I have attached the poster I used at the poster conference as well as the video of my research presentation to this post.
Month: April 2018
Mentor Post #6 Supplemental: Clement Ho
I met with Clement Ho on February 23rd for 30 minutes to discuss the research aspects of my project. After explaining my topic and research question, he showed me how to access and utilize the different international relations databases the American University Library has access to, something I may or may not have forgotten over winter break. After this, we searched through the databases to find some surveys, speeches, and economic statistics relevant to my research. We then had a discussion on the difficulties of finding certain types of sources on certain countries that were accessible to those who do not speak the language of the countries in question.
Mentor Post #5 Supplemental: Dean Jackson
I met with Dean Jackson on February 2nd for about 45 minutes to discuss my research project. After spending 15 minutes discussing our shared admiration for the Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the Clone Wars television series, we got down to the business of talking about my project. We talked about his experience being a guest professor at the Central European University in Hungary and his thoughts on what the situation in Hungary. He pointed me towards cultural rather than institutional elements of democratic decline, explaining that the Hungarian government had recently started stationing heavily armed police on campus without any justifiable security reason as a sort of intimidation measure against the student body. When I mentioned my interest in nationalism’s role in democratic decline, he brought up his visit to the House of Terror museum in Hungary and the nationalist message that it radiates. He mentioned having a number of materials from the museum gathering dust on his desk and asked if I wanted to use them. I arranged to pick them up after he brought them into the office next week.
Mentor Post #4
I met with Professor Levan on Friday the 13th of April for half an hour to discuss my analysis draft. During our discussion, we focused on my causal model and how it is expressed in my analysis. Professor Levan indicated that within my model as drawn up in my analysis section, it was unclear how the different variables interacted. More specifically, he said that it was unclear why the variable “loss of faith in liberal democracy” was the intermediary step between economic decline and democratic decline while “nationalism” and “appeal of alternative systems of governance” were labeled as antecedent conditions. Additionally, he thought that the variable “appeal of alternative systems of governance” was unhelpful as I was essentially saying that the appeal of alternative systems of governance led to alternative systems of governance, which is not exactly a profound statement.
We also discussed more stylistic elements involved in improving my paper. One top recommendation was moving more of my conclusions and takeaways to the beginning of my paper. The purpose of this change is to get to the point in a more direct fashion. After discussing this specific point, we discussed the revision process more generally and agreed that stylistic concerns are the last thing you address in the process as you have to address content and structural problems first.
RPP #6
I suppose part of me always knew that human knowledge and the way that we as scholars understand that knowledge was the product of decisions that were all too human as opposed to some objective process. When I was still just a military history nerd back in middle school, I was highly aware of the fact that most history of conflict is written by those who emerged victorious from individual conflicts. I also understood that this principle also applied to history more generally, with powerful groups and individuals wielding outsized influence over how we tell the story of the past. Despite this understanding of the role of power and privilege in the creation of history, I had never really applied much critical thought to the nature of knowledge in the social sciences before coming to college. This is likely a result of me sharing the identity of many of the traditional foundational thinkers in the social sciences: white, male, and straight.
Prior to the readings for seminar 7, I did not even know that W.E.B. Du Bois was an academic, let alone that he can credibly claim to be the first American sociologist. I knew he was a prominent writer and civil rights activist, but little else about the man. I was shocked, but not terribly surprised, to learn of the way he was shunned and denied due credit for his work because of his race and radical challenge to the then dominant discourse on race in academia.[1] What I mean by the phrase “shocked but not surprised” is that I was shocked to have never heard this specific story before but was not surprised to learn of its existence. American history is full of stories of the members of marginalized groups having their voices silenced and their accomplishments claimed by others.
The other half of this equation of marginalization is the building up of the historical reputation of certain western scholars to the point where one doesn’t even consider questioning them or their ideas. This half was also protested by students at Soas, with one stating “We’re not trying to exclude European thinkers, we’re trying to desacralize European thinkers, stopping them from being treated as unquestionable.” As I believe that scholars should be in the habit of thinking critically about everything, I agree with this student with the importance of removing the Western greats from their pedestals. If one is truly committed to the spirit of inquiry that dominates academic research, challenging the traditional Western cannon and bringing in formally marginalized voices is absolutely essential.
[1] “The Case for Scholarly Reparations,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, January 11, 2016, http://berkeleyjournal.org/2016/01/the-case-for-scholarly-reparations/.