Thursday, September 16, 2010

Some Musings on the Craft - Weber-Style...

The last couple of weeks of my ‘Scope and Epistemologies’ seminar have centered around the history, development, and (especially) the controversies surrounding the nature of political science as a discipline and practice. A large portion of the discussions, and one of the readings in particular, reflected on what the "social scientist" is and what their role in society (if they even have one) should or should not be. The book in question, Charles Gattone’s The Social Scientist As Public Intellectual, provoked a series of musings and rants on what life post-grad school should and should not look like, with some on the public intellectual side (as an active commitment to political intervention) and others on the more hygienized social scientist side (as producing good science for the scientific community). Like most of these debates, this week ended without a resolution (not that I assume there could ever be one), but it struck me that what we do (whatever we take the “we” to mean) comes with a heavy burden of one kind of another. Whether it’s the burden of scientific responsibility (within our community and the broader world) or of civic participation within our local communities (particularly, as one colleague mentioned, since we are members, employees, and potential children of a public state institution)...

It seems useful to address in this entry Gattone’s concluding assertion: social scientists have inherited a tradition that once believed in giving its savants “the responsibility of political leadership” in order to overcome the narrow rationale of local perspectives and “systematize the process of policy formation” (p. 125) on grand and even global scales. The goal – most clearly espoused by the Enlightenment spirit that produced personalities as diverse as Locke and Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, and even Marx, Einstein, and Freud – was to quell the masses’ potentially destructive power and to help build a social ferment that prolonged, rather than shortened, democratic participation and (underlying this) the optimum distribution of natural, cultural, and especially educational resources.

I personally struggle with such an inheritance, not because I question and think about my own approach to the issues and controversies of methodology (I would hope we all do, or at least have been), but rather because as a guiding star of political science’s identity and multiplicity, it seems so lofty a banner to wave. In today’s world of inextricable economic and personal interdependence, the unifying inheritance of the great social scientists (Weber, Mannheim, Mills, Bourdieu, etc.) seems to be less about preserving democratic civicness and more about retaining our ability to speak on its matters. Max Weber, who at the professional level inaugurates this trend, was certainly not the first to observe and investigate “the increasing rationalization of Western civilization and the strengthening of…state-centered capitalism” (p. 22), but he was a pioneer in emphasizing the insight that “the consequences of political actions often stray significantly from the original intentions of the actors involved” (p. 25), their paradox being the result of a human being’s (including Weber himself) inherent unpredictability and not the outcome of an insufficiently broad data-set or erroneously empathic interpretation (i.e., the paradox is not the result of using a quantitative or qualitative approach).

Like most any other human activity, Weber saw in the emergence of the social scientist an ideal path towards thought and action that we could only imperfectly (though at least stubbornly) aspire to. Though I disagree with his formulation of a separate ethic for those involved in politics and those involved in science – I am highly skeptical that such a division is sustainable, let alone even exists anymore – there is still much to learn from his analyses of how “the machine-like organization of politics [restricts] the autonomy of the individual and [interferes] with the potential for insightful decision making” (31), an insight that our sliver of the social world continues to proudly retain...

I find it curious (but appropriate) that Gattone's book asks us to remind ourselves how both the techniques and objectives of our research and investigations “are not based solely on utilitarian considerations” (p. 146), and that the ability of social scientists - and I would argue for all who have chosen the lonely academic path - to turn to the diversity of their disciplines to better understand ourselves is perhaps our greatest source of creativity, not just frustration. It is a sad fact of social reality that in the process of making our own path through the jungle of ideas, we will along the way step on the toes of both friend and so-called “foe” alike, particularly as we pursue funding, air-time, and even job security. Such a situation is not unique to academia, and can be found in industry, service, politics, and even the arts; the sadder realization, however, is that we (thinkers of social reality, particularly political scientists) are expected to know this and asked to continue to struggle against it…


This last state of ambiguity - to be aware of our community-changing abilities, while simultaneously be caught in the broader mechanistic process of a consumerist society - reminds me of one final anecdote from the week. Addressing the work of Weber, a peer pointed out that his most renowned work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (a book we will be reading in a few weeks), was in fact a representative example of the dangers of social scientists sticking their ideas into political environments. The question left on my mind was not whether Weber was evil, or worse, stupid; rather, I wonder what I would have done in his position...

Fair comparison? Revisionist counter-factual?? Maybe, maybe not, but isn't that the business that we are in: testing our hypotheses and insights against the grain of history??

Monday, September 6, 2010

A Research-Paradigm Gone Mad, or, How I Found My Way to Graduate School in Political Science...


In my first incarnation, I was a philosophy major: committed to the pursuit of wisdom; arrogant about what I knew was “good” in society; in love with the interpretation of the mundane things in life that make us human. Immersed in both the conceptual and the social aspects of the major (I was first secretary, later president of the Philosophy Honors Society), I took an adolescent love of politics and history towards a second major in International Relations. Between these two worlds, I found a space to link the continuity of ideas in Western ways of thinking with the historical events and processes that gave rise to the history of philosophy. Juggling five courses per semester, work, and organizational duties (funny how once you become president of an academic organization, no one else really wants to take the job from you), I somehow managed to remain involved in the political and existential questions that I had made my interest and in the process begin a journey that would take me down many roads.

On one side, intellectually, I defined my studies through a melding of phenomenology and existential philosophy (perhaps two of the most popular and far-reaching of European systems of thought) with the migratory experiences of my life after leaving Honduras. On the other side, personally and privately, I struggled to explain to those around me how my choices were a reflection of my desire to learn and to create knowledge in communal ways, while not confessing my insecurities about myself and the work I engaged in. I basked (or at least told myself this) in the homelessness of my strange blend of identities: a migrant, a repentant communist, and a Dionysian. I began to question whether or not I belonged in the place I called my physical home, whether or not there was something more waiting for me. Exhausted and overworked, I lived my senior year with a sense of despair: not necessarily about life after school, but more about life outside of school. Graduate work seemed a default position for me, yet one that came with the angst of not knowing whether I was cut out for it. Philosophy had given me the eyes to see and the senses to feel, but I wondered whether I had the legs to swim. I let old ghosts go free and opened my mind and body to new horizons and greater challenges…

In my second incarnation, I took the pent-up energy from the desire to leave my home in Miami and directed it towards my M.A. work in International Relations. I had been had well-warned that graduate school was not an advanced version of undergraduate work, where we were not only expected to read and write at levels beyond what we were used to, but also demanded to think at levels we knew not we could. The latter of these commands spoke powerfully to my philosophical self, providing the “real-world” outlet my personal angst (and my family) felt I lacked. After stumbling through the “second-semester blues” of my first round in graduate education, I thrived in my intellectual output; I began to highly consider the doctoral route as both a personal and professional vocation. Going through a range of theoretical lenses, I questioned the socialization and authoritarianism of the academic establishment in a fashion Kant would perhaps have been proud of. I strived to look at the underside of the ideas and “facts” I had been told were true of history; I wanted to teach and be taught, no longer by my professors, but by the people I felt were the strongest participants in the world of global politics: everyday people who constructed the inter-national as a meeting of places and ideas.

A key turning point in my path rose through the opportunity to teach, both in a college and public school setting. Having successfully defended my Master’s thesis proposal, in addition to the positive feedback from my section of Intro to International Relations, I came across the opportunity to become a Philosophy Instructor at a charter middle school. Not only did I fall in love with the experience of translating my developing ideas to a young audience in need of a critical, yet empathetic interlocutor, I felt compelled to make my work clear and its implications relevant to the daily phenomena of culture, politics, and how the human condition is caught in their midst. Having to teach two types of audiences (teenage and adult), while simultaneously write a thesis on the theoretical violence of Euro-American philosophies, I was professionally invigorated. I began to embrace the professional lifestyle of conferences, workshops, and manuscript revisions, living life as a way station to a new professional identity. Ironically enough, my own identity found itself at a crossroads towards the end of that year. My time in Miami was finally running out…

In my third re-birth, the discipline of Geography became my home. Through circumstances far too numerous to outline here – a strange blend of the personal and professional choices that emerged upon finishing my M.A. – an opportunity to work as a research assistant in an NSF-funded project brought me to Florida State University. The task: studying the local and global impacts of the recent (though hardly new) escalating “scramble” for the Arctic, particularly as it related to climate change. The benefits: take a hands-on approach to the theoretical issues I had worked with for three years and be a member of a cutting-edge research team looking at issues of both political and existential importance. I had no clue where a geopolitical understanding of the Arctic would begin from, nor did I have any experience studying and working with the history of the region and how its changing geo-physicality affected its political representation. Both at the time and today, however, going to Tallahassee was an opportunity for which I am greatly indebted, and which has shaped much of what both my outlook and approach to research and scholarly life look like.

As my first experience away from home and family, I became highly mindful of my choices and the path before me. In fact, the experience made terms such as home, family, and career take on much more profound meanings than I was used to. Not only did my year at FSU allow me to learn how geography parallels many of the questions and themes rooted in philosophy and the study of global politics, but I also learned how geographical perspectives can strengthen, broaden, and localize the political problems that so much of social science is concerned with. A quick glance on the work I have taken on over the last year reveals these lessons – from thinking the space of modernity as a historical enterprise catalyzed by the geopolitical encounter with the Americas, to the ecological challenges that spaces such as the Arctic bring to the theoretical canon of International Relations – but more importantly, they uncovered my desire to transcend the bounded spaces of disciplinary territories and embrace an organic, yet critical, mapping of how it is that I have come to know. No amount of words can quite yet say how my sojourn in the world of geography has affected my intellectual prospectus and desires; however, such a silence remains a strange, joyful burden that, much like Sisyphus’ boulder, continues to urge me to fulfill its monumental expectations…

I find myself now in a new program, but not necessarily in new territory. Entering my twenty-third consecutive year in school, although the work has not become any easier, my sense of direction has sharpened significantly. I am not sure how the word “home” and its implications will affect the way I will conduct my research and professional development at the University of Florida, but I have already found in the Political Science department a home to embrace and (I hope) be embraced in. From my first day here, though there was little surprise in this, I found myself “caught in the middle” (see Image I below) of a broad range of philosophies, experiences, and personal values that I had been seeking out for some time. Politics is hardly a realm where one can easily link notions of philosophical pluralism, let alone friendship. I should admit at some point, however, that the phenomenologist in me is more interested in taking on these “political” assumptions rather than the discipline’s “scientific” endeavors. In all fairness, my separation of these two elements is rooted in an intellectual exercise; that is to say, an act of philosophical analysis that helps me (us?) uncover the very real circumstances from which maddening experimentation emerges and through which a scientific identity is known.


Image I: The Space-In-Between


It is no stretch of this narrative to conclude that my own academic experience over the years has been a particularly political (if not politicized) version of the broader contours and dynamics of graduate education in the U.S. Though there is much in this enterprise that I remain dissatisfied with, there is clearly a great deal which continues to drive me deeper into it. The house of academia – much like the house of political science, smaller manifestations of what Heidegger calls the house of Being – thrives only from what its inhabitants can bring to it, particularly when facing its ghosts: histories of violence, oppression, intolerance, and worse, indifference. I hope to face these challenges, in one shape or another, through many more incarnations. In a poetic sense, I have never stopped living my previous lives: they continue to haunt my thoughts and my work. Though I strive to be able to “sing the world” into existence through my work, I will admit that as of late words have become harder for me to come by. I remain committed and in love with expressing the multiplicity of lives that as a scholar, a thinker, and a human being I am but one manifestation of. However, knowing that the ground left to cover remains shrouded in uncertainty, I trust my time here will not only help fill my map further, but also change the way in which I view its contents with every passing day.