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Although the benefits of undergraduate research for students are broadly understood, implementation of undergraduate research in the college classroom can be challenging. In this article, I explain how blogging assignments can be used to enable students to successfully complete course-long research projects and achieve many of the content and skill development benefits of undergraduate research, even in courses in which undergraduate research is less common--such as those with high enrollment numbers, those at earlier points in a political science major, or those with many non-major students. I draw on several forms of student feedback and assessment to identify the strengths and weaknesses of using blogs as a way to build a research paper. Additionally, I outline the components of one set of blogging assignments and provide suggestions for implementation of blogging research projects in other courses.

Demographic ageing in Europe is leading to an increasing need for care and a serious challenge for the sustainability of our social and healthcare systems. Informal carers across the EU currently provide over 80 per cent of all care. If not adequately supported, caring can have many difficult consequences for carers. Carers should not be socially and economically penalised as a result of their caregiving activities. Measures designed to support them should therefore aim to recognise them and their vital role in society, provide them with the essential information and counselling they need, give them access to allowances that offset the costs they face and truly values their contribution, develop flexible working arrangements and care leave schemes to allow them to maintain an active life, and improve the provision of equitable and accessible formal care services to ensure carers can rely on professional alternatives to informal care. This policy paper makes clear why it is necessary to address the challenges faced by young carers. It briefly discusses different forms of support measures and makes recommendations for better support for Young Carers

The freshman research paper can be a labor for both the teacher and the student with its many layers of skills and expectations. While academia has moved beyond note cards and simplified documentation models, students continue to get lost in the research process, often to the point that instructors may even wonder if they had been teaching in an alternate reality once they begin grading the finished products. As a dual enrollment instructor for Virginia Western Community College (VWCC) and Botetourt County Public Schools for the past eight years, the author has struggled to make the research process more appealing to her students so that their investment in their final papers is greater and yields more success. Typically educators see the research process as an individual and isolating experience where no one shares ideas or sources to avoid plagiarism. The truth is that students freely share ideas and sources and have become adept at hiding their collaboration from instructors. An interdisciplinary English composition/political science course used inquiry-based learning, technology, collaboration, and a real-world problem to engage students in a memorable project. The author reports that this approach reduces plagiarism, increases the students' research and writing skills as well as their interest, and decreases her workload.

After 9/11, the academic study of terrorism flourished as more government resources were focused on counterterrorism efforts. As the focus slowly shifted towards P/CVE or Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, more and more articles lauded the potential benefits of including Formers. The idea behind that was that experience equals expertise. Formers have been valuable data sources as research participants. However, the current trend has seen Formers leave that role and take on far more complicated and sophisticated roles, such as deradicalization experts, claiming to help people leave extremism. This policy paper focuses on the evidence, specifically the lack of evidence, to support the prevailing assumptions regarding the effectiveness of Formers and dissects the ethical issues arising from their involvement in P/CVE. The paper ends with policy recommendations to shift P/CVE activities and research toward a more empirically-grounded model. Since P/CVE initiatives involve a variety of actors, from academic researchers to the media to practitioners, this paper is not aimed at one field or profession. Rather, it is intended for everyone involved in P/CVE-related activities, including research.

This article studies the contested legal–political dynamics around forced migration flows to and through an unrecognized state: the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). We adopt an analytical perspective drawn from the literature on performative politics and the legal anthropology of documents to explore how migration dynamics interact with the contested legal status of the TRNC. Our two main questions are: What practical shape do the human rights of refugees and asylum seekers take in an interstitial legal space, where the foundation of law is itself subject to ambiguity, suspension, and contestation? And what implications—opportunities and hazards—does this constellation have for refugees and asylum-seekers? Drawing on interviews, lived experience and fieldwork observations, we make two arguments. First, we contend that the interstitial status of the TRNC represents both an opportunity for refugees and a threat. Secondly, we argue that a purely legal or technical understanding of legal identity and concurrent rights is inadequate; we must subject these phenomena to a politically informed analysis of the everyday practices through which legal norms and spaces are continuously shaped and reshaped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results from a comparative analysis of two sections of Introduction to International Politics, one of which used a traditional research paper as a supplemental assignment and one that used the Statecraft online simulation. Both sections were taught during the same semester and used common lecture notes, PowerPoint slides, exam reviews, and exams. The only difference was the nature of the supplemental assignment. The paper finds that the best predictor of student performance on exams is a student's GPA prior to taking the class. At the same time, the evidence suggests that time dedicated to the online simulation in class may have led to worse performance on at least one exam. Finally, the paper finds that students did enjoy the Statecraft simulation and generally believed that it was preferable to a traditional research paper in spite of its representing additional work relative to the more traditional research paper.

The Panama Papers disclosures in April 2016 revealed information about tax avoidance and fraud among political elites and the wealthy on a global scale. But did the disclosures affect relevant political attitudes and behavior, including perceptions of corruption, redistributive preferences, and voting intentions? We leverage nationally representative surveys that were in the field at the time in two heavily impacted countries, France and Spain, and treat the disclosures as a natural experiment, comparing respondents questioned just before and just after the disclosures. Our design highlights the difficulty, at times, of interpreting natural experiments, given the potentially compounded treatments that arise as events unfold over time, and the common inability to properly determine views prior to the treatment. That said, the analysis indicates that the disclosures had limited effects on the domains most likely affected by such a scandal, consistent with them being interpreted based on existing beliefs and identities. Our results thus contradict prior findings which suggest that the Panama Papers had substantial effects on redistributive attitudes, and shed further light on voters’ learning and updating around uncertain, yet emotionally laden, political facts.