Hi Poli Students!

The Political Science Department is accepting applications to the the 67th Annual Student Conference on U.S. Affairs (SCUSA) at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York. This is an excellent opportunity to get involved in international and security debates with a large number of students and experts from around the country.

Every year, the Department sends two students to represent UMBC at this conference. The Department covers registration fees and transportation to West Point, while the conference organizers provide room and board while there. If you are interested, please send a brief (one paragraph) letter of interest, including why you would like to go, what makes you qualified to represent the Department and your GPA to: Dr. Brian Grodsky, bgrodsky@umbc.edu. All applications must be received by September 18.

For more information, see below.

On behalf of Colonel Cindy Jebb, the head of the Department of Social Sciences, I would like to extend an invitation to the University of Maryland, Baltimore County to send two student delegates to participate in the 67th Annual Student Conference on U.S. Affairs (SCUSA) at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York. The conference meets from November 4th through November 7th, 2015.

West Point hosts SCUSA every fall. It is the oldest and largest undergraduate conference of its type in the world. Approximately 200 undergraduate students from over 100 colleges and universities worldwide attend SCUSA. Throughout the conference, the student delegates and cadets debate and formulate policy recommendations that realistically model American strategic responses to significant national and global challenges. The highlights of the four-day conference include the opening senior panel discussion on the evening of November 4th, an evening keynote banquet address, four roundtable sessions, and a closing-report session on November 7th. Recent keynote speakers have included Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Dr. Leslie Gelb, Admiral James Stavridis, Dr. Rajiv Shah, and Ms. Susan Eisenhower.

Our organizing theme this year is "Confronting Inequality: Wealth, Rights, and Power."  We challenge students to consider how inequality, in all its manifestations, influences US foreign Policy. Which inequalities are likely to increase and which might decrease as global development proceeds?  Are some forms of inequality inevitable or justifiable, and do any serve U.S. national interests?   How should U.S. foreign policy respond to an increasingly prosperous world in which material wealth is unequally distributed?

Take Care!

In an in-depth Seattle Times story about the difficulty in finding employment that women in immigrant tech communities experience, Amy Bhatt, an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies, was quoted in the article and provided perspective on many of the harsh realities that women in such communities encounter.

“It’s very challenging for many of the women who come here as spouses,” said Bhatt, who did her Ph.D. research at the University of Washington on high-tech immigrant communities in the Seattle area. “They are a highly educated group of women, trained in fields like engineering and computer science, coming to what they think is the land of opportunity and equality. They come here and they’re relegated to the status of being a housewife. For some, there’s real anxiety and depression.”

Bhatt researches global studies of gender, families and social reproduction, contemporary and historical ethnic formation, and globalization and transnational migration. She is co-author of Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest. 

William Blake, a new assistant professor in the political science department, was quoted in a recent New York Times article about a study he conducted with two colleagues that investigated why the Supreme Court grants a smaller percentage of cases during the first conference of its term compared to others throughout the year. The research points to new law clerks as the reason because they receive limited training and are reluctant to provide recommendations due to reputation concerns.

For the study, Blake and his colleagues analyzed clerks’ pool memos from 1987 to 1994 that were released as part of Justice Harry A. Blackmun’s papers. “The bottom line, the study said, is that ‘litigants face an arbitrary and legally irrelevant disadvantage that is empirically attributable to the clerks’ initial hesitation to recommend grants,’” stated theNew York Times article.

The study suggested additional training for law clerks to recommend granting more cases from the start. Blake said it wouldn’t be feasible to add more conferences during the summer for justices to consider cases.

“I don’t think we’re going to tell the justices to cut their vacations short,” he said.

Professor Blake’s research interests are in public law and the U.S. Supreme Court and state supreme courts.

Christy Chapin, an assistant professor of history, recently published a new book which traces how private and public interests merged to place insurance companies at the center of the U.S. healthcare system. The book, Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System, was published earlier this year by Cambridge University Press.

“Christy Chapin’s Ensuring America’s Health changes the scholarly conversation about the history of our health care system. It explains how both public and private forces created Medicare in 1965 and how the ‘insurance company model’ of health care finance has prevailed ever since. This book is the best treatment we have of the historical dimensions of our current health care crisis and will prove to be an indispensable resource for historians and policy makers,” stated Edward Berkowitz of George Washington University in a review.

Chapin’s research interests include political, business, economic history, and capitalism studies and she is a scholar of twentieth-century political history. She recently wrote a blog post in Public Seminar which discusses the history of health care financing and said of her new book: “It’s a story about insurance company power and how, among other problems, this corporate dominance has fueled high health care costs.”

In another column posted on the History News Network website, Chapin noted that it’s important to look back to the early twentieth century to understand rising health care costs and insurance company mergers, writing “AMA leaders spent decades attacking health care financing experiments that they believed would evolve into corporations. They worried that doctors would be pulled into large bureaucratic organizations under the supervision of non-physicians.  Consequently, AMA officials fought both health insurance and group practice – any market form that might develop into a corporation.”

Read more about Professor Chapin’s work on the history department website.

Last month, more than 1,000 podcasters gathered in Texas for the second annual “Podcast Movement” to discuss the latest in the industry. Jason Loviglio, associate professor and chair of media and communication studies, published a first-hand account of his experience at the conference in Antenna, a popular media and cultural studies blog.

Loviglio, who is an expert in media history and radio studies, wrote in great detail about the various conference sessions which ranged from an awards session presented by the “Academy of Podcasting” to the keynote address by Sarah Koenig of the overwhelmingly popular podcast Serial.

“Koenig’s talk was exquisitely produced and disarmingly personal. After nearly a year, she still manages to seem genuinely staggered by the podcast’s runaway success. And yet somehow she knows exactly which sorts of behind-the-scenes tidbits about the reporting, production, and post-fame spin-control we’re desperate to hear,” Loviglio wrote.

Loviglio noted that Koenig took the time to explain the importance of collaboration in creating successful podcasts, which many view as a highly individual process. “Koenig credited producer Julie Snyder with providing some of the most important improvements draft to draft, a valuable lesson about the importance of collaboration, another point often lost in the highly individualistic, ‘bootstraps’ narratives and underfunded business model of the business podcasters.”

Read “What I Learned at Podcast Movement 2015” on the Antenna website.

Of Note - Recent highlights from the Language, Literacy & Culture PhD Program