Last week, we took some time to talk about what Roosevelt @ MSU does as a broader organization, covering our research and writing efforts as well as our advocacy work. This week, we wanted to take some time to talk about our blog. Our blog started last year as part of a broader effort to expand our writing work outside of national outlets like Roosevelt Forward and 10 Ideas. While those venues remain important to us, we believe our members deserve a way to publish pieces more closely tied in with our work on campus. These pieces would be difficult to publish in other places because of length, subject matter, or editing time. In other words, our blog is ultimately ours.
Over the last year, we published thirty-two pieces of student writing on a wide variety of topics. A substantial number of those pieces relate to foreign policy, from diplomacy to refugee issues. We’ve published several pieces dealing with the fragility of traditionally solid European alliances from both American and European perspectives. As well as ones that deal with more volatile geopolitical issues like the increasing tensions on the Korean Peninsula. We also publish a lot of pieces related to refugee policy, discussing issues ranging from the ways local organizations in the US are essential for resettlement to the crisis at the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya.
Foreign policy isn’t the whole story, though. We also published work dealing with human rights issues, on topics like the legal battle over the Trump administration’s travel ban or educating law enforcement about visas available to victims of human trafficking. Often writing on human rights issues can cross over into foreign policy, like in a recent piece about ethnic cleansing in Myanmar that dealt both with the difficulties of US foreign policy in the country, and the human rights violations occurring there.
A last category we do a lot of writing in is the economy. We’ve published pieces on everything from neoliberalism to the sorry state of our nation’s broadband. As well, we’ve dealt with issues like antitrust in the tech industry, privatization, and entitlement reform. And, though it only slightly counts as an economic issue, we’ve also published pieces discussing the GOP’s attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
A great thing about our blog is that it enables us to publish writing from all of our members. The majority of our contributors last year were freshmen, and the work that they published was consistently great. The blog is a fantastic way to include new members in policy writing without the high stakes and stress that can come with contributing to other Roosevelt publications.
If you’re interested in writing policy on our blog, or in any other aspect of what we do, come to our general interest meeting this Thursday, September 7th, at 7 PM in Case Hall, room 334B. We hope to see you there!
Roosevelt @ Michigan State University 