About Amy M Skonieczny

Dr. Skonieczny is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University in the International Relations Department. Her research interests include Populism and Foreign Policy, Narratives and US Trade Politics, and the study of national identity and foreign policy discourses. She completed her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Minnesota. She holds an MA in International Relations from San Francisco State University and a BA in Political Science from Humboldt State University.

Dr. Skonieczny is currently working on several projects on the rise of populism in the United States and its impact on US trade policy. Her forthcoming chapter titled, “Populism and Trade: The 2016 US Presidential Election and the Death of the Trans-Pacific Partnership” will appear in the volume Global Populisms edited by Dirk Nabers, Frank Stengel and Robert Pateman in the fall of 2018. She is a board member of the new journal Populism, co-editor of a forthcoming (2019) special issue in the journal, and participated in the ISA 2017 Workshop on Populism in Baltimore, MD. She has also published articles on US Trade politics. Her most recent publications include a forthcoming article (2018) in Review of International Political Economy titled “Trading with the Enemy: Narrative, Identity and US Trade Politics”, “Corporate Lobbying and Foreign Policy” (2017) in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, Playing Partners: Expectation, Entanglement, and Language Games in US Foreign Policy (2014) in International Relations. Her reflections on her first publication “Constructing NAFTA: Myth, Representations and the Discursive Construction of US Foreign Policy” (2001) will appear in the forthcoming (2018) volume Tactical Constructivism as Methods: Expression and Reflection edited by Brent Steele, Harry Gould and Oliver Kessler. She has also published in the journal Alternatives and International Studies Quarterly. Her complete list of publications can be found at her website: https://sfsu.academia.edu/AmySkonieczny.

Dr. Skonieczny is an experienced and dedicated teacher. She has spent over a decade in the university classroom, and devotes a considerable amount of her time working with students on developing student writing and creating meaningful research projects on a wide-variety of IR topics. Over the past few years, she has taken some of her teaching online and advocated for an online section of IR 550, the senior capstone course in IR.  In addition to advocating for student access to IR core curricula, Dr. Skonieczny led the charge in the IR department by applying for and winning a 2017 CSU grant to rethink the curriculum with student success towards degree in mind.

Dr. Skonieczny’s experience teaching writing as well as other courses has led to collaboration and excellence in student writing. In 2014, she collaborated with graduating IR senior, Giuliano Morse, to develop his IR 550 paper into a book-chapter titled, “Globalization and Occupy Wall Street,” that she co-authored in The SAGE Handbook of Globalization, edited by Manfred B. Steger, Paul Battersby and Joseph Siracusa. She has also helped develop student papers from her courses into conference papers delivered at the International Studies Association (both the annual meeting and the West Region). Since 2009 she has brought ten undergraduate students and five graduate students to ISA conferences and her 2015 undergraduate student won the best undergraduate paper award at ISA West. She is always looking for ways to inspire students to write at a higher academic level and to think about writing for a broader audience. She has presented her thoughts on teaching in several roundtables on pedagogy at the International Studies Association conferences and in a forthcoming book chapter titled “Teaching Writing as Social Justice” in the (2019) book Journeys in Teaching World Politics, edited by Jamie Frueh.