The Hayseed Scholar Podcast

Cian O'Driscoll from the University of Glasgow does work on Just War theory, international security, and international political theory, and international ethics. He has been a friend of Brent's for well over a decade. They spoke in April 2019 following a workshop at the University of Warwick. Their conversation went a little long, so this is part 1 of 2 episodes with Cian. In this episode, Cian tells us about his intellectual journey: growing up in Limerick and going to the uni there, spending some time in the US, his Master's work at Dalhousie in Nova Scotia, his memory of September 11th, being on one of the first flights back into the US shortly thereafter, Irish neutrality and Michael Walzer's work, and his first year or so of PhD at Aberystwyth University (Wales).

Professor Lene Hansen of the University of Copenhagen likely needs no introduction to most listeners of this podcast. She has worked within what would be called the Copenhagen school or securitization theory, emphasizing within that school the overlooked lens of gender. Her work on discourse analysis is famous for being a key contribution to the development of especially interpretive methods in the 2000s and 2010s, and her more recent work in visual IR and visual/image analysis. She talks about growing up on an island, Langeland or Long Island, off the coast of Denmark, riding horses and playing sports while also being a great student (as she said she ‘had to be’ with parents who were teachers at the school), attending uni first at the University of Southern Denmark then the University of Copenhagen. Taking a course from Ole Waever on IR and French philosophy got her interested thereafter in poststructural IR and doing research on European security architectures. She talks about an impactful visiting professor position at Yale University in the late 1990s, as well as some of the background to her famous works like the 2000 Millennium article on gender in securitization and Security as Practice the 2006 book. She concludes reflecting on how she approaches writing, selecting images to analyze, and how she relaxes and recharges through exercise and cooking.
As this episode was getting ready to launch, it was announced that Professor Hansen just won the 2024 ISA Susan Strange award! This award 'recognizes a person whose singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency in the international studies community'. MANY congratulations Professor Hansen!
https://www.isanet.org/News/ID/6384/2023-2024-Award-Recipients

The first episode of the Hayseed Scholar podcast is an interview with Professor Peri Schwartz-Shea of the University of Utah. We discuss her evolution as a scholar and academic, the questions she's pursued in her research, and how she became so interested in interpretive methods.

Professor Alexander Barder joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Dr. Barder was born in Paris, France, but he and his family moved to Miami very shortly thereafter. He traveled back to France often to visit family, and mainly spoke French until going to a bilingual school. His discussions with his grandpa about World War II sparked an interest in history, which, along with math, were his favorite subjects in school. Alex went to boarding school in Geneva his senior year of high school, worked at a bank and thought about finance or banking as a major. But after three semesters at American University in DC, he quite college, went back to Miami and worked various jobs (including brokering) for the next seven years. Alex chipped away at his undergraduate degree, finishing in Spring 2003 with a BS in Mathematics. He became interested in International Relations, and took an IR theory seminar, co-taught by Harry Gould and Nick Onuf, at FIU in the Spring of 2004 that got him interested in being an academic. After being wait listed that year for the PhD program at Johns Hopkins, Alex got in the following year and pursued his PhD studies there. He talks about writing and publishing with Francois Debrix, including his first book published by Routledge in the Interventions series in 2012. Alex got a job at American University of Beirut in 2013, where he and his family stayed until 2014, seeing first hand the impact of the nearby civil war in Syria. Alex returned to FIU as an Assistant Professor that year, where he has been ever since. They finish by chatting about how he approaches writing, his practices of decompressing and health, spending time with his family, and more!

Professor Patricia Owens joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast.
Professor Owens grew up in London, with Irish parents who'd emigrated from Ireland during the Troubles, and the conflict in Northern Ireland provided a background to her life and especially growing up. Patricia went to a Catholic school in South London until 16, and her Catholicism was less a 'religious' factor than it was a cultural and political identity that shaped her time growing up in England in those days. She talks about playing football from an early age, going to Bristol for uni, the very impactful time studying abroad in the mid-90s in Chapel Hill, NC, where she first encountered political theory, and was a tour manager for the local indie rock band June in 1996:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_(North_Carolina_band)
Professor Owens went to Cambridge for her Masters, then to Aberystwyth for her PhD. She reflects on that time and the fellowships and postdocs that happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the US academy, and how those shaped what she was interested in. But there was always Arendt, a theorist whose work influenced Prof Owens' throughout the 2000s (work that Brent connected with especially during his time at KU), and 2010s. Professor Owens talks about the Women in the History of International Thought project, a Leverhulme-funded project that has reconfigured our understanding of the history and historiography of International Thought (and IR):
https://whit.web.ox.ac.uk/home
She and Brent conclude with her thoughts on writing, decompressing, and more!