Tarak Barkawi

12/07/21 • 86 min

Professor Tarak Barkawi joins Brent this week. He discusses growing up in Orange County in the 1970s and 1980s, in a very politically aware family, and his varied interests in military history but also LA’s punk rock scene, having a school that doubled as a fallout shelter and his first encounters with eye-opening racial violence. He talks about his decision to go to George Washington University, getting his master’s at the LSE, his brief overlap with John Vincent before the latter died, the influence of Bud Duvall at Minnesota, his work with Mark Laffey, going on the market, getting jobs at Wales-Aber, Cambridge and now back to the LSE. He discusses his approach to writing, how he handles stress, and his predictions on conferences and academia post-Covid and the need to get back to meeting in person.

Previous Episode

Sophie Harman

Professor Harman joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. She starts off discussing with Brent her childhood and growing up on a farm in Buckinghamshire in SE England, her interests and aspirations during that time and the family dynamics regarding politics and who was expected to take over the farm each generation. She had a gap year, then went to Manchester for undergrad and graduate training, got into global public health, political economy, and traveled to Tanzania, and then as she tells it was able to get a job in London at City University after approaching some folks from there when they were hiring, at a BISA, after two gin and tonics. She discusses the burgeoning section and field of global public health and how that slowly grew, but remained a somewhat smaller section even up until ‘the big one’, the current pandemic of Covid-19 that spread across the world in 2020. She is a film maker, the first one on this podcast, and her film, Pili, is an amazing accomplishment of a movie that was produced and filmed in Tanzania, about a woman who gets a chance to get a better job/role but is keeping a secret about her HIV-positive status. It is available on Google Play, Amazon Prime, Youtube, and other sites:
https://play.google.com/store/movies/details?id=tn6QEm-KjOU.P
Professor Harman finishes up her conversation discussing how she approaches writing, how when and where she and fellow global health scholars Sara Davies and Claire Wenham first discussed the possibilities of Covid-19 becoming the pandemic it is today, Polyani, the upcoming ISA Presidential election and friend of the pod Prof Laura Shepherd, and more!

Next Episode

Xymena Kurowska

Xymena Kurowska of Central European University joins the Hayseed Scholar podcast. Professor Kurowska grew up in the northern part of Poland, at a time of world and local transition. She discusses what it was like to move around to 'closed' cities in a military family, having a father who served in the Polish military and also in a UN peacekeeping operation in Southern Lebanon. Xymena recalls how a karate injury almost kept her out of going to a university, and how she came to study International Relations. She reflects on what Warsaw was like in the late 1990s, getting her MA in Warsaw when Poland was part of the 2003 'Coalition of the Willing' for the US-led Iraq War. She recalls being on the waitlist, and then attending, European University Institute in Florence for her Phd, and the challenges and opportunities that entailed, eventually working with Prof Fritz Kratochwil. She discusses the experiences she had with Dvora Yanow who 'changed her life' through introducing her to interpretive methods and a network of interpretive 'American Political Scientists' like Friend of the Hayseed Scholar Podcast, Professor Peri Schwartz'Shea. Xymena recalls how she got a job at CEU right after her PhD, getting a Marie Curie fellowship at Aber, how she decompresses via hiking and watching Mixed Martial Arts, and how she approaches editing a journal.