Raiders Of The Lost Archive
TRUE TALES of Discovery in the Social Sciences! Brought to you by Christian Davenport & Jesse Driscoll.
Episodes
Dana El Kurd (University of Richmond) reflects on the personal and ethical dimensions of a research journey that is also a journey home — in her case, to Palestine. Her candid insights on foreign-assisted state-building, doing fieldwork with limited resources, and navigating data collection in authoritarian environments illuminate how differently the field can treat different researchers. She asks whether scholars trying to underst...
How does one study war up close without acquiring dangerous habits of mind? How is the professional path of a military analyst different from a ‘pure’ academic path - and what do cloistered academics who never work in the government miss? Michael Kofman (Carnegie) shares insight on his fieldwork experiences.
Our podcast’s first bona fide political psychologist! Rose McDermott (Brown) has expertise spanning subjects from pharmacology to polygyny. In this lively episode we cover everything from male club behavior in security studies to the challenges of navigating graduate school if statistics aren’t your thing. Even nuclear war is easier to handle if you can laugh at it a little.
Mark Beissinger (Princeton) recalls fieldwork in the Soviet Union, the transition to a “post-Soviet” experience, and speculates about the future of fieldwork in Russia as U.S.-Russia relations return to something resembling a new Cold War. A tireless mentor to dozens of comparativists, he reflects on his career and our shared ethical responsibility as archivists.
How many civil wars were there in Iraq after the U.S. invasion – and how did they really end? Roger Petersen of MIT describes a life of immersion, from road construction to honchoing a network of scholar-soldiers as they unspooled the complexity of a decade of war in Iraq. How does one get honest answers out of warlords in situations where they (and their entourage) have all the power? Is it possible...
Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she is Crown Professor of Middle East Studies. She studies the comparative politics of the Middle East, social movements, and forced migration, and has conducted with more than 500 displaced Syrians since 2012. In this podcast we discuss how this data was curated ("midwife-ing") to create the award-winning We Crossed A...
Kristine Eck (Uppsala University) discusses the challenges of working with contemporary and historical police archives. For quantitative social scientists, how does "the data generation process" introduce measurement bias into the processes that we are actually describing when we employ data generated by the state for counterinsurgency? How do ongoing state efforts to digitize archives aid and hinder political scientists and data...
Ana Bracic (Michigan State University) discusses positionality, entree, and a variety of ethical considerations that informed her work with a highly-vulnerable population in Central Europe. The candid discussion of how her project on the Roma evolved from an idealized, perfect "magical dataset" ("something as ridiculous as a time-series cross-section dataset on some sort of dimension of Roma exclusion, and it didn't matter what it...
The author of Rule and Revenue, In the Interests of Others, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism, and Analytic Narratives describes some of her lesser-known her early-career work: police ride-alongs in Detroit after the social upheavals of the 1960s, interviewing Jimmy Hoffa, and day-drinking with scary police officers (before they went on duty). A wide-ranging discussion of triangulating data to tell a compelling story...
Sarah Parkinson's (Johns Hopkins) blunt and honest reflections on how her dissertation project evolved over more than a decade is a reminder that the field is supposed to change the scholar -- not always in ways that can be predicted in advance. Parkinson discusses her evolutions, both in terms of methods employed and her social identification in the discipline. There is something here that will be valuable to ever...
David Laitin reflects on lessons learned from a lifetime of fieldwork -- and imagines the road ahead. How did watching the Sardana folk dance in Cataolonia reveal the limits of Gramscian hegemony as an explanatory framework? After one just decides, in middle life, to "learn Russian", how does one get started? How does one arrange to take a family, with two young children in tow, to Nigeria? True adventures on the social science...
Sarah Cameron (University of Maryland) shares practical advice for conducting archival research in non-English languages, based on her her experiences living in Kazakhstan conducting research for her award-winning HUNGRY STEPPE: FAMINE, VIOLENCE, AND THE MAKING OF SOVIET KAZAKHSTAN. Why start with children's elementary school textbooks to develop a research vocabulary? The podcast's first bona-fide historian!
David Cunningham (Wash U St. Louis), next in our "when the field is home" series, discusses the archival and interview research that yielded KLANSVILLE USA: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS-ERA KU KLUX KLAN and THERE'S SOMETHING HAPPENING HERE: THE NEW LEFT, THE KLAN AND FBI COUNTERINTELLIGENCE. How do we mentor graduate students planning work on topics that will put them in close proximity to dangerous political actors? The ...
Kanisha Bond (SUNY Binghamton) on doing participant observation on the contemporary Antifa movement, the blurring of the line between researcher and activist roles, thinking about America as a comparative case, and thinking purposefully about the need to sometimes step back from research that can be repurposed by the state as op-sec. The third in our "when the field is home" series.
Asfandyr Mir (Stanford - CISAC) shares his reflections on the challenges of presenting himself as a neutral scientist observer when researching the U.S. drone war in Pakistan. The second in a "when the field is home" series.
Tariq Thachil (UPenn) is the first in a "when the field is home" series. What are the advantages and disadvantages of being able to present as a local? Is being ambushed on social media part of what we should be preparing students for? Does it "count" as ethnographic observation if you are also looking for measurable indicators for quantitative tests as you go? How should we teach THEFT OF AN IDOL?
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