Being born and raised in North Dakota, Joshua Plencner, associate professor in the department of politics with a doctorate in political science, never imagined working at SUNY Oswego for the past seven years. 

“Even though it’s the largest city in the state, Fargo was and still is really small compared to most metro areas in the US,” Plencner said. “You might think of it kind of like a smaller Syracuse. It profiles really similarly…So even though I’m not from here originally, Central New York feels very familiar to me.”

Plencner spent a lot of his childhood spending time with his family in Minnesota, which is where his parents are originally from. Otter Tail County is a few hours outside of Minneapolis and is considered a very rural part of the state where old Scandinavian farmers keep up immigrant traditions like “hyttekultur,” Plencner said. Hyttekultur refers to their cultural practice of embracing nature, simplicity, and coziness. 

“There we biked to gas stations to buy Mountain Dew and comic books, and rotted our minds watching cartoons and played wiffle ball until we couldn’t see the ball spin in the dark,” Plencner said. “It was pretty great.”When he got to high school, Plencner found a passion in sports like football and track and field. He was inspired by his parents, who were both college athletes, so both he and his brother played all the sports they liked. Plencner was elected captain of his football team in his senior year and competed at states for discus as well. 

“I’m grateful for those experiences, for sure, there were some extraordinary folks in that program, and one of my old football teammates is now a coach in the NFL, but as I grew into my late high school years, I wasn’t really passionate about it in the way that others were,” Plencner said.

Besides sports, Plencner always had his head in a book and was constantly searching for new music. He felt as though the strict schedule his sports had him on was increasingly alienating how he wanted to spend time, and was constantly trying to find a way to break out of the mold he was in. This was happening at the beginning of the Bush administration, and it sparked Plencner’s political interest. 

“My political consciousness was being raised at punk shows in the basements of VFWs and at the side-stages of local bowling alleys,” Plencner said. “In a way, my feet were in different worlds, and I knew the ground beneath my feet was shifting.”

After high school, Plencner attended the University of North Dakota. There, Plencner was able to discover what he was truly interested in. He took an interest in hockey because, like Oswego, they were a big hockey school. This is also where he found the study of political science, “mostly by accident because I was negatively interested in government and politics in the sense of critiquing it and trying to figure out how to undo its harms,” Plencner said. He also returned to his love of reading superhero comics and regularly read them. 

“And I fell in love with the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met,” Plencner said. The person he refers to  is his current partner.

He graduated from the University of North Dakota with honors and was accepted into a PhD program in political science at the University of Oregon. Plencner had never traveled west before and did not know much about it except for the trail-based computer games, but he and his girlfriend packed up everything and started their new adventure. 

“Oregon’s program in political science was one of the very best in the country for someone like me,” Plencner said. “I received an atypical and very heterodox form of training in American politics, specializing in a subfield called American Political Development, which, as I learned directly from some of its most capacious practitioners, held a very skeptical view of the center-poles of the discipline.”

Plencner said that this way of learning did not create a copy and paste version of the same people, but rather an “island of misfits” that blended various studies like theory, history and culture together to help create something “exciting and deeply challenging.”

After earning his PhD in 2014, Plencner has had a long journey to get to where he is today. He started teaching at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for a few years. He then moved to Union College in Schenectady, New York for two years before finally joining SUNY Oswego in the fall of 2019. 

Plencner has several inspirations, including his almost one-year-old son. He also enjoys art, weird books, making things with his hands and growing food. 

“I’m excited by people who are excitable,” Plencner said. 

Plencner teaches several classes at SUNY Oswego, including Politics 205, 300, 326 and 497. He advises students to “learn how to organize a collection of what isn’t important.” 

“Never let anyone get away with calling you the ‘workforce,’” Plencner said. “They’re trying to take something from you.”