Pete Furia / Politics 

For my dream idea, I’d like to revisit a research project that I carried out as a 27-year old grad student in 1999, and which, though I haven’t given much thought to it in the intervening years, is on a topic that’s back in the headlines. Back then, I conducted focus groups at local VFW clubs and then a national survey of registered voters on the topics of patriotism and globalism. I wanted to see a) to what extent these two types of “allegiances” were compatible and b) to what extent they varied across the political, economic, military and cultural spheres. Like many scholars interested in mass attitudes and allegiances, I refocused my work on religious attitudes after 9/11, but with the topics of patriotism and globalism now back in the headlines, I’d like to invite (and pay) at least three students to take charge of a 20th anniversary replication of that 1999 study (and, perhaps, to co-author a publication or at least a conference paper stemming from that replication).

Because visiting the VFW clubs was inherently interesting and because the 1999 survey was conducted by US mail (and thus relatively drudgery-free) I can honestly say that conducting the 1999 project was among the most fun academic projects I’ve ever been associated with. It should allow all of us to genuinely work together as a team (rather than as a giver of and recipient of grades), and to open up interesting conversations as we travel to and from focus group sites and work to administer our survey…Beyond all of that, however (as my nominators may or may have not have mentioned) I am also always sensitive to how difficult it can be for students to find meaningful careers these days, and, as such, I think the experience will be an absolute resume gold mine for them in terms of the skills they’ll acquire, in terms of my ability to boast about what great team members they are on recommendations, and so forth…