Maybe the problem isn’t that scholars don’t know how to speak to U.S. foreign-policy makers, but rather that U.S foreign-policy makers don’t know how to engage with scholarship?
Bridging the Gap to Nowhere?
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methodology
Doing PhD Research While Staying in Place
Last night, I taught another session of our Dissertation Proposal Workshop class, and the topic was the methodology section of one's proposal. That is, how am I going to research this question...
Mechanical Turk and Experiments in the Social Sciences
Amazon created a platform called Mechanical Turk that allows Requesters to create small tasks (Human Intelligence Tasks or HITs) that Workers can perform for an extremely modest fee such as 25 or 50...
Call for Participants: Interpretive and Relational Research Methodologies
“Interpretive and Relational Research Methodologies” A One-Day Graduate Student Workshop Sponsored by the International Studies Association-Northeast Region 9 November, 2013 • Providence, Rhode...
More methodology Posts
The Trouble with Combining, or Why I’m Not Touting the Global Peace Index
The Institute for Economics and Peace is making a big splash today with the release of the 2012 edition of its annual Global Peace Index (GPI)---"the world's leading measure of global peacefulness," according to its web site. The launch event for the 2012 edition included several people whose work I respect and admire, and the Institute identifies some of the heaviest hitters in the global fight for peace and human rights---Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama, for crying out loud---as "endorsers" of the GPI.I really want to like this index. I'm a numbers guy, and I've spent most of...
What’s So ‘Institutional’ @ Historical Institutionalism?
NOTE: The following was actually written before Dan Nexon posted a good piece on exactly the same essay. I’m not sure if that coincidence means anything, but here’s my take: ----------------------------------------- So I just read Orfeo Fioretos’ “Historical Institutionalism in International Relations” (IO 65/2, 2011). It’s very good - erudite and sophisticated, the kind of dense, abstract writing that makes me wonder if I can keep up in our uber tech-y scientistic field. In it (fn. 18), he defines ‘institution’ as “rules and norms that guide human action and interaction, whether formalized...
Winecoff vs. Nexon Cage Match!
Kindred Winecoff has a pretty sweet rebuttal to my ill-tempered rant of late March. A lot of it makes sense, and I appreciate reading graduate student's perspective on things. Some of his post amounts to a reiteration of my points: (over)professionalization is a rational response to market pressure, learning advanced methods that use lots of mathematical symbols is a good thing, and so forth. On the one hand, I hope that one day Kindred will sit on a hiring committee (because I'd like to see him land a job). On the other hand, I'm a bit saddened by the prospect because his view of the...
Labels and tribes
In the Matrix, it's trivial to specify the underlyingdata-generating process. It involves kung fu. Given PTJ's post, I wanted to clarify two points from my original post on Big Data and the ensuing comment thread.I use quantitative methods in my own work. I've invested a lot of time and a lot of money in learning statistics. I like statistics! I think that the development of statistical techniques for specifying and disciplining our analytic approach to uncertainty is the most important development in social science of the past 100 years. My objection in the comments thread, then, was not to...
Experiments, Social Science, and Politics
[This post was written by PTJ]One of the slightly disconcerting experiences from my week in Vienna teaching an intensive philosophy of science course for the European Consortium on Political Research involved coming out of the bubble of dialogues with Wittgenstein, Popper, Searle, Weber, etc. into the unfortunate everyday actuality of contemporary social-scientific practices of inquiry. In the philosophical literature, an appreciably and admirably broad diversity reigns, despite the best efforts of partisans to tie up all of the pieces of the philosophy of science into a single and univocal...
Challenges to Qualitative Research in the Age Of Big Data
Technically, "because I didn't have observational data."Working with experimental data requires onlycalculating means and reading a table. Also, thismay be the most condescending comic stripabout statistics ever produced.The excellent Silbey at the Edge of the American West is stunned by the torrents of data that future historians will be able to deal with. He predicts that the petabytes of data being captured by government organizations such as the Air Force will be a major boon for historians of the future --(and I can't be the only person who says "Of the future!" in a sort of breathless...
$h•! PTJ Says #3: protest banners vs. precise terms
I am going to try writing down pieces of advice that I give to students all the time, in the hopes that they might be useful for people who can't make it to my office hours."Many if not most of the terms we use to differentiate styles and traditions of scholarly inquiry are tools for positioning ourselves relative to other scholars. Names of schools of thought, incontrovertible assumptions that have to be agreed to in order to belong to a particular club, shorthand references to 'great debates' and 'key controversies' -- treating these as though they had positive content is basically the...
Knowing and the Known
Although the majority of the offerings in the European Consortium on Political Research's inaugural Winter School in Methods and Techniques (to be held in Cyprus in February 2012) are pretty firmly neopositivist, at the risk of sound like a shameless self-promoter I'd like to call your attention to course A6, "Knowing and the Known: Philosophy and Methodology of Social Science," which I am teaching. The short description of this course is:"The social sciences have long been concerned with the epistemic status of their empirical claims. Unlike in the natural sciences, where an evident record...