3 thoughts on “Security in The Balkans

  1. Tristan Shogren says:

    Hi other Tristen,

    I think you have a firm grounding in what the interpretivist mindset is for your project for the coming year. Something that tripped me up in my own interpretivist research was accidentally having a neopositivist mindset for my cases. You are examining American discourses in Bosnia over a time range and I would just make sure that you are creating a discourse analysis instead of case study comparison. I initially was a little confused by this but you quickly recovered. When writing the paper and researching next year I would clearly outline this so as to avoid confusion.
    Another aspect of the project which could prove interesting is causal inference of how the discourse has informed public action, or inaction. This is achieved in the second portion of your research and I think could prove to be what adds most to the conversation. I would once again be careful though to ensure it is grounded in interpretivist instead of neopositivist framing because it can be fickle.
    Best of Luck,
    Tristan

  2. Mohammad says:

    Hey Tristen, I really valued how thoroughly you thought of your evaluative standards. You began with an interesting literature review and isolated the government sub-group in your decision to examine official American discourse towards Bosnia. You mention clearly and honestly the concerns of access and linguistic competency and share how you have adapted your research accordingly. I say “adapt” because it seemed to me that you were not just being transparent (and trustworthy) as you seriously engaged the evaluative standards, but also referred used the “research mindset” we discussed earlier in the course as it didn’t seem like you were “dodging” research question, but rather thoughtfully navigating them, which resulted in your focus on American official discourse. I also appreciated how you engaged the text. Briefly and superficially reading the two quotes you provided, I didn’t glean the same deep insights into tone and confidence as you did, which demonstrates that you have spent time reading and re-reading the texts. Locating the periods of rupture and change temporally was also an additional feature that I liked about your analysis. In terms of further advancing trustworthiness, how might you try to record your thoughts and analyses and interrogate your findings and data generation practices? In mapping for exposure, are there any specific sources or texts you might look for? Is this something you are considering prior to executing your research? Finally, are there any canonical texts you think are explicitly or implicitly referenced intertextually in the sources you’ve examined thus far? Thanks!

  3. bh3812a says:

    Hi Tristen,

    Your presentation is really well structured and extremely well-done. I specifically really enjoyed your reflexivity section. You are super right when you say “access doesn’t equal understanding” and I thought that specific wording was really effective. I also enjoyed your section on trade-offs. It’s great to recognize that while it’s not exactly what you wanted to study, your research is now going to be more intellectually honest which is a far more important goal than our personal preferences.

    The only comment I have is in regard to your discussion of context. In your discussion I got a little confused on what the actual context is and the differentiation between broad and specific context (I didn’t end up doing interpretivism so maybe it wasn’t asked on the assignment). My only suggestion, therefore, would be to clear up the context and why this, and what you’re studying is the puzzle you are so passionate about. Your literature review and presentation of the topic makes it sound really interesting; let that shine in your discussion on context!

    I’m really excited to see what this project becomes in 306 because it seems like you’ve done a lot of reflection on how to make it the best it can possible be.

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