The events of the past few days in Kazakhstan are tragic. The tragedy lies in the lives of the ordinary people who will bare the consequences of the actions of elites and opportunists for the foreseeable future.
This will be a short post. I have been thinking a lot lately about the job of a professor. I was reminded recently of the piece by Max Weber about science as a vocation linked here{target=”_blank”} and how being an academic is a career, and one that is based a lot on chance at that.
Sweaty Revelations The morning was cool in the high southern dessert of Arizona. We were not too far from the Mexican border. We were two weeks into our training as 97B Counterintelligence Agents for the US Army.
The talk about forgiving student loan debt has got me thinking about the choices that I have made in my own educational journey. I have done a lot of school - I hold a terminal degree (PhD) in political science.
Four years ago I traveled to ISA 2017 in Baltimore. Flying in from Kazakhstan through Germany meant that the best and cheapest way to fly was into Washington, DC. I ordered a Super Shuttle bus from Washington (IAD) to my hotel in Baltimore.
I follow a lot of political scientists who study civil-military relations. That isn’t an area that I do a lot of active research in - but it is an area that I teach and one that I have a lot of personal interest in.
For the first time since 2009 when I was a second year graduate student at the University of Iowa, I am not attending the International Studies Association (ISA) Midwest meeting in Saint Louis.
I have been here in Nacogdoches at Stephen F. Austin State University for the past two months. I finally feel like I am settling in. It has been a long journey to get here - literally and figuratively - into a tenure track job in the US.
The escalation of violence in the aftermath of protests against police brutality has stirred up some feelings in me. I am on the other side of the world, in Kazakhstan, watching the US burn.
I am the father of four daughters (current ages 12, 12, 13, 15) and my wife is Russian. We currently live in Kazakhstan and have lived here for the past 6 years.