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Mentor Meeting #7
This meeting took place on April 17, 2018 from 3:30 to about 4:05. It was the first since I found out I had been accepted to the Undergraduate Research Symposium, so we mainly discussed the feedback that I had received on my presentation last Friday. I explained that Professor Jackson had suggested that I be more explicit in my conceptualization of my theory as a model, rather than three separate hypotheses (since they really are not separate at all). He said that my analysis section looked much improved (since I had reorganized it to give a chronological explanation of each protest even before my variable analysis), but that I could be even more concise in both my analysis section and on my poster. He said that generally speaking I was in good shape for the symposium and to submit my paper for comments from and reading by the symposium panel this Friday.
Mentor Meeting #6
My meeting with Dr. Zhang took place on April 11, 2018 from 3:30 to about 4:10 (so about 40 minutes). We mainly discussed my poster for the poster conference in April. He explained that I had to deal with the dual problem of presenting enough information for people to understand my project and making my presentation simple enough to draw people in. He also reminded me that my audience was slightly different from that of the Research Symposium — at the poster conference, I might be presenting to people with no experience researching international relations, making prioritizing simplicity and clarity even more imperative. He also said that I could add one or two more visual aids to make my poster more pleasing to the eye and sent me an example from one of his former students.
Mentor Meeting #5
My fifth meeting with Dr. Zhang took place on April 4, 2017 from 3:30 to about 4:00 (so about 30 minutes). We continued our discussion of my analysis. He said that I needed to prioritize clarity more in my writing. His issue, as he put it, was that he, someone who knows my research and had been following me and guiding me in the research process, was confused in some places. He said that reorganizing my paper so that I gave the sequence of events before moving onto my structured, focused comparison of variables would help to this end, but also that I needed to make my wiring itself more dynamic and not worry about writing every piece of data I have collected. He also told me to start working on my poster so that I could bring it in next time for comments since I will be presenting at the SIS Poster Conference.
Mentor Meeting #4
My latest meeting with Dr. Zhang took place on March 28, 2018 from 3:30 to 4:08 (so 38 minutes). We discussed problems with my analysis section, as well as deadlines that were coming up. I sill do not know whether I will be accepted to the Undergraduate Research Symposium, and so if I am, Dr. Zhang suggested that we meet very often over the next month (possibly every week). He showed me a paper that he was working on as a demonstration of a way to organize a small-n structured, focused analysis. Essentially, he started out his analysis section with a historical background so that readers know the order of events before the variables involved were distilled into degrees of presence and absence. He said that simply diving into variable analysis and also giving contextual information on the way was a confusing and somewhat cumbersome. As something to work on moving forward, I said that I would work on writing a more dynamic analysis.
Mentor Meeting #3
Dr. Zhang and I met on March 21, 2018, from 3:30 to about 4:00 (so about 30 minutes). We mainly discussed my methods for data collection as I was finishing up and preparing to finalize my analysis. His original suggestions (from a previous meetings) were to focus on coverage of THAAD deployment from the South China Morning Post (a somewhat neutral source and it is neither from a foreign country nor from the mainland), the Global Times (as a populist perspective), and the People’s Daily (as the official line). He suggested that I keep track of my searches either to report in my paper or so that I could retrace my steps in the future and that not worry about recording every fact of the event (in fact, he said that I would almost certainly end up with an excess of data than a shortage). We also talked about my methodology, the additions that I had made to it, and Dr. Field’s comments. Dr. Zhang felt that I had incorporated the language of structured, focused comparison well, but that I could better incorporate some of his other suggested methodological readings.
RPP #6: Marginalization and Activism in Academia
I agree and somewhat buy into the argument by Ardent and other scholars that our current (and admittedly subjective, as I consider in many of my previous posts) conceptualization of scholarship is inadequate for dealing with the problems that are facing humanity with the advent of vast technological advancements.(1) In fact, even if there were not existing technologies (such as genetic engineering with CRIPR or the atomic bomb) that threaten to come into direct conflict with our moral and ethical standards, simply the possibility of future technologies that might clash with our morality is enough to make the contemporary separation of normative and empirical considerations completely obselete.(2)
However, the argument to end the separation of the sciences and normative considerations makes the assumption that those normative considerations can and should actively check scientific progress. The problem here lies in the increasing multipolarity of scientific research. While the United States has produced a huge percentage of the world’s published research papers since World War II (and if you count the West as a single bloc, it has and still does a lot of the world’s research), that is increasingly changing as developing economies (especially China) produce more and more. Perhaps it would be in all actors’ best interest to use ethics to check scientific progress (which certainly has not been happening in recent history), but if, for instance, the United States were to infuse its technological research with ethics and morality, other actors have just as much (maybe more) incentive to continue those lines of research.(3) This trend is especially pronounced — and already happening in military technologies. While many technology companies in America balk at working with the military and sharing artificial intelligence technology to be weaponized, Chinese tech firms (which are much more technologically competitive than many Westerners assume) have no such scruples.(4) Indeed they cannot because the Chinese government can leverage them to share intellectual property (which is often not even necessary since so many big firms have very close relationships with government officials).(5) In this way, without some sort of comprehensive multilateral solution, the entrance of morality into the sciences could lead to whichever actors are the most unscrupulous gaining a technological edge over the others.
(1) Hannah Ardent.
(2) Ibid, Hans Jonas.
(3) “China Will Soon Have Air Power Rivalling the West’s.” The Economist, February 15, 2018.
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.
Research Portfolio Post #5: Grappling with the Division of the Sciences
Bacon and Weber maintain that there must be a division between the sciences — what we can “know” as “facts” — and questions of morality — what we can only make opinions about. In this line of reasoning, Weber argues that “the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform.”(1) Essentially, since there are things that we can know for certain (by using science) and things that we cannot (such as irreconcilable ideological or religious struggles), we need to ensure that people — whether it is “the prophet” or the demagogue” or the techno-fascists — do not claim scientific-level legitimacy for non-scientific ends.(2) Perhaps Bacon is not as convinced that science cannot get to those ideological or religious “gods” (as Weber calls them), but he insists that a division is necessary to keep the relentless march of scientific progress from trampling and coming into conflict with religious traditions.(3)
It is true and a valid point that following Weber’s model for the fact-value divide to its logical conclusion carries worrying ramifications. For instance, how can one engage in political arguments and support one’s values and opinions using facts if the fact-value distinction is really as salient as Weber makes out? However, the distinction may seem arbitrary in its placement, but it does, in fact, serve an organizational service. Preventing social scientists from engaging in philosophical speculation and philosophers from empirical research acts as a “division of mental labor” since people wishing to do social science research probably do not want to grapple at length with the philosophies that motivate them as researchers and the philosophical implications of their research. Or perhaps some would like to make a “philosophy section” of research papers, but it would probably ultimately distract from the purpose of the paper and force the researcher into an unfamiliar field. Thus the fact-value or empirical-normative divide lends purpose and focus to the social sciences by strapping on a kind of blinders to the philosophical world. If I were to break down the barrier between facts and values for my project, I would probably spend a large period of time analyzing my ideological motivations at the beginning and then analyzing the ideological ramifications at the end. More likely though, I would completely redesign my project in a way to straddle the now nonexistent divide. Perhaps I could find some way to empirically investigate how liberalism and democracy might be implemented in China.
(1) Sem. 5 reading, p. 8.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Francis Bacon. “The New Organon.” The New Organon: 1-238; Sem. 5 reading, p. 12.
Mentor Meeting #2
My second meeting with Dr. Zhang took place on February 19, 2018 from 12:15 to about 12:45 (so about 20 min in length). Our conversation mostly addressed my anxieties about the current form of my research question, and so the internal (and also external) validity of drawing any conclusions to answer it. I explained to Dr. Zhang that I had come to a sort of crossroads — a dilemma about the trajectory of my research — and was considering moving antiforeign protest from the dependent variable of my research project to the independent variable of my project. Instead of testing for causes of protests, I would be testing for the cause of the diplomatic concessions made after (and hypothetically in response to) the nationalist protests.
I also explained that after Professor Mislan’s workshop, I was feeling slightly more confident about the state of my project and possibly saw a way forward in structured, focused comparison. His explanation of structured, focused comparison acted as a nice counterweight to the emphasis that others (especially in our readings from last semester) had given to process tracing. The “structured” and “focused” nature of this methodology is very useful to me as it entails testing for the presence (or degree of presence) of variables at different stages of the given process rather than placing as much emphasis on directly approaching or observing the causal mechanisms at play (though these two sides of case study research are not completely mutually exclusive — indeed, process tracing is probably the most powerful form of within-case analysis).
He replied that I certainly still could change my research question at this point, but shifting nationalist demonstrations from the dependent variable to the independent variable would be a complete break from my work up to this point — my literature review would probably consist of social movements research, rather than research on protest and crisis bargaining. He also expressed that my research was doable in its current form. I do not have the resources, time, or experience that Weiss had when she did her research on Chinese nationalist protest, but I can still test for external effects of government decision-making and do meaningful research — even if I cannot necessarily directly observe the decision-making process. Since then, I have decided not to change my research project and instead to dedicate myself to work on structured, focused comparison.