New Era Workshop (NEW)
NEW 2025: September 25-27 at the University of Denver
Applications for NEW 2025 are now open can be found here! Applications close 11:59pm MT May 4th.
The New Era Workshop (NEW) is an annual three-day training program for PhD students in international affairs and related disciplines. Over the course of the workshop, participants collectively tackle a scenario-analysis exercise—an innovative approach to assessing the medium-term challenges and opportunities currently facing the world. Facilitators then lead participants through a process to help generate and shape policy-relevant research ideas. In the past, participants have incorporated their ideas into dissertation projects, conference papers, published academic articles, and pieces in policy journals. Throughout the workshop, participants also learn from a series of foreign policy experts and “gap bridgers”—about responsible engagement, effective public communication, and pursuing careers across the academia/policy divide.
NEW is not your typical academic conference; the activities and conversations will invite you to think beyond disciplinary debates and outside the box. Ideal applicants are PhD students in political science and related disciplines, who are around their transition to candidacy stage and who are interested in conducting policy-relevant research and pursuing publicly engaged careers. We seek a cohort of creative, cooperative thinkers and doers, looking to work together to ask and answer questions of interest to policymakers and the public.
The goals of NEW are three-fold:
To bring together and build a network of policy-oriented PhD students in international affairs
To invigorate the foreign policy community with fresh ideas and new avenues for future research
To equip a new generation of international affairs scholars with the tools for conducting and disseminating policy-relevant and public-facing research
We accept applications from PhD students located both domestically and internationally. Applicants are encouraged to visit our Frequently Asked Questions page prior to applying.
To learn more about the comparative scenario analysis used at NEW, please review an example scenario set from the 2007 New Era Foreign Policy Conference. For more information on the use of scenario analysis in political science, please see “Imagine a World in Which: Using Scenarios in Political Science” by Naazneen H. Barma, Brent Durbin, Eric Lorber and Rachel E. Whitlark. For an assessment of scenario analysis in the context of Covid-19, please see “Borders, Blinders, and Mental Maps” by Danielle Gilbert and Rachel E. Whitlark.