How to Write a Good Book Review

Book reviews — and here I mean those that are written for strictly academic purposes — serve four essential, and sometimes conflicting, purposes. They can: 1) summarize the book so that busy academics don’t have to waste time reading it but want to still appear as if they have perused it when talking about it; 2) provide a tool to retaliate to that ridiculous colleague (the author of the book) who asked ‘a very small question to an otherwise excellent paper’ which totally destroyed your argument; 3) allow you to climb up the academic ladder by extolling the virtues of your supervisor’s (or another important person in the field) latest ‘path-breaking contribution to the literature’; 4) help you pad your CV in case during your intense three years of writing the thesis, researching, and wasting time you have not had the decency to get an article accepted in a peer-reviewed journal. Since my advice is oriented towards early career academics, I will not focus on option 2) even though it is tempting to do so because it places less burden on my conscience and does not force me to dig down through the book and my brains to find something positive to say just so that some other poor soul (apart from me) is enticed to read it.

Volunteering for Amnesty International @ the Edinburgh Festival

Since tomorrow is my last day of volunteering for Amnesty International Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival, I thought I would share my experience in the hope that more people will be encouraged to stand up for human rights and get involved in the Protect the Human initiative.  For those of you who feel that a) we should solve the problem of poverty before we care about human political rights; b) human rights is a boring subject;  or c) one should not care about anything that is happening outside their city/region or, at most, country; you can still read this piece and see if you are in the majority. Same for you, passionate-yet-inexperienced human rights defender (like me): you assume that everyone cares about human rights and their abuses. Maybe you should also read on and check….

How to Get your Abstract Accepted

Ambitious title, no? Hehe, it should be if you want to get your paper noticed and invited for a conference.

Let me start by saying that the advice given stems from my experience in the social sciences. In other fields, they actually require you to submit the entire paper in advance! Yes, my dear political scientists, it seems that you can’t just make some lofty promises like providing enough evidence to challenge some 30 years of research on the topic, add a few fashionable catchphrases, trim the text down to 250 words, click the ‘send’ button and enjoy an acceptance mail a few weeks later. I guess it also spares you the few sleepless nights before the deadline for submitting the actual paper most of which are spent pondering over the question ‘What the hell was I thinking when I wrote this abstract?’ and convincing yourself that ‘everyone does it’; embellishing abstracts, I mean.

So, how to get the perfect social science abstract?