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…
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…
By Kimine Mayuzumi It’s been quite a while since I created my first guided meditation audio for writing. Since then, I’ve received so much positive feedback … and, in fact, it’s been one of our top three most viewed blog posts ever. That’s why I thought it was time for a refresh. So I asked our listeners what they’d love to see (or hear) in an updated version. Through a recent survey, I gathered…
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;…
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…
