Psephy's ~ologies: On being 'mobile'--thoughts on the international academy

Monday, April 13, 2020

On being 'mobile'--thoughts on the international academy

How mobile should our careers be?

Recently, I was asked to contribute to the Research Whisperer blog, a fantastic resource for researchers from around the world, curated, edited, facilitated and all the other things necessary to run a fabulous blog, by Tseen Khoo and Jonathon O'Donnell.

I hope they don't mind if I post the link here (originally posted 10 March 2020).

'When you choose to re-locate'

If nothing else, it has been a prompt to get back into my own blog-posting.

With thanks to Tseen and Jonathon for giving me the opportunity to convey a few thoughts.

In case you're wondering...

Thank you for visiting. My blog is like many others, mostly a way to extend my conversations on Twitter and/or comment on all the politics as the need arises. Politics is broadly defined here and, as I get older, I am trying to philosophise about life and politics--hence the '~ologies' (the 'psephy'--silent p--is short for psephologist, one who analyses elections).
At present, I'm seeking to find better ways for us, the electors, to engage with those, our elected. I am concerned about where too much apathy towards our politicians might lead us. I actually think the onus is on our elected representatives to engage with us as well.
I'm doing this via explorations of the idea of the 'social contract', espoused most famously by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century, but flavoured by others including Machiavelli, Hume, Locke, Kant, Mill, Arendt and Maruyama. These philosophical threads weave their way through all my posts here...they are ideas we need to revisit.

I am also a passionate educator and, after some three decades in Australia and in Japan, you'll find I have a bit to say about that too. In April 2016, I relocated to Tokyo to take up a position in the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Law at Musashino University. I'll be teaching Japanese politics and peace studies to Japanese students, in Japanese. These views are my own and any resemblance to actual events is likely to be coincidental. But such are our constructed lives and opinions.