Western Political Science Association conference on April 20, 2019. She also served as chair on a panel titled “Spatial and Social Imaginaries: Buddhism in Context” and a discussant on a panel titled “Buddhism, Feminism, and the Body Politic.” This was all part of a miniconference she coorganized titled “The Politics of the Mindful Revolution.” Thirty interdisciplinary academics met over the course of two days to attend eight panels that explored political problems and possibilities arising from the mainstreaming of meditation and mindfulness that is known as “Buddhist modernism.”   

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin has been named an associate faculty member at the Observatorio de la Relación Binacional México–EE.UU. (Observatory of the Binational Relationship Mexico–USA) of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Read the full story here.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin served as one of the mentors to the 20 young Global South Scholars selected from several hundred globally to participate in the daylong International Studies Association’s First Emerging Global South Scholar Workshop sponsored by the International Studies Association’s (ISA’s) Committee on the Status of Engagement with the Global South (CSEGS) and the Global South Caucus (GSCIS). Among the activities, Selbin led a session on teaching experiences and challenges. Selbin also facilitated a panel at the ISA conference on publication strategies at an Intergenerational Café sponsored by the recently inaugurated Committee on the Status of the Global South with support from the ISA Global South Taskforce and the Global South Caucus. Finally, Selbin cochaired the final meeting of the 2014–2019 editorial team of International Studies Perspectives, one of the ISA’s journals.

Conner Joyce  ’19 presented his honors thesis in political science, “A Path-Dependent Explanation of Divergent Nuclear Trajectories,” at the Midwestern Political Science Association’s annual conference in Chicago, IL, April 7.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor’s 2018 article “Platforms for Incivility: Examining Perceptions Across Different Media Formats” was reprinted as a chapter in the book Studying Politics Across Media.The book, which was published by Routledge, contains research that was originally included in a special issue of the journal Political Communication.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor published the chapter “Signaling Incivility: The Role of Speaker, Substance, and Tone” in the edited volume A Crisis of Civility? Political Discourse and Its Discontents. The book was developed with the support of the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona and published by Routledge.

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder coauthored an article with Sarah Wiliarty titled “Conservative Women in Germany and Japan: Chancellors versus Madonnas,” which was accepted for publication in Politics and Gender. It is currently available as a featured online article and is forthcoming in hard copy.

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder attended the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) Annual Meeting in Atlanta, GA, Jan. 23–26. While there, she led three consecutive roundtable sessions for the American Conference of Academic Deans (ACAD) on “Guiding Change in the Curriculum.” She also participated on an AAC&U panel with deans from Macalester College and Denison University. Her presentation focused on curricular innovations in the humanities and interdisciplinary programs at Southwestern.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnorpresented a project titled “Accountability or Audacity? Protest and the Boundaries of (In)Civility” at the Southern Political Science Association, in Austin, Jan. 17–19. Current political science student Camille Martin’19 also participated in the conference, presenting her honors thesis, “Surveying Neoliberal Feminism.”

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti published an article in the journal New Political Science. The piece, titled “The New Progressive Federalism: Common Benefits, State Constitutional Rights, and Democratic Political Action,” explores the history and contemporary relevance of the “common benefits clause,” an overlooked but robustly democratic provision that dates back to 1776 but is still on the books in many state constitutions. The article shows how these “common benefits clauses” can inform the broad “new progressive federalist” movement, where democratic political action is rising up from city, state, and local governments to interrupt and counteract the oligarchic tendencies of the national government under the Trump administration.

Eleven Southwestern University faculty members have won Sam Taylor Fellowship grants to support their research, with award amounts ranging from $1,000 to $1,600. Sam Taylor Fellowships are selected through a competitive application process and are provided by the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church. This year’s recipients are

• Professor of Physics Steven Alexander, “Generating Energy from Hot Sidewalks” (awarded $1,200)
• Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Lamiyah Bahrainwala, “The Politics of Stealth Halal: Re-Presenting the Islamic Origins of U.S. Meat Products” (awarded $1,600)
• Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth , “Nature Education in the German Classroom: Possibilities for Integration and Inclusion?” (awarded $1,400)
• Professor of Biology Romi Burks, “Unravelling the Mystery: Genetic Differentiation of Chinese and Japanese Mysterysnails Using 16S” (awarded $1,400)
• Assistant Professor of History Jethro Hernandez Berrones, “With Indigenist Spirit: Doctors on Spiritual Practices in Post-Revolutionary Mexico” (awarded $1,500)
• Professor of Anthropology Melissa Johnson, “Human–Jaguar Becomings and Racial Capitalism in Belize” (awarded $1,000)
• Associate Professor of French Francis Mathieu, “Research on Claire de Duras’s Avant-Garde Novella, Ourika” (awarded $1,400)
• Associate Professor of French Aaron Prevots, “Gestures toward the Sacred: Guillevic, Vargaftig, Tellermann, Michel” (awarded $1,400)
• Associate Professor of Communication Studies Valerie Renegar, “Contemporary Modes of Parenting: Disrupting the Representation of Stepmothers in Popular Culture” (awarded $1,500)
• Associate Professor of Spanish Maria De Los Angeles Rodriguez Cadena, “Cultural Memory and Historical Fiction: Women of the Past on Television and Film by Four Contemporary Mexican Women Directors” (awarded $1,400)
• Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor, “Researching Attachments to American Political Institutions” (awarded $1,600)

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor was interviewed by KXAN to discuss the changing political landscape in Williamson County.

Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor was interviewed by Spectrum News’s In Focus program about civility in the midterm elections.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin was selected to present at the London School of Economics’s (LSE) inaugural 2018–19 International Relations Notable Scholar Colloquium. Selbin was also an invited guest at the 2018 Millennium Conference hosted annually by the LSE; this year’s theme was Revolution and Resistance in World Politics. Selbin was asked to be the final speaker on the conference’s concluding panel, “Revolution and Resistance in the 21st Century,” and served on an author-meets-critic panel discussing Alpha Shah’s Nightmarch about India’s Naxalite revolutionaries, the world’s longest revolutionary struggle.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti coorganized a mini-conference on “The Politics of the Mindful Revolution” for the upcoming Western Political Science Association conference. Some panels explore how mindfulness and meditation can be coopted by neoliberal capitalism while other panels emphasize how Buddhist modernism contains countercultural strategies for progressive social change. Some panels assess the dangers of Buddhist modernism becoming a white-washed form of cultural appropriation while other panels analyze how meditation and mindfulness practices play vital roles in sustaining social movements generally and racial justice and abolitionist movements in particular. Some panels explore how mindfulness, meditation, and Buddhist modernism can be a valuable part of feminist theory and practice while other panels see these practices as less accessible and more exclusionary. The conference draws together over 30 scholars from interdisciplinary fields in the U.S. and internationally to consider these questions at the intersection of meditation, mindfulness, and politics.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin helped lead a workshop “Writing and Reviewing for US-Based Peer-Reviewed Journals” at the Asociación Mexicana de Estudios Internacionales and was also part of a roundtable titled “Collaborations between Global North Journals and Global South Scholars and Teachers.”

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin was interviewed on KUT-FM’s Texas Standard about the Honduran caravan. You can listen to the interview here.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin’s book series, New Millennium Books in International Studies,published by Rowman & Littlefield, released the fourth edition of Laura Neack’s Studying Foreign Policy Comparatively: Cases and Analysisand the second edition of Sheila Croucher’s Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World. Mary Durfee and Rachael Lorna Johnstone’s forthcoming volume, Arctic Governance in a Changing World, will be the 20th book published in the series.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin’s book Modern Latin American Revolutions (first edition 1993; second edition 1999) was recently purchased by Routledge and had a Kindle edition added. This fall marks 25 years in print.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin was invited to speak to a small, international workshop on “Doing IR Differently,” hosted by the Departamento de Relaciones Internacionales y Ciencia Política in the Colegio de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito on San Cristóbal Island, Galapagos, Ecuador. He was specifically asked to address how he identifies himself and engages with life, how he got to the point of wanting to engage his academic work differently, what he experienced or observed that made him question the discipline, his focus now in contrast to what previous knowledge and where he thinks that will take him, and what other kind(s) of “knowing” he might be able to share. Following that, Selbin was on a roundtable titled “Collaborations between Global North Journals and Global South Scholars and Teachers” at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO)–International Studies Association Joint International Conference in Quito, Ecuador.

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder presented a paper titled “Cracking the Glass Ceiling in Japan: The Constraints of Party Strength and Organization” at the Asian Studies Association of Australia Conference July 3–5, 2018, in Sydney, Australia. She also was one of four scholars invited to participate in a featured roundtable on “Asia’s Democracies” at the same conference.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin presented a paper titled “The Legacies of 1968: Social Movements & Revolution in the Austerity-Security State Era and Age of Authoritarian Revanchism” at the conference “1968-2018, Fifty Years After: Where is the Social Movement Field Going?” in Florence, Italy, May 23–25, 2018. The conference was sponsored by the Centre on Social Movement Studies (Scuola Normale Superiore), the European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on Participation & Mobilization, and the European Sociological Association Research Network 25. He also attended the annual Latin American Studies Association meeting to meet with young faculty and graduate students about small liberal arts colleges (SLACs) and conducted research related to the 1939 Retirada (the flight from Spanish fascism across the border) and the 1940 death of Walter Benjamin.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti was invited to serve as a Guest Editor for the journal Political Theory: An International Journal of Political Philosophy. She will edit the journal’s new “Guide to the Archives” on the topic of political theory and American literature.

Political Science major Elizabeth Wright, class of 2018, published her fall 2017 Senior Capstone project, “I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me. Understanding the Authoritarian Tendencies of the U.S. National Security State,” in Politikon, the peer-reviewed, flagship publication of the International Association for Political Science Students. Wright is currently a Fellow at the Muslim Public Affairs Council and will remain there while starting an MA in Security Policy Studies at George Washington University’s Elliott School in the fall.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin spoke on “Nicaragua’s Crisis and/in the Regional Political Landscape” as part of a Foro Urgente Nicaragua at the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin was a participant on a roundtable organized by Cynthia Enloe titled “Diversifying the Discipline: Problems, Policies, and Prescriptions” and served as a mentor for ISA’s Taskforce on the Global South’s “Mentoring Café: Strategies and Support for Global South Scholars” at the 2018 International Studies Association meeting. In addition, as associate editor he co-convened the 2018 International Studies Perspective’s Editorial Board Meeting and chaired the annual meeting of the New Millennium Books in International Studies series of which he is co-editor. Finally, as part of the ISA’s Taskforce on the Global South as well as the nascent South-South Educational Scholarly Collaboration and Knowledge Interchange Initiative, Selbin was invited to attend conferences in the coming year in Quito, Ecuador, and Guadalejara, Mexico.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor presented two papers at the Midwest Political Science Association’s Annual Meeting. The first, “What’s your excuse? The Effects of Personal and Political Justifications for Flip-Flopping,” demonstrated that constituents are more effectively persuaded by explanations for a Congressman’s position shift when they are grounded in public opinion or personal experience, rather than party politics. The second, “Creating Trust in Government,” investigated whether local governments could increase citizen trust by emphasizing the participatory nature or policy successes of the government. Two current political science students, Emily Tesmer,class of 2020, and Camille Martin, class of 2019, presented posters analyzing survey experiments they are conducting on the SU campus.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti presented a paper titled “Zen and the Art of Democracy: Sensory Perception, Aesthetics, and the Political Value of Buddhist Modernism” on the panel “Mindfulness and Politics: Embodied Social Change” at the Western Political Science Association conference in San Francisco, Calif., on March 30, 2018. She also presented a paper on her experiments with mindfulness and meditation as pedagogical practices in the political science classroom at a roundtable titled “Staying Centered with Too Much To Do: The Possibilities and Dangers of Mindfulness in the Neoliberal University.”

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti was invited to give a lecture at The University of Texas at San Antonio on Feb. 22, 2018. Her talk to the department of Political Science and Geography drew from her current book project and was titled “The Experience of Democracy and the Politics of Buddhist Modernism.”

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder’s article titled “‘Madonnas,’ ‘Assassins,’ and ‘Girls’: How Female Politicians Respond to Media Labels Reflecting Party Leader Strategy” was published in the most recent issue of the interdisciplinary U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal.

Professor of Political Science  Shannon Mariotti  was invited to contribute the essay on “Adorno and Democracy” to the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to  Adorno , edited by Peter Gordon, Max Pensky, and Espen Hammer.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor published an article titled “Easing Political Digestion: The effects of news curation on citizens’ behavior” in the Journal of Information Technology and Politics. The article is coauthored with Danielle Psimas, a 2015 graduate of the University of Virginia’s Politics Honors Program.

Associate Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti was invited to contribute the essay on “Adorno and Democracy” for the Blackwell Companion to Adorno, a volume that will be edited by Espen Hammer, Peter Gordon, and Max Pensky. Her essay, “The Dispossession of the Public and the ‘Common Benefits’ Clause: Working Against Neoliberal Oligarchy through U.S. State Constitutions,” was also just published in American Political Thought: An Alternative View, edited by Alex Zamalin and Jonathan Keller (Routledge, 2017).

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor presented a paper titled “The Emotional Consequences of Political Incivility and Psychological Conflict Orientation” at the European Consortium for Political Research Joint Session Workshops in Nottingham, United Kingdom. The workshop, titled “Political Incivility in Parliament, Party Competition and Political Communication,” brought together scholars from 10 countries for four days of in-depth discussion on the topic.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti participated in a panel titled “Mindfulness, Meditation, and Politics: Practices of the Social, Practices of the Self” on Apr. 13, 2017 at the Western Political Science Association conference in Vancouver, Canada. Her paper was titled “Zen Democracy: Experience and the Political Value of Modern Western Buddhism” and draws from a new book project.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor participated in the second research convening of the National Institute for Civil Discourse in Tucson, Ariz., on March 23–25.  She presented work she began with Southwestern alumna Grace Atkins ’16 titled “Signaling Incivility: The Role of Speaker, Substance and Tone.” She also presented her work on “The Emotional Consequences of Political Incivility and Psychological Conflict Orientation” at the Midwest Political Science Association’s annual meeting in Chicago, Ill., April 6–9.

Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti presented a paper on April 1 at the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities conference at Stanford Law School. Her paper was titled “Common Benefits and Equal Privileges: The New Progressive Federalism, State Constitutional Rights, and a Democratic Politics against Neoliberal Oligarchy.”

Associate Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti accepted an invitation from the political science department at Trinity University in San Antonio to present a paper on March 23, 2017. She presented a talk, titled “The Experience of Meaningful Democracy: Adorno in America,” that drew from her recent book, Adorno and Democracy: The American Years (University Press of Kentucky, 2017).

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder published a book titled Japanese Politics and Government with Routledge in March 2017. This book investigates Japanese politics in the postwar era from theoretical and comparative perspectives offering an in-depth exploration of postwar political institutions, political reform in the 1990s, the policymaking process, and the politics of economic growth and stagnation. It also draws attention to key policy issues including women and work, immigration, Japanese aging/low fertility society, security and trade.

Associate Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti gave an invited lecture at Oklahoma City University on March 2. Her talk drew from her new book project and was titled “The Common Benefits Clause: Working Against Neoliberal Oligarchy Through U.S. State Constitutions.”

Professor of Political Science and Tower-Hester Chair Tim O’Neill’s article “New Directions in Anti-Terrorism Policy” has been accepted for publication in the journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism. Another article, “The Canucks, Brits and Yanks:  Creative Anti-Terrorist Policy Making in the 21st Century,” will appear in the Winter 2017 edition of the Journal of Conflict and Security Law.  He has also signed a contract with Sage/CQ Press for a textbook on American Politics tentatively titled The Quest for Fair and Effective Government: The American Experience.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor published an article titled “Assessing Undergraduate Student Learning in Political Science: Development and Implementation of the ‘PACKS’ Survey” in PS: Political Science and Politics.  Sydnor was also invited to present her research on “The Interaction of Political Incivility and Psychological Conflict Orientation” as part of the University of Texas Moody College of Communication’s Political Communication Lecture Series. She also presented a poster on the same topic at this year’s meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin was part of a roundtable, “Ernesto Cardenal in Word and Action: Poetry, Politics, and Priesthood in 20th-Century Nicaragua,” including poet, priest, liberation theologian, and revolutionary Father Ernesto Cardenal and writer, revolutionary, and former Nicaraguan Vice President Sergio Ramírez. The roundtable celebrated the opening of the Ernesto Cardenal Papers at the University of Texas at Austin’s LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections.

Associate Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti published a co-edited volume titled A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson. The volume includes nine essays in which contemporary political theorists analyze Robinson’s novels and essays, and one original interview with Robinson that Mariotti and Lane conducted at her home in Iowa. Mariotti also co-wrote the introduction to the volume, titled “The Mystery of Experience: Marilynne Robinson’s Political Theory,” and also contributed an essay titled “The Housekeeper of Homelessness: The Democratic Ethos of Marilynne Robinson’s Novels and Essays.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor was interviewed for a story in the Austin American-Statesman about the lack of competitive congressional races in Texas. The story was published on the front page of the Oct. 19th edition.

Associate Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti was invited to review two books related to her recently published book, Adorno and Democracy: The American Years. She reviewed Robyn Marasco’s The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel, which will be published in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs. She also reviewed Gary A. Mullen’s Adorno on Politics after Auschwitz, which will be published in Symposium: a Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor and Assistant Professor of Psychology Erin Crockett ’15 received a grant from the American Political Science Association’s Centennial Center for Political Science and Public Affairs. The grant will support their research on physiological reactions to political incivility.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor presented a paper titled “Signaling Incivility: The Role of Speaker, Substance and Tone” at the Political Communication Pre-conference to the American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting on August 31 in Philadelphia, Penn. Grace Atkins, Class of 2017, is a co-author on the project. Her analysis was included at the conference.

Associate Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti published her book Adorno and Democracy: The American Years (University Press of Kentucky, 2016).

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin published an article “Queering Uncle Sam, the Caribbean, and the Academy: A Humanifesto for Us All” in Millennium: Journal of International Studies. The article was inspired and influenced in part by the excellent work of Southwestern alumna Dr. Meghana Nayak ’97 of Pace University.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin has the lead article in a special issue of the The Journal of the International Association of Inter-American Studies titled “Spaces and Places of (Im)Possibility and Desire: Transversal Revolutionary Imaginaries in the Twentieth Century Americas.”

Associate Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti was invited to present a talk on her forthcoming book, Adorno and Democracy: The American Years, at the annual meeting of the Association for Adorno Studies Conference at the Université de Montréal.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science Emily Sydnor was awarded the Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award by the American Political Science Association’s Political Communication section for her dissertation, “Fighting Words and Fiery Tone: The Interaction of Political Incivility and Psychological Conflict Orientation.”

Associate Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti presented a paper at the Western Political Science Association conference on March 26th. Her paper was titled “The Dispossession of the Commons and the Common Benefits Clause: Working Against Neoliberal Oligarchy in the U.S. Through State Constitutions.”

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin spoke at the Eminent Scholar Panel honoring Cynthia Weber of Sussex University as a Distinguished Scholar. The panel was sponsored by the International Studies Association’s Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section and the LGBTQA Caucus at the annual International Studies Association meeting.

Professor of Political Science and Dean of the Faculty Alisa Gaunder had a chapter titled “Women in the 2014 Lower House Election” published in Japan Decides 2014: The Japanese General Election (Palgrave 2016). This volume was edited by Robert J. Pekkanen, Steven R. Reed, and Ethan Scheiner; and focused on the December 2014 election to the lower house of the Japanese Diet.

Associate Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti has had two previously published articles reprinted. “Adorno on the Radio: Democratic Leadership as Democratic Pedagogy,” originally published in The Journal Political Theory, was reprinted in a volume that collects notable work on Adorno’s politics, titled “Theodor W. Adorno II.” An excerpt from Mariotti’s forthcoming book, Adorno and Democracy: The American Years is also being reprinted in Germany in a volume titled “Die Dialektik der Aufklärung in Amerika,” under contract and forthcoming from Leipzig University Press in 2017. Mariotti also recently accepted an invitation to present a paper, drawing from her forthcoming book, at the Association for Adorno Studies conference, at the Université de Montréal in April 2016.

Professor of Political Science Tim O’Neill’s article, “The Canucks, Brits and Yanks: Creative Anti-Terrorist Policy Making in the 21st Century,” has been accepted for publication by The Journal of Conflict and Security Law, the leading international journal on anti-terrorist policy.

Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin helped lead a workshop on “Decolonizing the Teaching of International Relations” and was a participant in the “Inclusive Classroom” track the annual American Political Science Association Teaching & Learning Conference in February.

In December, Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin was an invited guest at a conference entitled “What’s the Point of IR” convened to celebrate 50 years of International Relations at the University of Sussex.

At the recent European International Studies Association meeting, Professor of Political Science Eric Selbin presented a paper entitled “The Story in Our Eyes: The Implications of a Storied IR” and was part of roundtable on “Decolonizing the Teaching of International Relations.” In addition, he served as Chair and Discussant for a panel “Critiquing Eurocentric Representations: Voices/Perspectives from the Global South” as well as Chair and Discussant for a panel “Interrogating ‘Modernity’: Progress, Development, & Postcolonial Appropriations.

Associate Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti recently signed a contract with the University Press of Kentucky to publish her second book, “Another Adorno: Democracy in America.” The book explores Adorno’s theory of democratic leadership as democratic pedagogy to inform the practice of citizenship in the U.S. and will be published in spring 2016. 

Associate Professor of Political Science Shannon Mariotti will have an article that was first published in the journal “Political Theory” reprinted in a definitive two-volume study of the politics of the critical theorist Theodor Adorno. Her article, “Adorno on the Radio: Democratic Leadership as Democratic Pedagogy,” will be reprinted in “Adorno,” edited by Espen Hammer and forthcoming from Routledge in October 2015. 

Shannon Mariotti, associate professor of political science, was invited to participate in a round table on recent scholarship in critical theory at the Western Political Science Association conference in Las Vegas, April 1-3. She presented a paper titled, “Another Adorno: After Despair?,” drawing from her book manuscript “Another Adorno: Democracy in America,” currently under review with a university press. 

Shannon Mariotti, associate professor of political science, contributed the essays on Henry David Thoreau as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson for The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, published by Wiley Blackwell Press. The essays provide the political significance of each thinker’s writings, scholarly approaches and current research, as well as biographical information. The Encyclopedia of Political Thought assembles experts in the field to analyze key topics, themes, and theorists in the history of political thought, contemporary political theory, and political philosophy.