Dana El Kurd (University of Richmond) reflects on the personal and ethical dimensions of a research journey that is also a journey home — in her case, to Palestine. Her candid insights on foreign-assisted state-building, doing fieldwork with limited resources, and navigating data collection in authoritarian environments illuminate how differently the field can treat different researchers. She asks whether scholars trying to understand public opinion under these constraints can — or even should — strive for “neutrality.” An inspiring conversation for junior scholars who think they’re the only ones improvising methods as they go.

How does one study war up close without acquiring dangerous habits of mind? How is the professional path of a military analyst different from a ‘pure’ academic path - and what do cloistered academics who never work in the government miss? Michael Kofman (Carnegie) shares insight on his fieldwork experiences.

Our podcast’s first bona fide political psychologist! Rose McDermott (Brown) has expertise spanning subjects from pharmacology to polygyny. In this lively episode we cover everything from male club behavior in security studies to the challenges of navigating graduate school if statistics aren’t your thing. Even nuclear war is easier to handle if you can laugh at it a little.