Tom Pepinsky

Category: Teaching

  • Revitalizing Area Studies

    I have a new piece at the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “How to Make Area Studies Relevant Again.” (I did not choose the title.) The motivating observation is that area studies has always had a close relationship with US national interests, and working within that model is the best way to protect and revitalize area studies.

    Here is another way to think about my proposal.

    Many of us would enjoy the opportunity to advise a promising PhD student who is going to become the world’s leading expert on, say, contemporary Thai or Malaysian politics. That would mean not only great language training, but also serious, extended interview-based fieldwork, probably mostly in the capital but also with an eye towards the regions as well. It would also require real interdisciplinary training. (By this I mean something more than a safari or a gamelan class, but rather a complex appreciation of culture, history, art, music, language, etc.)

    Many who value area studies are quick to note, however, that developing that kind of in-depth expertise about one particular country is incompatible with the incentives from the academic job market in the United States. As a result, faculty do not push graduate students to do this.

    That’s not a criticism of political science, or of academia more generally—and this is where I depart from most defenders of area studies, who usually lament that the disciplines have destroyed area studies. It’s just a statement of fact. The skill sets required to know the ins and outs of national politics at a truly sophisticated level, and to make important theoretical and empirical contributions to political science, may not much overlap. And to the extent that you believe that it is appropriate for political scientists to train country experts, the result is a missed opportunity for producing relevant area studies that is grounded in a discipline. As I wrote,

    some PhD students develop this kind of expertise, but it is not part of the job description for an emerging scholar in either the social sciences or the humanities, and so these skills are seldom prized and rarely nurtured.

    The solution I propose starts with the incentives of students and faculty and works from there. The basic idea is that the federal government should create what I call a Critical Area Studies Scholarship Program that trains students who want to work in the policy world to become area studies experts while also earning PhDs in political science or another academic discipline. Under this scheme, students can follow their interests to become country experts regardless of whatever costs that might have from the perspective of the academic job market. They also would get the disciplinary theoretical and methodological training that I think is so important. (You can read my defense of disciplinary research in area studies here.) And there is no dilution of the disciplines’ own interests in training the next generation of scholars.

    If you care about area studies that is relevant and engaged—and the recent Avey and Desch survey of policymakers reminds us that they value area studies more than anything else that social science produces—then this would be the best of both worlds.

  • Book Chapters for R1 Assistant Professors

    I can’t resist weighing in on Chris Blattman’s discussion of book chapters. I think that Chris is right that assistant professors should only focus on things that increase the probability of tenure, and that book chapters have real opportunity costs. I also agree that given the choice of placing one nugget of research output in a book chapter and a journal, the journal is better if you want to increase (1) visibility of that piece of research and (2) citations. But book chapters can have indirect benefits that far outweigh these costs.

    Here are some principles to keep in mind.

    Principle 1: Some book chapters imply immediate non-academic benefits.
    In my corners of the discipline, an invitation to contribute to a book chapter is usually not an invitation to sit in my office and write. It is also an invitation to a conference, usually someplace interesting, always on someone else’s dime, and sometimes with an honorarium. In my case, book chapters have (1) paid for part of my honeymoon, (2) introduced me to the single best bowl of noodles that I have ever eaten, and (3) helped to keep my United FF status at high levels, among many others. Each of those things has value.

    Principle 2: Some book chapters have non-immediate academic benefits.
    The folk wisdom within my household is that the connections that I have made at edited book conferences have been among the most enduring and valuable professional connections that I have ever made. These are people who certainly wrote tenure letters for me, they are people who have helped me to get jobs, they are people who review my manuscripts. They are also, in many cases, my friends. Would we have become friends otherwise? Maybe. Would they have written tenure letters for me otherwise? Again, maybe. But I am confident that I am on better footing because we spent two days working together on a common intellectual project, where they got to know me and see what I do. If you insist on thinking of opportunity costs, think of the real benefit of the book chapter as the experience that comes with working on it, and the effort devoted to writing the chapter as the price of having that experience.

    Principle 3: Some research outputs don’t belong in journals.
    Sometimes my research projects have not panned out the way that I had wanted them to. It happens to all of us. Given that, it is often possible to create a book chapter out of a piece that would not survive peer review at a good journal but that could survive peer review as a piece of a broader multi-author project at a good press. So long as the effort required to convert the research is low enough, it may be worthwhile to do this. Chris’s implicit belief that a piece of research is better as an article than as a chapter is true as a ceteris paribus statement. But ceteris is not always paribus, and there is a “citations-networking” tradeoff.

    Principle 4: Signaling games have many equilibria
    Perhaps the most insidious belief about book chapters is that you work on them if you don’t have anything else to do. This means that book chapters reveal information about your type—“high types” write articles because they can, “low types” write book chapters because they can’t write articles. This is the standard “beer-quiche” game. But when our choices are supposed to be signals, and then what we rationally learn from them depends on the information structure of the game, prior beliefs, etc. It’s not hard to work up a pooling equilibrium in which low types write chapters because they write can’t write articles, and high types write chapters and articles because writing a chapter signals that you are a high enough type to be able to afford to write chapters. (Presumably “write articles and chapters” is observable, but just allow for a continuum of types and some unobservables, and the point stands.)

    So if I didn’t know anything about you, your position in the discipline(s) or field(s) in which you work, the nature of the edited volume, the other participants, or the “extras” that come along with it, I would advise against writing a book chapter. The generic advice against book chapters is right. Or if the book chapter came with no opportunity for networking, no non-academic benefits, and required you to devote effort that could be better devoted to journal articles or books. In that case, again, don’t write that book chapter.

    But it’s not hard to work up a good argument that given the right circumstances, a particular project writing a chapter for an edited book is worthwhile. Don’t rule them out. I regret nothing about the chapters that I wrote as an assistant professor, and I am completely confident that I have done better professionally for it. Your mileage may vary, but I don’t know, and no one else does either, not in the abstract.

    I will say, this, though. Do not, under any circumstances, edit a book as an assistant professor. This advice is unconditional.