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“Less Stress, More Confidence”: Supporting Junior Scholars Online at the Graduate Student International Political Economy Workshop

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2022

Alexander KirssOpen the ORCID record for Alexander Kirss[Opens in a new window],
Paul KoOpen the ORCID record for Paul Ko[Opens in a new window] and
Cleo O’Brien-UdryOpen the ORCID record for Cleo O’Brien-Udry[Opens in a new window]
Alexander Kirss
Affiliation:
The George Washington University, USA
Paul Ko
Affiliation:
Dickinson College, USA
Cleo O’Brien-Udry
Affiliation:
Yale University, USA
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Abstract

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Information

Type
Building Community and Improving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Political Science Through Virtual Workshops
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2022, pp. 549 - 552
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

The COVID-19 pandemic did not affect all scholars equally. In particular, junior scholars—primarily doctoral students—faced challenges that may not have been immediately obvious to senior scholars. It was necessary to revise dissertation prospectuses and ongoing research as fieldwork became impossible and archival access was limited (Rowland Reference Rowland2021). Opportunities to present work disappeared as departmental seminars were canceled. Networking up with senior scholars and across with other junior scholars became more difficult as conferences moved online. Fears over a weak academic job market increased as junior scholarsFootnote 1 faced an uncertain professional future. In response to these stressors, graduate students developed depressive and anxiety disorders at twice and 1.5 times the pre-pandemic rate (Chirikov et al. Reference Chirikov, Soria, Horgos and Jones-White2020). In response to these pressures, we sought to build a graduate-student–led community focused on the work and professional needs of junior scholars. The Graduate Student International Political Economy (GSIPE)Footnote 2 workshop began on Twitter. We asked academics on the platform if an online workshop targeted at graduate students had an audience, and the answer was a resounding “yes.” More than a year later, we are the proud founders of an active virtual community of more than 550 international political economy (IPE) researchers from 260 institutions and 28 countries (figure 1) who collectively organized 36 weekly workshops and five mini-conferences and panels from June 2020 to May 2021.Footnote 3 As figure 2 demonstrates, the majority of our members as well as all of our workshop presenters are doctoral students. Under new leadership, GSIPE plans to continue hosting virtual workshops while transitioning the workshop to include in-person events at conferences.

Figure 1

Locations of GSIPE Members

Figure 2

GSIPE Membership by Professional Stage

This article describes three core steps we took to develop and grow the GSIPE network: (1) defining the mission of the workshop, (2) cultivating community through outreach, and (3) engaging membership in the organizational structure.

Defining GSIPE

By focusing on a single subfield (i.e., IPE), we created a clear value-add for graduate students. GSIPE members share common interests and intellectual backgrounds that enable fluidity of communication, create clear opportunities for coauthorship, and make the community easily recognizable to observers. GSIPE is an interdisciplinary space for political scientists, economists, and other social scientists who have obvious intellectual connections. This reflects the intellectually diverse heritage of IPE while further broadening the discipline through the cross-pollination of ideas. Scholars exposed to different disciplinary norms, methods, and ideas will be stronger, more versatile researchers who can appeal to other researchers across disciplines.

Early in the process, we wrote the following mission statement: “GSIPE is committed to promoting the work and voices of Black, Indigenous, scholars of color, and women scholars.” We explicitly defined the space to include historically excluded groups, including women, to hold ourselves accountable to combating discrimination in IPE and the discipline and by describing the workshop as a welcoming space. As figure 1 shows, we recruited a geographically diverse group of participants. In light of this diversity, we paid close attention to scheduling events at times that worked across multiple time zones, avoiding evening events to accommodate parents. The workshop format—one hour weekly over Zoom—provided flexibility for presenters to allocate their time between presenting and receiving feedback, with GSIPE moderators enforcing time limits.

Growing the Workshop

We first worked to demonstrate the value of GSIPE and to ensure its accessibility for diverse graduate students. We created a website and listserv to make the workshop visible; both initially were registered online to demonstrate the workshop’s validity. We then invited professors in the field and their graduate students to sign up for the workshop; this initial buy-in from key figures in IPE legitimized the workshop. By Fall 2020, we had demand for weekly workshop slots that far outpaced supply, a pattern that has repeated in all subsequent semesters. This growth (figure 3) resulted from the demonstrated value of the workshop and the active involvement of our membership.

We cultivated a social media presence on Twitter, tagging groups that highlight the work of women (@womenalsoknowstuff), Black women (@citeblackwomen), people of color (@POCalsoknowstuff), and first-generation (@1stGenScholars) scholars. We also consistently reached out to scholars who identify as members of historically disadvantaged groups to encourage submissions and participation and to solicit their input for a more inclusive workshop.Footnote 4 Existing listservs for political science and economics were useful for disseminating information about the workshop.Footnote 5

Figure 3

Change in GSIPE Membership

Active Engagement

Each semester, we distribute a form to solicit feedback from our members. We identified scholars who were interested in helping to organize the suggested changes, then gave them the freedom to develop programming. We created functional teams that assisted with moderating workshops, organizing additional events,Footnote 6 and writing a regular GSIPE newsletter. These flexible teams helped us to manage the growing needs of our community by delegating tasks to motivated GSIPE members.

In particular, the planning teamFootnote 7 organized themed mini-conferences to provide more opportunities for junior scholars to present work and to create space for connections among IPE scholars with specific interests. Networking events allowed for chance meetings at GSIPE mini-conferences and in tandem with established conferences. Job-market panels provided GSIPE members and other interested scholars an opportunity to learn about alt-academic careers.

Our engaged membership and flexible structure have allowed us to step down from organizing GSIPE. We are grateful to three new organizers—Carlos Felipe Balcazar, Elizabeth Meehan, and Oriana Montti—for moving the workshop forward. We actively reached out to individuals who had demonstrated an interest in being involved in GSIPE, taking care to maintain a gender, discipline, and sub-subfield balance. The transfer allowed us to centralize the component parts of GSIPE by moving our website and listerv from the original URL to ensure longevity of access; to meet with the new organizers to offer advice; and, finally, to step back to allow them to take GSIPE forward with their own vision. This new vision includes job-market profiles on the website; active solicitation of greater involvement by historically excluded groups; an official GSIPE Twitter presence; and a clear, point-based schema for selecting workshop papers weighted toward historically excluded groups.

Conclusion

The core identity of GSIPE is not defined by its founders but rather by the community we have created and support. We believe a key feature of a successful workshop, whether online or offline, is its ability to grow and change. We hope that our experience sheds light on other research communities to foster more diverse representation of and collaboration opportunities for junior scholars.

Footnotes

1. Although our workshop caters primarily to doctoral students, postdoctoral students, junior and senior faculty, and predoctoral students (e.g., undergraduates and research assistants) often attend our meetings and are actively involved in the community.

2. See https://gsipe-workshop.github.io.

3. For updated data on workshop attendance and participants, please contact .

4. For updated data on workshop attendance and participants, please contact . Gender participation is roughly at parity, diversity along other metrics (e.g., ethnicity, institutional affiliation, and disability) is low despite our efforts. Our initial recruitment and workshop design could have attuned GSIPE more to the needs of these groups.

5. This includes the European Political Science Association, Political Economy of International Organization, International Political Economy Society, Society for Political Methodology, International Studies Association, and American Economic Association.

6. See https://gsipe-workshop.github.io/special-events.

7. See https://gsipe-workshop.github.io/our-team.

References

REFERENCES

Chirikov, Igor, Soria, Krista M., Horgos, Bonnie, and Jones-White, Daniel. 2020. “Undergraduate and Graduate Students’ Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Student Experience in the Research University Consortium, University of California–Berkeley and University of Minnesota. https://cshe.berkeley.edu/seru-covid-survey-reports.Google Scholar
Rowland, Ashley. 2021. “‘We Were Panicking’: How Political Science Grad Students Persevered Through COVID-19.” University of Notre Dame News, June 14.Google Scholar
Figure 0

Figure 1Locations of GSIPE Members

Figure 1

Figure 2GSIPE Membership by Professional Stage

Figure 2

Figure 3Change in GSIPE Membership