Is Activism Killing Science? Normativity vs Theory in Social Sciences (Dr. Ashley Rubin)

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
What motivated me to write the paper was I was getting really
frustrated at the quality and content of articles and
conference presentations. I've been seen, especially over
the last couple of years. It kind of took me until this
year and last year to really start to notice that it wasn't
just this marginal thing, but that actually it really is kind
of taking over the field. But within academia, yeah, I
think activism has become extremely common.

(00:22):
And I do think this is what people think it means to be an
academic at this point. People are using terms because
they sound cool, because they kind of serve as a shibboleth of
saying like, book, here are my my political bona feeds.
I'm criticizing this thing like that's again, that's not really
what social science is supposed to do.

(00:54):
Hello everyone, welcome to the Generalist Universe podcast.
My name is Kai Hooks Berandali. I'm an economist and science
communicator from Brazil, and today I bring on a show Doctor
Ashley Rubin. She's an associate professor in
the Sociology department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa
and an interdisciplinary social scientist specializing in the
study of criminal punishment as a social phenomenon.

(01:17):
In this episode, we talk about Doctor Rubin's new paper,
Normativity is Not a Replacementfor Theory, where she looks at
how social scientists are focusing more on activist goals
and less on building solid theories to explain society.
Links to her paper and other materials related to this
conversation can be found in theepisode description.

(01:38):
And before we begin, I want to mention that I run this entire
science communication project onmy own, from recording to
editing, so any financial support through the podcast
PayPal account is greatly appreciated.
You can find the PayPal link fordonations in the episode
description or use the QR code displayed on the screen.
If you're watching this on YouTube, don't forget to give it

(01:58):
a like and subscribe to the channel.
And if you're listening or watching this on Spotify, be
sure to follow and rate the podcast there as well.
Doctor Ashley Rubin, welcome to the podcast and thank you for
accepting my invitation to come on a show.
Thank you so much for having me.So today we're going to be
exploring your latest paper, Normativities Not Replacement

(02:19):
for Theory, and I would like to know what motivated you to write
this paper. And maybe it would be
interesting to know exactly whatyou mean by normativity and
theory here. So I'll start with the second
part. So I'm using normativity to
basically describe morality statements.
So I, you know, typically think of normativity as should

(02:39):
statements. We should do this, we should not
do that, but also kind of more moralistic statements like this
thing is bad, this thing is good.
In the social science context, it would be scholars basically
describing policies or practicesas good or bad and using other
terms that have basically becomecoded for meaning something as
good or bad. And so kind of bringing that in.

(03:00):
And as a social scientist, I, you know, I typically see my own
morality, my own politics as kind of separate from typically
empirical questions and theoretical questions, where
politics in my morality might shape which questions I'm
interested in, but they're not supposed to shape my answers to
those questions. The data is supposed to be the
primary thing that determines the answers to those questions.

(03:23):
And so when I'm talking about the rise of normativity, I'm
seeing people basically refer back to their own morality,
their own politics, their own ideology, rather than the data
to answer really important questions or to make claims in
general. So people have different
definitions of theory, differentunderstandings about what counts
as theory. But the definition that I go for
basically has two parts. First, it has to be an

(03:44):
explanation and 2nd, it has to be some level of
generalizability or abstractedness in the the
explanation. So if I have a case study of a
particular area or a topic or a population and I'm just
describing it, then I would say that's not theory.
But if I'm explaining something that's going on in that context,
to get that to the level of theory, it has to be something

(04:06):
that I think is true, not just in the context that I've
studied, but I have to do some sort of work to show that this
is actually relevant in other contacts, maybe different
countries, different populations, different time
periods, different topics. So we see the same kind of
underlying processes or mechanisms happening in these
other places. And that's what we mean by
abstracted is, you know, you kind of have to take it out of

(04:27):
that context and have it be portable so it can make sense
elsewhere. So what motivated me to write
the paper was I was getting really frustrated at the quality
and content of articles and conference presentations I'd
been seen, especially over the last couple of years.
There had always been, you know,an occasional paper or
conference presentation that wasalways, you know, it would raise

(04:48):
an eyebrow and you just kind of ignore it.
But it seemed like in the last couple of years, it went from
being kind of a marginal trend to not just very common, but
increasingly what was expected of scholars.
And I was seeing this especiallywith junior scholars, but
increasingly with senior scholars, people whom I respect.
And their research had just really been kind of drifting,

(05:10):
shall we say. So I started noticing seeing
this. And so the first version of the
article was just kind of a, an observation of this trend
happening. And then I went back and I
systematically reviewed the literature and I realized that
it was actually a lot worse thanI thought.
I thought it was a fairly marginal trend where I was still
kind of surprised to see the stuff, you know, being

(05:31):
published, being tolerated, being allowed, being encouraged.
But I thought it was a few people doing it.
But my experience at conferenceswhere this is the majority was
kind of like, it's not the majority of published papers,
but the extent to which I saw this in published papers was a
lot more than I was expecting. So I was, I was pretty
surprised. So, yeah, so, so the original

(05:53):
motivation, it turns out I was alittle late to the party in
figuring that out. And late to the party.
You mean this has been going on for some time and you never
noticed? Yeah, like other people have
been talking about this in otherfields as well, but also just
that I didn't realize how bad things had gotten so quickly
that it it kind of took me untilthis year and last year to
really start to notice that it was, it wasn't just this

(06:16):
marginal thing, but that actually it really is kind of
taking over the field. Well, in your paper you go over
in the criminal punishment, which is your field of study,
right? But do you see this in other
social sciences too? Yeah, I've actually been hearing
from folks in other fields, including psychology, especially
ecology. There seems to be a big
conversation there. I know there are pockets of
political science where this is an issue.

(06:37):
I think it's starting to kind ofdiffuse across sociology has
been a big focus for folks and and that's that's when the
people been talking about for decades where they've been
complaining about there's kind of different related things.
So some is just like the liberalbias in our field.
I think like there, there's somefields where I'm kind of
surprised to like I used to think criminology was more kind

(06:58):
of conservative leaning, but recently criminology has become
more left-leaning, but also justdifferent subfields across these
disciplines. So yeah, it's kind of happening
across the social sciences. It's definitely happening across
the humanities and it might haveeven started there, I think
ahead of time, but it's definitely starting to go across
the fields and it's even starting to happen in some STEM
fields, which is is weird because you know, STEM fields,

(07:20):
usually there's a very clear right answer.
Or at least you can, you can empirically, you know, debate
that it's, it's a little hard todo too much interpretation.
But even there, people are starting to bring in politics,
shaping some of the the claims that people we're making.
And so that's that's been interesting to see as well.
Yeah, I'm speaking from Brazil, but I, I can like confirm that
it's, it's not actually happening here too.

(07:40):
For it's been happening for quite some time.
And I've been trying to bring people on the show to talk about
some of these, well, theories orso-called theories that are
spreading. And I don't find them very
scientifically sound. So that's how I came across your
paper. And I thought it would be a good
idea to bring somebody from sociology to, to talk about this

(08:02):
topic in here. We're not talking about your
feeling, right? You you check that.
And what kind of evidence pointsto an increasing reliance on
normativity in your field, whichis criminal punishment?
Yeah, so I was looking at published articles, published
books, also book reviews where somebody writes a couple of page

(08:23):
overview, kind of summarizing and then also criticizing or
talking about the contribution of a book.
And so I've been looking at those across both the kind of
key journals in my field, so punishment society, theoretical
criminology, but also kind of more broadly.
So there's a traditional field of punishment society, but then
there's this newer field of carcerality studies and critical
prison studies. And they exist across geography,

(08:46):
across like some of the area studies, political science and
so on. So they're, they're kind of even
more interdisciplinary than punishment society historically
has been, which is also very interdisciplinary.
I forgot to mention history. And so I was looking at what's
been published in these areas. And I like I did a little, I
don't even want to call it a quantitative analysis because
it's not sophisticated by any means.

(09:07):
But I was really interested in this question of how new is this
issue? Because certainly there's been
critical work, you know, going back centuries, but like
especially in the 1960s, there'sthis big critical criminology
movement in the 70s, there's kind of a critical turn, the
rise of Foucault as being very influential and then
postmodernism, post structuralism and all that.
So this has been with us for a while and there's been some

(09:29):
really important insights that scholars have given.
But for me, it felt like things had really changed, I would say
around 2016, around 2020, and then especially over the last
couple of years as well. And so as curious kind of, is
there a way to quantitatively check that?
And so I did some word searches for some of the jargon terms
that are both kind of correlatedwith the, the type of work that

(09:51):
I'm talking about. But also in a lot of cases,
scholars have actually explicitly justified their turn
to these words as part of their,their politics and their kind of
political motivations for writing these papers.
And so I did a search of a number of different terms just
to try to get a sense of like, OK, how common are these things?
And so it looked especially at punishment society, which for me

(10:12):
as a key journal, and I would say this is this is like a
really good journal. This is not, you know, a fringe
journal. So this one, you know, has good
stuff. So it's, it's kind of an
interesting test case. And so I looked across this
journal for the frequency of these words being used in, you
know, titles, abstracts and thatsort of thing and saw that there
really is kind of a peak, or nota peak, but a discontinuous

(10:33):
shift upwards around 2020 for a lot of these terms.
A lot of these terms have just been kind of gradually going up,
but with like a steeper shift, Iwould say around 2015 to 2020
and then 2022 to present. So, you know, it's, it's a very
unsophisticated analysis. I'm interested in doing other
analysis. The other thing that I I found
is a lot of the articles that I had found just from keyword

(10:55):
searches, they were actually some of the most popular, the
most downloaded and read papers in these journals.
And SO1 criticism I got was, youknow, these articles, they're
kind of fringy articles. I've never heard of a lot of
these authors, you know, so how how big of a trend is this
actually? But if you go to the journal's
website, a lot of these are actually the most downloaded
papers. And so they, you know, and a lot
of them actually were highly cited.

(11:17):
I ended up writing about multiple generations of papers
where there'd be like an original paper and then a paper
that uses that paper and then a paper that uses the, the middle
paper and so on. So it's, it's becoming like, you
know, these little genealogies of papers.
And so these, these aren't papers that just kind of get
published and never get read. And they're, you know, marginal
impacts. They're actually having a pretty
big impact. So I would argue that there

(11:38):
might not be the most common, they might not be exactly
dominant, but I think they're were rapidly becoming dominant.
And then I was also looking at these book reviews.
And one of the things I was highlighting in the book reviews
is how the reviewers themselves were criticizing books that had
been written in a lot of cases with like, you know, they had
their own recommendations to activists in the book, but the

(12:00):
reviewers were reading them as not activist enough, as not
going far enough, as not taking certain steps to kind of reach,
you know, a liberatory potential, which in my view is
not really the purpose of research.
People can use research for those ends, but as researchers,
that's not what we're supposed to be doing.
We're supposed to provide the data that people can use in the
interpretations and then people can make their own decisions

(12:21):
about what to do about these issues.
And so the book reviewers themselves were criticizing
that. And then I also to kind of get a
a broader sweep of of this, I also cited a number of other
studies that folks have been publishing talking about
different versions of related problems from the push to self
censor research. So if you know, if you have a
study, especially quantitative study, and you don't like your

(12:41):
findings, there's been kind of apush to either not publish those
findings or you'll have journal editors or reviewers who are
holding them to higher standardsor they're not publishing them.
And I actually recently saw a new article that's not been
published yet, but they were showing screenshots of journal
policies and psychology where they're saying they're not going

(13:02):
to publish findings that could potentially harm populations,
which, you know, is, is very much up for interpretation.
That's also that's not how science works.
Like that's going to create hugeselection biases.
So if you want to do meta analysis and things like that,
we're going to have very misleading results from that.
But it's also science is supposed to be neutral.
It's, it's not supposed to take a stance on if this is good or

(13:23):
bad. And one of the things that we're
seeing is, well, sorry, I'm kindof getting off topic, but one of
the things we're seeing is people are having very narrow
interpretations of what it meansto be good or bad for certain
populations. And a lot of times those things
are not even consistent with what the populations themselves
want. So it's it's it's gotten kind of
messy. But to answer your question, I'm
using published work both as primary sources and then kind of

(13:45):
analysis of trends that are alsobeen published.
And in the case of jargon, whichyou mentioned in the in your
paper, can you give some examples of the most used ones
and what are the problems with them?
Yeah, sure. So I would say the the most
common jargon term that I'm seeing these days is carcerality
and a closely related term of the carceral state.

(14:06):
So the carceral state is actually an offshoot of what was
originally called the penal state.
So scholars like Luik Vakant andDavid Garland had used and
developed this idea of, of the penal state to talk about
initially kind of the the difference between the welfare
state and the penal state and the kind of shifting
relationship between the power of those two States.
And kind of focusing on the roleof government and how government

(14:29):
was managed, festing in its relationships with people and
kind of talking about the shift between the welfare state and
the penal state. And David Garland use the term
to kind of think about like, OK,let's look at the, the, the
people, the elites who are making these decisions, who, you
know, work for the state and areactually, you know, like let's
look at their role in shaping policy outcomes.
Over time, people started using the, the penal state and then

(14:52):
increasingly then the carceral state more descriptively, just
to refer to essentially the build up of punishment.
And so increasingly it became a synonym for mass incarceration.
It in some cases it's just a synonym for the criminal justice
system. In some cases, it goes even
broader to be social control, either like formal social
control, so like by the state, but also informal social control

(15:13):
from people. Increasingly it's kind of
expanding even beyond that to forms of oppression and just
basically anything that an author doesn't like, then they
just call it carceral. So if you want to insult
something, you just call it carceral.
And this is, you know, really problematic because, you know,
carceral is supposed to mean relating to jail or prison.

(15:34):
Like that's literally what the word means, but we've expanded
it to mean these other things. And so when we're talking about
carcerality or the carceral state and people are using these
terms in the literature, I don'tknow what they're talking about
anymore. And, and in a lot of cases, I
think they're using it to refer to mass incarceration, the
criminal justice system, or social control.
And we already have these terms and we we've theorized these

(15:56):
terms and we've built them up, but people are basically
ignoring those terms because it seems like they just like the
the kind of punchiness of carceral state.
Like it sounds very scary. And, and I guess like, I don't
know to what extent they're trying to relate it back to the
prison and say this is all part of a continuum, like kind of
going back to Michelle Foucault and his carceral archipelago, if

(16:17):
that's what they're doing. But in a lot of cases, they're
not even citing him. So if that's what they're doing,
it's not, you know, clearly that.
So they're just kind of creatingthis boogeyman of the carceral
state. And so it's just very
unrigorous. It's not well defined, it's
watering down the terms. So this, you know, the original
theoretical underpinnings of penal state are just getting

(16:37):
lost as people are using these terms.
And when people are using carcerality to refer basically
to Vadnais, we're losing out on carceral means prison or jail or
relating to prison or jail. So it's just getting very
confusing. So that's, those are, I would
say the probably the biggest ones, but we also see the return
of the idea of the prison industrial complex, which

(16:58):
similarly started off with NilesChristie in the 1980s and he
talked about the role of economic factors in shaping
political prison policy. But since then, it's kind of
become this conspiracy theory that people don't even bother
elaborating to say like what specifically they're talking
about. They now use prison industrial
complex to refer to mass incarceration, to refer to the

(17:21):
criminal justice system, to refer to the collection of
prisons in the United States, which also is really problematic
because then they're bringing itdown to just one variable,
essentially economics or profit industry, I guess.
And, you know, the criminal justice system is shaped by many
factors. Like we each like to highlight
different factors, but at the end of the day, prioritizing one

(17:42):
factor is really misleading. But that's basically what
they're doing when they they usethese these terms.
So, yeah. So those would be some of the,
the main terms that I'm seeing and this problem of basically
not defining their terms, using the same term to mean many
different things. That's making it very difficult
to theorize, but also just to understand what people are
talking about. And then kind of this underlying

(18:02):
normative issue where people areusing terms because they sound
cool, because they kind of serveas a shibboleth of saying like,
look here my, my political bona feeds.
I'm criticizing this thing. Like that's again, that's not
really what social science is supposed to do.
We're supposed to be fairly trying to be neutral and
objective, you know, even if that's, you know, not perfectly

(18:23):
possible. We're not supposed to be showing
our cards this much. Yes.
And do you think these jargons, they're they're being used as a
way to signal ideological affiliation and that's the main
reason people are using it or researchers are using it?
Yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's some
people who just don't know any better or they've been

(18:43):
socialized into thinking this iswhat we're supposed to do.
You know, like at this point, sometimes you get criticized for
not using some of these terms. And of course, when we're around
people that use terms, we tend to use the terms that they do.
I myself have published an article where I refer to the
criminal legal system, which is another jargon term people have
used. I've seen people explicitly
write they won't use the term criminal justice because that's

(19:05):
a misnomer because they say there's no justice in the
criminal justice system. Earlier versions, people would
say it's a criminal injustice system, but now the kind of more
subtle way of doing it is to refer to the criminal legal
system. And so I, I published an article
using that because I had a co-author who insisted on using
that term. And I thought, well, you know,
it's a good way to remind I was writing for a group of law and

(19:26):
society scholars. It's a good way to remind them
that, you know, criminal justiceis within the legal system.
So that's helpful. So I, you know, I used it for
other reasons and I'm sure people have other reasons for
doing it. But increasingly you're seeing
people actually explain their terminology from, you know,
criminal legal system to using terminology like we're going to
talk about incarcerated people or people who are incarcerated

(19:48):
or system impacted youth or justice involved individuals and
things like that, or residents instead of prisoners.
And they'll explicitly explain that they're doing this to avoid
stigma, to try to create a future in which people are
treated more equally and basically these these normative
or political goals that they're embedding in the language that

(20:09):
they use. So I think people are definitely
doing this for signaling purposes and for other political
purposes. And you also mentioned explicit
calls for prison and decolonization.
You said it's becoming more common.
And do you know where this trendcomes from at all?
That's a great question. I have some speculation.

(20:30):
So I mean, I think there are a couple of different mechanisms.
So prison abolition was, I don'twant to say popular because it
was still pretty marginal in the1970s.
But I would say kind of as a as a factual matter, it started to
become talked about more in the 20 tens, at least in the US
context. So you start seeing more people
kind of bringing up Angela Davisor using the term abolition.

(20:52):
The first study that I remember seeing was actually first
published online on in 2016, butit was finally published in
2017. And then that I think kind of
created a a path dependence where once an article was
published, it kind of invited other people to make similar
calls. So something that previously was
seen as forbidden, like you do not make calls for outright
political platforms and peer reviewed research.

(21:14):
Once somebody has done that, nowthe field is open for other
people to do that too. And so you start seeing more
research like that published. So I think there's a little bit
of that path dependence going on.
Then, of course, there's the larger context.
So I think the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and then
the pandemic in 2020, the summerof Black Lives Matter are kind
of becoming really popular in the protest over the killings of

(21:37):
of George Floyd Floyd and Brianna Taylor.
I think that really went an additional context to the kind
of gravity of these terms and and then basically the
popularity of them. So at that point, I remember
seeing mainstream news, you know, outlets like The New York
Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, publishing
articles by abolitionists calling for abolition, either of

(21:57):
prison or we also saw a lot of, of course, police abolition and
defund the police and that wholething.
So I think that context is really important.
I think another factor that's been really interesting, I think
is also the growing internationalization of
research. And so over the last 10 or so
years, we've seen a much bigger move to make research more
global, more international, morewelcoming for folks outside of

(22:20):
the, you know, the Anglosphere. So I was, I was living in Canada
from about 2016 to 2019. And it was really interesting
because I noticed a pretty big difference between American
scholarship and Canadian scholarship, where Canadian
scholarship was much more critical than I was used to.
And I think kind of as we got more international and as we

(22:40):
kind of, I think, you know, likebasically different countries
have different norms about what you do and do not say.
When I was living in Canada, I remember people were basically
criticizing the United States ashaving a methods fetish.
So like, you know, it, it depends on your perspective of
what's good and what's bad in terms of, of research and
quality and those sorts of things.
So, you know, there's plenty of stuff you can criticize for
American research. There's plenty of stuff you can

(23:01):
criticize for, you know, lots ofcountries research.
But I think as we tried to become more international, the
kind of norms went away. So one of the issues that I
faced actually is an editor is when I would insist on norms
that were traditionally there, as in my journal and that I had
been taught and that I would seeother people insist on.
I would be told that I was being, you know, a colonizer,

(23:22):
that I was being racist, that I was being, you know, Eurocentric
or Anglocentric and all these things.
And so I think as part of this push to kind of try to bring
more people along and to be moreopen and inclusive, one of the
ways that's manifested is instead of kind of explaining to
people about trends and kind of training people in, in different
trends, what in or sorry, not trends, but in norms.
But what we've ended up doing iskind of exploding the norms.

(23:44):
And so part of the move to decolonize academia has allowed
people to bring in more normative points that I think
were more traditionally, you know, common in other countries.
And I think that's starting to impact American research and
increasingly international research.
So, yeah, so I think that's that's kind of my take on
abolition and the kind of general changes overall and then

(24:07):
decolonization. So again, my my perspective is
really kind of colored from being in in Canada.
So I was in Canada shortly afterthey had had the Truth and
Reconciliation commissions and there was a growing push in
Canadian society to kind of be more attentive to the needs and
preferences of Indigenous people.
But what was interesting is it it tended to be kind of more

(24:29):
what social justice activists wanted for Indigenous people and
not necessarily what Indigenous people wanted.
And there's great work by JustinTetreault, who is working with
Indigenous people who actually want a lot of the things that
critical activists, a lot of times white critical activists,
non Indigenous activists are saying like, oh, you know, we

(24:49):
need to get rid of these things.We need to decolonize this stuff
is cultural appropriation and it's bad.
And it turns out the Indigenous people like, you know, no group
is homogeneous, but a lot of them like these things and they
want them. And so we see this kind of
general trend that we're seeing across different areas of, of
critical scholarship where people are saying, oh, no, this
thing is bad. And, you know, the proper social

(25:10):
justice thing to do is to criticize this.
But actually, when you talk to the people who are the groups
that, you know, these ostensiblyvulnerable groups that people
are trying to champion, it turnsout they like these things.
So like abolish the police. Turns out it's it's really, you
know, controversial among black people.
And, you know, critical scholarsare like, oh, this is what black
people want. Turns out it's mixed.

(25:30):
It's complicated. And that's not always the case.
Decolonizing practices. Indigenous people have different
views about these things. There are plenty of Indigenous
people who are like, you're whatyou're calling decolonization is
not decolonization. Guys like that that's come on,
that's not your like this is very symbolic, performative
stuff when it comes to some of the language stuff that we
talked about. You know, this idea of

(25:52):
incarcerated people, one of the groups that kind of got this
going was a group of formerly incarcerated students at UC
Berkeley who put together a language guide basically calling
for more humanizing language, kind of modeled on disability
studies and disability activistscalling for person first
language. But, you know, when I've talked
to incarcerated folks and formerly incarcerated folks, a

(26:13):
lot of them, they use the word prisoner.
And, you know, I go to a conference and I say prisoner
and somebody in the audience is asking me, why are you using
this word prisoner? It's so dehumanizing.
And it's like this is the language that prisoners use too.
Or, you know, some of these these words that people are are
turning to like incarcerated individual or resident.

(26:34):
A lot of them kind of smack of the earlier language that, you
know, an earlier generation was trying to get away from.
So this idea of inmate and now we're saying resident.
And it's not clear to me how inmate and resident are that
different. But like inmate is a bad word,
but resident is a good word thatjust doesn't make any sense to
me. And it apparently doesn't make a
lot of sense to incarcerated folks either.

(26:55):
So it's it's, it's kind of a a messy situation right now where
I think a lot of people think they know what's best for other
people, but they're not always talking to those other people.
Or they're listening to a very radical subgroup of that
population and letting them speak for everyone within their
group instead of recognizing allgroups are homogeneous.
People have different views. It's really complicated.

(27:16):
And if you know, if you actuallydo want to help people, you, you
need to talk to a large, diverseaudience, and not just the
people who agree with you or whom you think they agree with
you. Yeah.
The The thing is just as you mentioned in in your paper,
these things are taken as or presented as a framework, A
theoretical framework for for example, when talking about

(27:38):
decolonization, you will see theabstract something like I'm
using the decolonization framework to analyze this.
And I think this is also a problem where when you try to
explore these terms or topics oras a framework, it's very hard
to navigate. Like I had, I had like a three
hour interview with Cavish Chatty from University of Cape

(27:59):
Town just to clarify what is decolonization and what are the
different meanings to the word and different authors or
thinkers and especially from Africa.
And but this took me like it wasa very long episode, a very long
conversation. But when you look into the term
and then you try to identify if there's any kind of scientific

(28:22):
framework to, it is very difficult to navigate.
It's very complex to navigate. And it was really hard to find
someone to, to, to talk about this topic too.
Like it took me two to three years to find a researcher that
could actually explore it properly and then dissect every
element of of the term. So then it can clarify what it
means and if it makes sense at all to, to use the term right.

(28:45):
But it also comes with this ideaof like a theoretical framework
behind it. What do you think of that is?
Is there anything that can be done to to?
I don't know to to to avoid thiskind of use?
Yeah, I mean it's, it's really tricky and and that's a great
example. Yeah, I see that a whole bunch
in in my field and I don't know what the decolonial framework

(29:09):
is. And one of the things that's
challenging is like I've heard of colonial studies and post
colonial studies and there's colonial theory, you know, they
they raise some really importantvariables and interesting
hypothesis. But then when you add decolonial
to it, from what I can tell, like it's, it's no longer about,
OK, here are the, you know, the important variables, here are
the hypothesis. It's really an activist

(29:31):
platform. It's saying we need to change
things. And for me, that's, that's just
not a theoretical framework. It's, it's not about
explanation, it's not about generalizability.
It's about like, find some context and decolonize it.
And so when people call it a theoretical framework, I, I get
really confused about what they're doing.
And I, I think part of what's going on is there's a status to

(29:53):
calling things theory. Like people think to get
published, you need to have theory.
And in some journals that's true.
In the journal I added that's, that's definitely true.
But you know, there's, there's other journals where you're
allowed to do description and descriptions, really important
work. And so you can do that.
But if the goal of your researchis just to basically write a
political essay where you're calling for, you know,

(30:16):
decolonization or you're laying out pathways for it, like, I
mean, I think there are ways to make it more scientific or to,
you know, make it into theory. So you could say, OK, here's an
activist understanding of decolonization.
Here are some platforms they're saying for how we can decolonize
society. OK, so we're going to take those
platforms and we're going to treat them as hypothesis.
Now we're going to go ahead and study them in these different

(30:39):
contexts and we can see how thatworks.
And so I think you could, so I wouldn't call it a decolonial,
you know, framework, but I wouldsay, you know, you're going to
create a theoretical framework that's going to test, you know,
these, these claims. But you have to 1, you have to
be open to the possibility that the platform is wrong, that, you
know, the thing that you're trying to do is, is actually not

(30:59):
going to have the impact that it's going to have.
But you also have to make them into empirical questions.
And a lot of times, you know, the, the debate is about
normative questions. It's, you know, we should do
these things. It's what is owed to this, this
population. You know, what is the moral
argument for decolonizing? And for me, like that's, that's
a question for philosophers, maybe for political theorists.

(31:21):
That's not a question that I canweigh in on because it's not my
place to tell you what you should think.
And it's not my place to tell policymaker or a citizen like
how they should vote. That's not my my job.
I can have my own views on thesesubjects, but you know, it's
it's very like self promoting tothink that my views on, you

(31:42):
know, a moral subject are more important than anyone else's.
Where I can be useful is to say like, OK, so here's your goal.
You want to improve the conditions of people who have
indigenous ancestry. OK, so here's some things we can
try. Let's go ahead and test that out
and let's see how it goes. But it might turn out that some
of the things that we think is going to help are actually

(32:03):
aren't going to help. You know, we have to be open to
those possibilities. And unfortunately, there are a
lot of things where we get in our head that this thing is
gonna help and either it's not what people want or it's not
gonna help, or it has downstreamconsequences.
But those are things that we canempirically task.
But I think the problem is people are just confusing
anything that's normative as theory.

(32:23):
And, you know, that's a, a pretty big problem.
And so I think, you know, how dowe fix this?
I think we have to be really clear about our definitions and
our standards and explain to people this is what it means to
do theory. And that might be very
colonialist and colonizing of meto, you know, 'cause I'm sure
I'm using European standards forwhat constitutes theory.
If, you know, if there's a different version of theory, I'd

(32:45):
love to hear it. But I want it to make sense.
Like I, I'm totally open to, youknow, an indigenous version of
theory, but it, it needs to be something that's coherent and
the, the literature has not provided that yet.
So I would, I would like to see that.
But I also think, you know, like, if, if what we're claiming
to do is science and if we're using the terminology of theory,

(33:05):
you know, maybe maybe we keep itthat way and maybe people have
other things that they're doing and they call it something else,
but they don't have to call it theory if that's not actually
what it's doing. So I would just, I think we need
to be better about training and to be really clear about, you
know, norms and standards and explaining to people how those
things work instead of just kindof passing it through and just
saying like, oh, OK, you're coming from a different

(33:26):
perspective. And to respect that perspective,
I'm going to have to lower my standards like that.
That's a very insulting way to approach things.
I I think people can do really good work and they do good work.
We don't have to dumb things down and call something in
theory just because it's coming from somebody that we want to
promote. Yeah, the problem here is just
to understand the problem, it takes a scientific framework and

(33:51):
the people that are advocating for these topics or or things,
they don't have that to start with.
So I think it's very difficult whenever I try to to talk to to
someone that is fighting for this political radical ideas is
just that the framework that is needed for a bit for them to
understand the problem is not even there.

(34:11):
And even to present this framework is already taken as
something negative and that shouldn't be done.
Like like you said, it can be seen as Eurocentric way of
thinking and so on. So, but I imagine if the signal
coming from academia is already,let's say so activist that is

(34:34):
already attracting students thatare expecting to become part of
this activism through academia, at least in Brazil, that's my
perception. People in social sciences,
they're always left-leaning a lot, a lot of them are are very
active online. And I think when people think of
social sciences in Brazil, they think about activism.

(34:56):
So they go in already expecting to see specific things, specific
the topics, and not science at all.
Do you think this is also the case in the US or wherever
you've been? Yeah, I, I think so.
I've definitely seen that happenas well.
So it used to be when I would ask students, you know, why do
you want to go to grad school? The kind of preferred answer and

(35:17):
the standard answer was, oh, I just love research.
Like I just, I can't imagine a life where I'm not doing
research. That's why I want to go to, to
grad school. I would say over the last 10 or
so years, I started to especially online, I would see a
lot of people talk about their motivation for going to grad
school as to make money, which especially in the United States

(35:38):
like that, that is not like there are much better ways to
make money much faster. Like it is not at all cost
effective. Like even if you're going to a
program where they're going to pay for your education and give
you a stipend, it is still not cost effective to go to grad
school. So that's a terrible reason.
Fame and status, which as a professor, like, I'm sorry, but

(35:59):
we do not have fame and status. Like I, I feel like I'm the
black sheep of my family. Like, you know, like this, this
is like faculty are generally not looked upon very highly.
Like I'm sure in some groups, like, you know, there's a little
bit of status, but most people think we're idiots at this point
and like really out of touch. And then the third one, the
really common one that I'm seeing is that they want to

(36:19):
change the world. And again, I think you don't
need to go to grad school to do that.
And this is really not a good way to do it 'cause I mean, one
of the ongoing critiques that I used to also see a lot was
academia is so conservative, which, you know, in the light of
current events, like it's reallyfunny that that was the the
ongoing critique. But that was that was one of the

(36:40):
things that people would complain about is that it's not
good for activism because it is so slow moving.
It's so beholden to tradition and the standards that you use
just aren't conducive to activism.
But yeah, like, I mean, at this point, I think that's really
changed where the norm increasingly is for students to
be activists. I've heard from grad students in

(37:00):
their in a grad program where the norm is for the grad
students to be activists and they pressure each other to be
more activists. And if you're not there to to do
social change, if you're not there to be an activist, you're
going to get, you know, kind of not teased, but kind of given a
hard time, I guess. I've heard about students
competing over who is a better activist.

(37:20):
I know of faculty who introduce themselves as I'm a scholar
activist or I'm an activist scholar.
And like, I mean, that used to be something you would keep to
yourself. It wasn't something you would
share. And now it's something that
people just, you know, say openly.
And even in in this climate, I'm, I'm still really surprised
when people do that. Yeah.
So it's become like part of the norm.

(37:40):
And then I remember you mentioned social media and like
people being very online. I think that's another
contributor to this because I doremember I'd be on Twitter and I
remember seeing a recurring critique of people's work where
is if you're doing research and your goal is not to change the
world, if it's not to improve the lot for the most vulnerable,
you know, whatever, whatever platform you want to say, it

(38:03):
would be some version of that. If your goal is not social
justice, what are you even doingit?
Was this common come and refrain?
What are you even doing? And most of my work is
historical. So like a lot of my work is not
going to have a direct impact. Like even from like a policy
perspective of is a policy makergoing to use my work?
Most of it's not like whether ornot I take a normative stand in

(38:23):
my work. Just, you know, is it policy
wise? Is it useful?
Like it, you know, I'm just helping to push knowledge
forward basically, but it's not something that's actually going
to make a change in people's life, I'm guessing.
And so there's a lot of pushbackonline that I remember seeing
where people were like, if this isn't what you're doing, what
are you even doing? Essentially, your work isn't
valid. You're not doing good work.

(38:44):
And then a a related story. There is a really big name
scholar. I heard this one second hand
from a friend of mine who is there.
There was a really well respected scholar, really nice
guy too, who gave a talk at a particular university and
afterwards spent some time talking with the grad students.
And one of the grad students asked, what is it that motivates
your work? And he had said something about,

(39:05):
you know, wanting to understand how the world works and, you
know, just being really interested by these things,
which is the same answer I wouldgive.
And the students got really mad that his answer wasn't, oh,
because I'm working to improve the criminal justice system or
because I want to abolish prisonor I want to undermine these
capitalist structures or something.
And so apparently, like, the students got really mad at him.

(39:27):
And it was like, this, this big scandal.
And so I'm like, oh, my God. Like, first of all, this is a
really nice person. Like they're taking time to talk
to the grad students, they're doing really, really good work.
And this is the reaction they'regetting.
Like that's that's unacceptable,unprofessional, but also just
what? So yeah, I think, I think this
like activist mindset has has really spread.

(39:49):
And I recently saw opinion data or not opinion data, but polling
data where people had polled professors and grad students in
terms of do they identify as some combination of activist,
radical, Marxist and something else?
But it was basically like, you know, variations on radical and
activist, I think it was. 40% offaculty in the, I forget if it
was just social sciences or if it was all faculty and then I

(40:11):
think it was 58% of, of grad students.
And you know, I, I think that's becoming a really big issue.
And then honestly, it's true forundergrads too.
We're at this point, I'll give aclass and I try to teach as
neutrally as possible. Like I have students who they
have family members who are police.
I have students who family members are in prison.
I have students who, you know, families have both sides.

(40:33):
I have students who want to become police officers and
students who want to abolish thepolice.
So I see my job as a public university professor to, you
know, be a professor to all of my students.
So I try to teach as neutrally as possible.
And so I'll give these lectures and then I'll read my students
quiz answers where I'll ask thema question about something.
It's and it's a neutral questionand their response will be

(40:53):
normative. And I once got a a response
where it was, you're right, Professor Rubin, the prison
industrial complex is bad. And I'm just like on so many
waffles. That is not what I said in class
like 1, like I think the prison industrial complex is a is a bad
concept at this point that I think has been pretty thoroughly
debunked. But two, like that wasn't the

(41:14):
point of the lecture. And three, I, I didn't say
anything was good or bad. And, and like, that's how the
students are reading a lot of ofwhat we're we're talking about
these days. So I think the kind of
combination of the left-leaning bias across academia is becoming
a really big issue to the point where if I say something
neutral, it's interpreted as liberal leaning from my

(41:35):
students, from the public. I I've written op eds where I I
tried to just here's the data. I'm not taking a stance on, you
know, like I'm, I'm, this is a nonpartisan article and people
assume based on what I say, which way the data come out.
They assume my politics based onthat.
So if I say crime rates are down, they think I'm a Democrat.
If I say crime rates are up, they think I'm a Republican.

(41:56):
So, you know, it's, it's a, it'sa pretty big problem.
But within academia, yeah, I think activism has become
extremely, and I do think this is what people think it means to
be an academic at this point. And of course, like the most
well known academics, a lot of them are activists.
And then we have this long standing kind of distinction or,
well, blurring distinction between what it means to be a

(42:17):
public scholar and what it meansto be an activist.
And so, you know, some people take the stance that you can be
translational, that you could just kind of get the word about
research but not take a stance. And then other people, of
course, weigh in on moral and political issues as part of
their public scholar nature. And then some people argue that
to be a public scholar, you needto take a stance on moral and

(42:38):
political issues. So it's gotten really messy
lately because, you know, now when people hear professor,
they're seeing activists. And so that's just further kind
of reinforcing the cycle of people turning to academia for
activism. And do you think this can lead
to a loss in terms of the knowledge the field has
accumulated over the years? And then these things would just

(43:01):
fade away because of this activism.
Yeah, I think so. I think there are probably at
least three ways in which I think that's happening.
So 1 is this erosion of norms and standards.
Like we, we build up these normsand standards for really good
reasons. Like the scientific method is
really useful for figuring out truth statements.
And, you know, a lot of people are rejecting the scientific

(43:21):
method, these ideas of objectivity and neutrality.
And I, I totally understand the critiques of them, but I think
there are better ways to addressthose critiques.
And we're, you know, basically saying, well, we're just going
to throw these out the window. But I think that's leading to
really harmful things. So part of this is just the
erosion of, of norms and standards.
The other part is, I think some of the worst offenders that I've

(43:42):
seen in terms of published research that is very normative
is part of the new kind of approach.
Like instead of science and we're going for activism
instead. The kind of new rules and
standards that people are using are things like, well, I'm not
going to look at contradictory evidence.
So that's a big problem because if I make a claim, I want to

(44:03):
know if that claim is accurate or not.
And to do that, not only do I need to collect really good
evidence to, you know, 1 evaluate that term, but I really
have to pay attention to contradictory explanations,
alternative accounts, evidence that I might be wrong, Like I
have to test that I might be wrong.
And if I'm not doing that, I'm going to present information

(44:24):
that very well could be wrong. And I'm, I'm seeing some claims
in the literature, unfortunately, especially about
race issues, which, you know, islike, it's such an important
area and people are doing reallyshoddy work and they're just
refusing to talk about evidence that's basically unflattering to
vulnerable groups or groups thatthey deem vulnerable.
And that's really bad. So, for example, with crime

(44:45):
rates, one of the kind of taboosthat's emerging is to not talk
about racial disparities in crime rates.
And I understand where people are coming from, but at the same
time, one of the things that they're also kind of doing in
the process is they're overlooking racial disparities
and victimization. So if we say, oh, crime in,

(45:06):
let's say, the black community is not a problem, they're kind
of erasing the black victims of violence.
And you know, that's a pretty big issue too.
So, or I'll give another example.
This one's actually from when I was in grad school.
So this is, I don't know, around2012 or so, we were in this like
special honors seminar and the student was presenting her
research and she was looking at the effects of family visitation

(45:27):
on, on prisoner misbehavior in prison.
And another student in the seminar, kind of more activisty
type spoke up and he criticized the study because it was quote,
using the language of the state.And so he just didn't even like
the idea that her outcome variable was looking at prisoner
misbehavior. And he objected to that because,

(45:47):
you know, basically we should fight the state.
And if prisoners are misbehavingand they're violating the rules
of the state, we should be on the side of the prisoners, which
not even going to touch that. But she had this really nice
answer where she pointed out a lot of the misbehavior that I'm
talking about is violence against other prisoners.
So this isn't some sort of like symbolic political resistance
that's fighting the man. This is prisoners hurting other

(46:10):
prisoners. So if you want to, you know,
protect prisoners and help them out and champion their cause,
reducing prisoner against prisoner violence is one of the
key things that you can do. And so I I thought that was a
really nice explanation. And I think that's one of the
things that people are losing track of is a lot of the work
that's considered inappropriate and not social justicy.

(46:33):
And the stuff that we're kind ofcensoring, either self censoring
or other censoring actually is going to help these communities.
It's just we have it in our mindthat there's one particular way
to help these communities. And the way to do that is to not
talk about, you know, the reallyhigh crime in Indigenous
communities or in Black communities or in other
communities of color or in otherpoor communities or, you know,

(46:55):
other marginalized groups. And to treat it like it's just a
social construct, that's not fair to these communities
either. Yeah, if you want to intervene
in reality and be efficient, butyou got to know the causal
mechanisms, right? And you only know the causal
mechanisms if you have the proper science to do so, right?
And it's not something easy to do.

(47:16):
It's very complex and a lot of things to uncover.
And especially when you're talking about human behavior in
society is one of the most complex things you can find.
But then if you're your main objective as an activist is to
change society, I mean, if it's not through science, you're
going to be doing a lot of pretty bad stuff in the world

(47:38):
and then putting everything at risk, especially if you're very
radical too. So I think that's one of the
things these individuals, they have a hard time to understand
too. Even the basic scientific
framework framework is not there.
And so that's why I think it's so hard to have a conversation,
a proper conversation and dialogue with them or I don't
know, it's, it's very frustrating, I would say.

(48:01):
And do you, do you have an idea what can be done to reverse this
whole situation? Do you have any idea or have you
talked to other professors and researchers about these topics?
Any ideas have come up? Yeah, I've been having a lot of
these conversations. Actually.
I've been thinking about this a lot and I know other people have
too. So I've heard a number of

(48:22):
different proposals. So one that I've heard is
enforced viewpoint diversity. I'm a little nervous about that
because I think they're easily ways that that can be abused.
There are different ways to define that and to implement
that. One variation of that I've heard
is essentially that we should have preferential hiring for
conservatives because they're sounderrepresented in
universities. I in general, I'm just against

(48:45):
preferential hiring. You know, I think to be
consistent, it makes sense to beagainst it regardless of whom
we're talking about. I see the appeal.
I know that's becoming increasingly popular and I think
if we're going to do it, I thinkit makes sense to put a sunset
provision on it. So say like we're going to do
this for five years or 10 years,or we have like a particular
quota we're going to hit. And once we get there, we can re

(49:05):
evaluate every 10 years or so, make sure things are on track.
But I think one of the problems with when we get into these like
cycles that we're going to do preferential hiring is we kind
of forget the original context of why we did this and we just
kind of keep doing it. And so once the original problem
is solved, we kind of just move the goal posts and you know,
continue. So I think if people did that, I
think having some sort of sort of limitations on it in general

(49:28):
would be good. But I also just, I don't like
the idea of preferential hiring.My preference is, I think
especially over the last couple of years, I would say the last
five years, the last 10 years, we've really put our thumbs on
the scale. And I think we just need to take
our thumb off the scale. I think we've imposed certain
structures to make academia go in certain directions.

(49:49):
And I think we just need to undothose structures.
I think we need to go back to a world that recognizes that there
is such a thing as meritocracy. It might be flawed, it might
lead to problems, but I think there are, you know, legitimate
ways to do that. We've done some experiments to
get away from that. So like, for example, we stopped
using Sats, like standardized testing to get into colleges.

(50:10):
And pretty quickly we realize that this is one of those
activist suggestions that actually ends up harming the
groups that we're trying to helpand protect.
And so likewise, I think a lot of the stuff that we're doing
now, it's not actually been helping the groups that we're
trained to protect, even in academia.
So I think we need to basically undo some of these things that
we've done in the last five to 10 years.

(50:30):
And I think that's going to makea huge difference.
One question I think is kind of getting on the same page of if
we're going to turn back the clock, when would we say is a
successful time? And it might be that we say, you
know what, looking through therewas no successful time.
Like we, we've always had these problems, in which case maybe
the question isn't, let's turn back the clock, but kind of
think about what are some piecesthat we liked that we used to do

(50:53):
that we can kind of try to lean into in the future.
And so, you know, I think that'sanother possibility.
But I think at the end of the day, like we just need to
encourage people to do good work.
Be really clear about what it means to do good work, get
better about training people to do that good work.
I think that's going to make a really big difference.
And I'll, I'll give one example of that for theory and how kind

(51:13):
of theory has declined, especially in sociology.
So it used to be that we would have in sociology departments,
you would hire somebody who is adedicated social theory
professor. So they had specialized in
social theory. They had taken a lot of classes,
they had, you know, studied the classics, they had studied the,
the newer theoretical works and they specialized in theory.
And then they would teach the required social theory class.

(51:35):
Over the last 10 or so years, I think partly because of budget
cutbacks and maybe for other reasons as well, a lot of
sociology departments stopped hiring people who specialized in
social theory. And it just became, oh, this is
a class that somebody will teach.
We've all taken social theory, therefore we're all qualified to
teach this class. And so we'll do it.
But then you get people teachingsocial theory who actually are

(51:57):
not qualified to teach social theory.
And then the students are getting this training this like
it's one of our two mandatory classes in most social
departments. And so they don't know what
theory is. A lot of times the especially
because this coincides with the decolonizing syllabi movement
where some people define that aswe're going to add women to the
syllabus or we're going to add people of color to the syllabus.
And you know, like we're literally using the word

(52:18):
decolonizing and like we're not talking about indigenous people.
So, you know, that's another issue.
But like just these like we're going to add critical theory and
we're going to get away from theEuropean approach and, you know,
we're doing this instead. And so people are seeing kind of
this imploded notion of theory and then kind of they're
learning that is theory. And then I, I think it's no, you
know, coincidence that over the last couple of years, theory has

(52:41):
really been abused and people are writing stuff that they're
claiming is theory and it's really not theory.
So I think just kind of going back to let's have norms, let's
have standards, let's be really clear about them.
You know, it's kind of funny, wehad this big discussion about
the hidden curriculum in grad school a while ago.
So all the stuff that we don't teach students.
And so there was a push to kind of teach students the stuff that

(53:03):
maybe if you have a good advisor, they tell you about
this stuff, But you know, there's, there's some stuff that
it's not even part of the hiddencurriculum.
It's just what we should be teaching people.
We should be teaching how to write, We should be teaching how
to read. We should be teaching what
counts as theory and how we evaluate theory and how you how
you make theory and those rules.And so the truly inclusive thing
to do is to explain that stuff. But instead, our version of

(53:26):
inclusivity has been let's get rid of the norms, Let's get rid
of the standards because that's not inclusive, which, you know,
again, it's just so insulting. Like it's because it's implying
that the people we're trying to be inclusive of can't do good
work. And so we have to lower our
standards. Like I can't think of anything
more insulting than that. So I think just kind of
explaining to people, bring people along and say, like, OK,

(53:47):
you're coming from a different tradition or you came from a,
you know, a different educational background.
So we're going to give you some extra training to kind of
explain this or, you know, you came from this tradition, but
like, you know, you had a, a teacher who just never taught
you this stuff. Here's here's what it means to
do this stuff. So I think just laying that out,
being really clear, and we absolutely should have debates

(54:07):
and we should discuss like, OK, so maybe theory is going to
evolve. Maybe we need something other
than theory. Maybe we can have something
called normative theory. And, you know, but we would have
very clear rules about how you do that and how you do it well.
And so it's not just like, Oh yeah, this agrees with my
politics. So I'm going to go ahead and let

(54:27):
them say whatever they want and said we should be holding
everyone to higher standards, even if we agree with what
they're saying and, you know, and also if we disagree with
what they're saying. So I think for me, that's
probably the most important thing.
But there's some other kind of discussions in the US
especially, there's a lot of topdown reforms coming through.
There's a lot of debate about whether or not that's acceptable

(54:49):
or not, whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing.
I think these are things we can discuss more.
I'm seeing a lot of knee jerk reactions where people aren't
kind of stepping back and, and kind of talking about, OK, like
which parts of these things might be, you know, good or bad
or like, are they going to the impact we think they are?
Are the justifications aligned with the mechanisms?
Like we can be social scientistsabout this and, you know,

(55:12):
instead we're being pretty political.
And then for me, one of the questions I have is if this is
the direction academia is going,do I stay in academia or do I go
to a think tank? Do I go do consulting?
Do I do something else if I'm advising potential students,
Like what do I advise to them? If I see my professional
associations basically encouraging behavior that I

(55:33):
think is unethical and not rigorous, do I leave the
organization or do I try to reform the organization from
within? I've actually been trying to do
that for a couple of different groups that I'm part of and it's
not going well. So I'm, I'm not sure I'm going
to give it like another year or two before I, you know, do
anything more drastic. But I'm, I'm kind of slowly

(55:54):
leaning out the door for a lot of these things.
And I think a lot of people havealready decided a lot of these
organizations have behaved unethically and ways that don't
reflect the values that they started off as saying they
reflect. And so they've, they've already
left the organization. So I know a lot of people that's
kind of their like the, the classic distinction.
Do you, you know, exit voice forloyalty?
A lot of people are exiting, a lot of people are voicing.

(56:17):
And I'm curious how many people think there's a problem, but
just aren't saying anything. That's for me like a really
important empirical question of like, just where are people
aligned right now? And like, what are they
thinking? And I think a lot of people are
too scared to speak up. So there's a lot of private
conversations. I've, I've actually got a lot of
emails from people. And so it's been really
interesting to get a sense of like, OK, like there are people

(56:39):
out there who think like me, butat the same time you're not
seeing that much publicly. And then I think the people who
have spoken up publicly, there have been some costs associated
with. So in academia today, being a
conservative is a bad thing. And a lot of the people who are
speaking up are being called conservative, which is funny
because a lot of them are not. And so like people are being

(57:00):
called Trump supporters, which of course is code for bad thing.
You're a bad person. So, so it's kind of a weird time
right now. So I think those are some of the
things we can do and some of thethings that people have been
discussing and some of the challenges facing some of those
proposals. Yeah, most of my interviews have
I've I've done in Portuguese with Brazilian researchers, but

(57:21):
I I've been very vocal about being very sceptical of
interdisciplinary projects. I don't know if you would agree
with me, but like you said in some Stanfields you you've seen
something related to decolonization coming in.
And I think a lot of it comes from this process of
interdisciplinary projects without checking the background

(57:44):
of each discipline involved, which in my case, I think the
big problem is anthropology. I think it's like our
perception, our view of human behavior would be very
different. If you check the ethnographic
records, you would have a very different perspective on on
human behavior. So I think it's a a big problem
not having this wider discussionwith disciplines because I think

(58:09):
it has to be collective effort in order to check what's what's
wrong and then try to to to do something about it, right.
But if it's just done by one particular feud within a
discipline, I think this is morelikely to fail than anything
else. So I think it's a big issue that
I see here in Brazil, but I can see this in different parts of

(58:29):
the world too. And it's a hard thing to do is
just to make people understand each other's feud or different
disciplines and understand the framework.
And I think a lot of it, for example, the scientific
framework coming from a STEM field is one that sometimes I'm
just like, I, I find it quite curious not to see the

(58:51):
scientific approach to other disciplines.
They just accept things. And I was like, man, just try to
use some of the scientific framework you have to understand
if this makes sense or not. But since it's coming from a
different discipline, you take the whatever credential the
person has as a, as a form of acceptance of the idea that is
coming, coming through, right? So I think this is a big problem

(59:14):
in Brazil. And I think it's not only here.
It's just like the effort to actually fix these things is
huge and it demands a lot of time and a lot of reading from,
you have to, to be able to read a little bit about different
disciplines to understand their framework, the history of the of
the discipline, and then try to find out where is the problem

(59:36):
coming from and what can be doneabout it.
But I'm very skeptical of this interdisciplinary projects
because of what I've seen so far.
I don't know if you if if I'm making any sense now.
Yeah, no, that's super interesting.
So I, I come from an interdisciplinary background and
I'm, I'm in theory a fan of interdisciplinary, but it's

(59:56):
interesting because it's, it kind of depends on the
implementation. So you know what you're talking
about where it's just like, OK, you get this random person from
another discipline, you don't know if they're a good scholar
or not. And because they're so
different, you don't necessarilyhave the tools to evaluate their
work. And so I can see how that would
be a really big problem. I'll also say there are some
interdisciplinary fields in the US and.

(01:00:18):
Some of them are really terribleand it's, it's kind of
interesting because it's almost like they're rejecting the
standards of their kind of mother disciplines.
And so they're kind of going into a field where it's almost
like because it's interdisciplinary, it has
different standards and different norms and it has to be
more flexible. So we're going to, you know,
it's, it's kind of like the greater internationalization
where it's like, well, to be fully inclusive, we're just

(01:00:40):
going to lower our standards across the board.
So I think that's not a great way to do it.
I, I think interdisciplinary canbe done really well.
You know, it's, as you mentioned, it's hard, like it's
super interesting to talk to folks like economists approach
questions very different from, from sociologists.
And I was actually trained by aneconomist, a political

(01:01:00):
scientist, some interdisciplinary folks, some
criminologists and some sociologists.
And so I had like really interesting conversations with
people and like each one attacksthe problem differently.
And some people bring different variables, some people bring
different assumptions, differentmethodologies.
And I was like going to talks when I was in grad school, I
would go to different departments talks and I, I

(01:01:20):
specialized as a methodologist And I, I thought of methodology
as like my, that makes me, you know, multilingual because you
can be studying this thing that I really don't care about, but I
care about research design. And so I can at least evaluate
your research design. Of course, that doesn't work if
I'm talking to people who basically reject the idea of
research design or don't have a research design or they don't

(01:01:43):
talk about their research designor their methods because they
don't think it's interesting. So that type interdisciplinarity
becomes really difficult. I have a much harder time having
a conversation with a philosopher because I just, I
don't even know how to be on thesame page with them.
We're interested in such different things and such
different rules. Whereas my husband's an
astrophysicist, I love having conversations with him and like

(01:02:03):
completely different field that we can understand each other.
And like even, you know, the, the traditional norms of how we
write, they're actually pretty similar.
So like, I can read his papers and even though I don't
understand some of the technicalmath and the physics, I can
understand enough of it because the papers are kind of written a
similar style. So I think there's some ways

(01:02:24):
that interdisciplinarity can be done really, really well where
you have like these conversations.
I also think though, there's a way in which the lack of
interdisciplinarity is actually a problem.
So in sociology, for example, a number of a small number of
scholars have started to point out that actually we should be
having more overlap with biologyand that basically biology

(01:02:45):
because it's been right coded. Basically sociology has kind of
not talked about biology or theyonly talk about it when it's
kind of supportive of left-leaning causes.
So that's been kind of an interesting revelation of like,
you know, we'll talk about biology as you know, you're Born
This Way when it comes to, you know, same sex preferences and
it's, you know, it's a biological predisposition, but

(01:03:06):
we're rejecting it in other contexts, like when it comes to
like male, female differences, we're going to reject biology.
So it's that was like a really interesting insight and I hadn't
thought of that myself, but likethere's a lot of really cool
stuff that we could look at biology and bring that into
sociology and kind of combine that.
But yeah, you want to make sure that you have a good biologist
and criminology. There is some work that people

(01:03:27):
had been doing where it was kindof claiming to be biology.
But as somebody who is also trained in quantitative work,
even I could look at that and say, whoa, like at first I
avoided it because I thought, oh, you know, this is very smart
stuff. Like I, I don't, I don't have
the training to evaluate the stuff they're doing DNA and IQ
and like, you know, I just, I'm not going to be qualified.
But I read some of the pieces and I was like, wait a minute, I

(01:03:48):
was training statistics. I can evaluate this stuff.
And I can tell you the research design is, is garbage.
There's some stuff where you canevaluate it, but you know,
assuming you're, you're at leasttalking like with the same
common language of research design and statistics and things
like that. So, yeah, so there's, there's a
way in which sometimes people are doing kind of
interdisciplinary stuff in a very dishonest way.

(01:04:08):
And I, I remember hearing about there's one scholar who would
always write their criminology articles in a biology journal
and their biology articles in a criminology journal.
And that way they're basically able to get around reviewers who
would know better because it wascriminologist reading biology
who just didn't know, you know, how to evaluate that, and
biologists reading criminology who didn't know how to evaluate

(01:04:30):
that. So there, I think there are
definitely ways that people can game the system can be
dishonest. But I think there are also some
really good advantages to interdisciplinarity where we can
identify new perspectives, new variables.
We can question our own assumptions about things,
realize blind spots that, you know, basically, I feel like
I've not, I feel like I'm, I'm pretty sure I've been in an echo

(01:04:51):
chamber for, you know, quite a long time.
And so talking to people from other fields, I'm like, Oh my
God, you're right. Like, wow, I never thought about
that. And nobody in my field was going
to point that out. But, you know, you're coming
from this different perspective.And that really makes me
question a lot of things that I wasn't able to see that before.
So I think there are some advantages to
interdisciplinarity, but I can absolutely see the ways in which

(01:05:11):
it's being abused. And certainly there's a lot of
interdisciplinary work in the USthat's not very prestigious, and
rightly so. And one last question.
Florida has eliminated sociologyas a core course at its
universities and I would like tohear your thoughts on that.
Yeah. So I think it's an interesting
development. Part of me is nervous, you know,

(01:05:33):
like there's there's the kind ofknee jerk reaction to the
government getting involved in what's going to be part of a
college degree. But at the same time, these are
public universities. So like there is a sense in
which the government has some responsibility.
So I think that's something thatI would like to see more
discussions about. Historically, we've kind of
moved into this hands off mode. But there was that recent

(01:05:54):
Manhattan Institute statement where they pointed out, you
know, like a lot of these universities started off as
based on a charter where the government gave them permission.
And like, we had certain rules. And same thing with journalism.
Like, you know, journalists wereallowed to cover the news for
for free, basically, but they had to follow certain rules,
kind of like drifted into a particular pattern where some of
those rules got eroded. That requires that we have a

(01:06:18):
bigger conversation. And maybe we need to rethink
those rules, but maybe we also need to rethink what we're
doing. So that's kind of my first
reaction to it. But my other reaction is I
understand why they're picking on sociology.
Like we're kind of one of the more notorious disciplines and
there's a lot of stuff that's been done.
I mean, especially in Florida. It's funny because initially
there was like this focus on critical race theory that got

(01:06:40):
associated with sociology, whichironically strengthened the ties
between critical race theory, which historically was something
that you saw in law schools. It wasn't something that you
would see in sociology, but oncecertain government actors
decided critical race theory is is bad and should be policed,
that ironically just made it so much more popular.
And so then people started importing it into other social

(01:07:02):
sciences and it just skyrocketedinto popularity.
And so sociology really leaned into that and kind of brought in
more critical race theory that I, I would argue I'm not even
sure it's critical race theory because I think of critical race
theory is the stuff that was from law schools and a lot of
this stuff is not talking about law.
It's just talking about it's basically critical race studies
rather than critical race theory.
But I think sociology really leaned into its activists kind

(01:07:25):
of reputation. But that said, I mean, I don't
know, a lot of the stuff that's happening in sociology is
happening across the social sciences.
It's happening across the humanities.
And as we've discussed, it's, it's starting to happen in the
STEM fields. So it's a little weird to see
sociology targeted. It might be, you know, that we
need to see these discussions more broadly.

(01:07:45):
Like if, if we take the stance that the government should
intervene, I don't think sociology should be alone in
getting this target. It's a little unfair that it's
alone, but that's, you know, conditional on the, the
government should intervene likewhich personally, I'm still
trying to decide how I feel about that.
I, I'm nervous about top down change, but I also, I also get

(01:08:06):
it like, I mean, if, if we're, if basically, if academia is
going off the rails, if we are having a really hard time
justifying the value of a college education.
And I think that's getting harder now with AI, where
there's a lot of stuff that AI is, if it isn't already doing
stuff better, very soon it will be doing stuff better.
And so I think instead of just kind of putting our heads in the
sand, I think we really need to acknowledge that this is

(01:08:28):
something we need to figure out like what our what our
contribution is to society underthis current setting.
We've had a lot of economic change even before the new Trump
administration, but now under the Trump administration, that's
also causing a lot of issues. So I think there's a lot of
rethinking we need to do. And I'm still trying to decide
how I feel about how much this should be government
intervention, how much it shouldbe from the ground up.

(01:08:50):
For me, one of the key points ishow much do other faculty kind
of weigh in and say this is a problem, Maybe we don't like the
circumstances under which we're kind of forced to deal with this
problem. I think a lot of things happened
at once. And I think even without the
Trump administration, I think there was some stuff that we
probably were going to realize we needed to discuss anyway.

(01:09:11):
But because it's associated withthe Trump administration, I
think a lot of people are refusing to discuss it because
we're kind of in this mode whereif you don't like Trump, then
anything he says, you're just going to believe the opposite.
And you know, that's, that's nota very scientific approach to
things. But because Trump is kind of, I
guess people say waging war on academia or on universities, I
think that's causing a lot of people to just knee jerk defend

(01:09:34):
universities and not acknowledgethe problems.
And so for me, one of the thingsI'm really going to be looking
for the next couple of years is,are people acknowledging the
problem? How many people is it just
basically a fringe group of people who are kind of willing
to speak up? Is there a silent majority?
You know, how big is that group?What are they willing to do?
Are we going to have these collective conversations and at
least debate these things? Like I, I could be wrong about a

(01:09:56):
lot of stuff. I'm, I'm fine with that if
people can, you know, point out what I'm wrong about, but we
need to be having these conversations.
What I'm not fine with is peoplerefusing to have these
conversations. And so I'll be seeing, you know,
like, do we have these conversations or more people
speaking up? Are we willing to have these
debates? Or is it just, you know, we're
just going to get on the front lines and oppose any changes
whatsoever just because they're top down?

(01:10:18):
And like I, I get that perspective too.
But I also think we have some serious problems we need to
address. Sure.
Yeah, it's very messy situation.And actually I want to thank you
once again for coming on the show.
I think we've covered quite a lot.
I'm linking your paper in the description of the episode.
Whoever wants to to read the full papers in there and thank
you. Thanks so much, this is fun.

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