Suchergebnisse

What do we mean in the U.S. today when we use the terms ""race"" and ""ethnicity""? What do we mean, and what do we understand, when we use the five standard race-ethnic categories: White, Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic? Most federal and state data collection agencies use these terms without explicit attention, and thereby create categories of American ethnicity for political purposes. Davora Yanow argues that ""race"" and ""ethnicity"" are socially constructed concepts, not objective, scientifically-grounded variables, and do not accurately represent the real world. She joins the

What do we mean in the U.S. today when we use the terms ""race"" and ""ethnicity""? What do we mean, and what do we understand, when we use the five standard race-ethnic categories: White, Black, Asian, Native American, and Hispanic? Most federal and state data collection agencies use these terms without explicit attention, and thereby create categories of American ethnicity for political purposes. Davora Yanow argues that ""race"" and ""ethnicity"" are socially constructed concepts, not objective, scientifically-grounded variables, and do not accurately represent the real world. She joins the

Critical deliberations concerning the Data Archiving and Research Transparency effort (DA-RT) which had been set in motion within the context of the American Political Science Association's (APSA) Qualitative and Multi-Methods Research (QMMR) Section had, by the Fall of 2015, resulted in multiple conference workshops and panels, email exchanges, webpage and listserv posts, and various Section newsletter publications. Most of these seemed to come from Comparative Government and International Relations (IR) scholars, who are the mainstays of the QMMR Section. Researchers in other subfields of political science—notably, public policy, public administration, public law, and political theory—were less often heard from among those deliberations. And so Peri Schwartz-Shea and I, both of us working in the first two of those subfields, convened a roundtable at the 2016 Western Political Science Association (WPSA) meeting, "Engaging DA-RT: Critical Assessments from Public Policy and Political Theory," to address this gap. The essays in this symposium—by Renee Cramer (Drake University), Samantha Majic (John Jay College, CUNY), Amy Cabrera Rasmussen (California State UniversityLong Beach), Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (University of Utah), and Nancy J. Hirschmann (University of Pennsylvania), ordered by appearance here—were developed from those roundtable presentations. (Amy T. Linch [Pennsylvania State University] was also a member of the roundtable, but she has not joined in this written compendium.) As panel chair, I set the stage for the discussion; and it is those comments that I present here, expanded to situate DA-RT in its contemporary context.

No observational method is "point and shoot." Even bracketing interpretive methodologies and their attendant philosophies, a researcher—including an experimentalist—always frames observation in terms of the topic of interest. I cannot ever be "just a camera lens," not as researcher and not as photographer. Framing research "shots," an observer always includes some features of the research question terrain while excluding others—of necessity, given human limitations and the partiality, always, of what we can know and the knowledge we can claim. With "shutters" open, we are never passive, always thinking, always world-making. While attention to videography and other visual research methods is welcome, researchers doing "visual politics" need to ask "political" questions: who has created the image being analyzed, for what purpose(s), what imagined viewer(s), and what unintended viewer(s), as well as consider the ethical issues that these methods entail.

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, … that form ever follows function. This is the law. —Louis H. Sullivan, 1896 Form follows failure. —Henry Petroski, 1993

The Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Conference Group of the American Political Science Association is proud to announce the creation of the "Grain of Sand" Award to honor a political scientist whose contributions to interpretive studies of the political, and, indeed, to the discipline itself, its ideas, and its persons, have been longstanding and merit special recognition.

As the discipline re-engages with its earlier history of ethnographic approaches to the study of political matters (e.g., Selznick 1949, Blau 1955, Kaufman 1960, Pressman and Wil-davsky 1973, Lipsky 1980), we need to engage two dialogues. One is a conversation with those parts of the discipline not familiar with it concerning what ethnography is—a more general conversation that draws on works outside of political science, as well. The other is a narrower, or perhaps deeper, conversation among "ourselves," to elucidate the characteristics of political ethnography and to map its terrain, especially as political ethnography can be done from both objectivist-realist and constructivist-interpretivist ontological and epistemological positions (Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2006). Parallel conversations are taking place in some subfields, such as public policy concerning what policy ethnography is, and in other disciplines, such as organizational studies concerning the character and practice of organizational ethnography. Here, I want to engage two of the issues that, for me, lie at the center of what we need to be exploring in political and policy ethnography today: its distinctive characteristics; and its underlying logic of inquiry. Getting to those points requires some definitional brush-clearing with respect to what this "ethnography" thing is, and in the process I collapse these two conversations (as well as whatever distinctions might exist between political and policy ethnography: I will largely subsume the second under the first).