By Riyad A. Shahjahan You have set aside time to write. You know what you plan to work on for the next 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or hour. You sit down to begin — or perhaps you are already writing — when suddenly an urge arises to do something else. Maybe you feel compelled to check the laundry, browse the news, scroll through social media, make a quick phone call, or do a bit more…
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About Riyad A. Shahjahan
From keynote to journal article: My journey of conceptual writing
By Riyad A. Shahjahan My recently published conceptual paper “Am I a Scholar” began with a keynote invitation. I’d been asked to deliver a keynote at an international forum I hadn’t attended in some time. The theme was “I Am a Scholar.” But as I sat with that phrase, it didn’t settle in very well. The certainty of it felt out of step for me. My experiences have been shaped more by ambiguity, deferral, and…
Introducing a new concept? Start by studying others’ work
By Riyad A. Shahjahan When graduate students and early career faculty struggle to clarify an argument, I always give the same advice: find a model to follow. Look for an article, proposal, or dissertation that resonates to help articulate and organize your own ideas. Study how it builds its case, what kinds of evidence it uses, and how it structures its ideas. This is exactly what helped me develop a concept I call decolonial…
How I wrote my ‘velcro’ paper: 4 lessons from a conceptual writing journey
By Riyad A. Shahjahan As I have recently blogged, there is a plethora of advice on empirical work writing, but not as much about conceptual and theoretical scholarship. In this blog post, I reflect on the lessons learned from writing a conceptual piece about the nation-state ontology in internationalization — a paper I now refer to as the “velcro” paper. The process of writing this ‘velcro’ paper involved more than just presenting a coherent argument;…
Why I wrote reflexively about my teaching: Writing as pedagogical inquiry
By Riyad A. Shahjahan Why do we write what we write? This question kept tugging at the back of my mind when I sat down to draft a piece about how I use popular culture in the classroom. At first, I thought I was simply documenting my teaching strategies—something practical, maybe even replicable. But as the words unfolded, I realized: I wasn’t just writing about pedagogy. I was writing through it—using reflexivity to ask deeper…