So, this weekend I attended the Midwest Political Science Association's yearly meeting. This is not particularly heroic, since it's only a bus ride away (at the quite gorgeous but very creepy Palmer House Hotel on State Street) and I only went up on Friday. So it goes (I had to work this in to commemorate Kurt Vonnegut - he was one of my favorites).
First, I presented my paper at an "informal round table," which was new this year and even stupider than a poster session. In the ballroom, there were 10 round dinner tables set up. At each table, there was one or two presenters. There is no discussant. Each person presents their paper for a few few minutes, then engages in a chat with the people at their table. After 45 minutes the audience rotates, and the process goes a second time. Hardly shocking: no one attends. I mean, most panels barely have audiences and people only look at the posters on their way through the goddamn book displays. It wasn't a total loss. The guy who I shared my table with had an interesting paper on Article 5 of the US Constitution, and we each had a couple of friends stop by. So I got a few useful comments, but nothing great. I dunno. It's a line on the CV, what more can you ask for?
Then I was a discussant. I don't think this went much better. On the upside, I got to meet two faculty (the other discussant and the panel chair) who work in my field. On the downside, I give mean comments. In my experience, discussant comments come in one of two varieties:
1. Fluff: These are comments that tell you how great your paper is, and recommend a book to read; these comments often bring tangential issues that in no way relate to the argument ("I was curious about.....).
2. Good comments: These comments cut right to the quick, and raise serious problems with methodology and theory; they often involved you totally rewriting your paper to deal with them.
I give, what I perceive to be, good comments. I was talking about degrees of freedom and poor theorizing all the live long day. At least one woman clearly gave me a dirty look (in all fairness, I did say her paper was "a fact in search of a theory" - but it WAS!).
The problem is really a tension that is undercutting my subfield. So, I do American political development (APD) - which is the study of shifting governmental authority in the United States, particularly of the centralization of American state power in the national government. APD is also closely related to studies of comparative politics, notably state building in other countries. Given the dearth of good data from the 18th and 19th centuries, a good deal of APD is done through historical analysis. The problem comes when people in APD want to be *historians* and not *social scientists.*
See, social scientists have theories of causality, variables they manipulate, variables they control for, and expected outcomes. While experiments or data manipulation are usually the way we would prefer to get at these problems, we can't really do that in APD. So, we rely on good historical analysis - using comparative case studies and careful process tracing to figure out the how and why of state building. Which I'm totally on board with. Other people ..... not so much. They just want to tell a really complicated historical story that is not reducible to a tight, lean, and generalizable theory. (I heart the 2x2 square!) Then they sort of sit back smugly for having uncovered some fact that other APD scholars "overlooked" - without actually incorporating their little piece into a bigger narrative at all.
I was actually caught in "some shit" about this of my own. Earlier in the year, when I ventured to the Western in Las Vegas to present my paper, *my* discussant made a big point about trying to advance methods and theory in APD (he ripped me a new one, in a collegial way that I found useful). This weekend, when I was attending a panel, someone *brought up* that discussant's comment from Las Vegas. In so doing, they characterized the panelists at being "angry" that the discussant had pushed for better methods. I just sat there aghast - because I *wasn't* angry. I *agreed* - I want good theory/hypotheses/advanced methods. It was stunning to see just how bullshit moves.
In other news, I was also terribly offended when someone on yet another panel referred to political science as "in the end, the study of individuals." As if there aren't whole branches that study, you know, institutions. Fucking morons.
Anyway, this is all just academic whining. The conference was good - I had dinner with a friend I hadn't seen in a while, and ran into some folks from my program for good chit chat. Made a "contact" or two. Conferences.... whatever.
First, I presented my paper at an "informal round table," which was new this year and even stupider than a poster session. In the ballroom, there were 10 round dinner tables set up. At each table, there was one or two presenters. There is no discussant. Each person presents their paper for a few few minutes, then engages in a chat with the people at their table. After 45 minutes the audience rotates, and the process goes a second time. Hardly shocking: no one attends. I mean, most panels barely have audiences and people only look at the posters on their way through the goddamn book displays. It wasn't a total loss. The guy who I shared my table with had an interesting paper on Article 5 of the US Constitution, and we each had a couple of friends stop by. So I got a few useful comments, but nothing great. I dunno. It's a line on the CV, what more can you ask for?
Then I was a discussant. I don't think this went much better. On the upside, I got to meet two faculty (the other discussant and the panel chair) who work in my field. On the downside, I give mean comments. In my experience, discussant comments come in one of two varieties:
1. Fluff: These are comments that tell you how great your paper is, and recommend a book to read; these comments often bring tangential issues that in no way relate to the argument ("I was curious about.....).
2. Good comments: These comments cut right to the quick, and raise serious problems with methodology and theory; they often involved you totally rewriting your paper to deal with them.
I give, what I perceive to be, good comments. I was talking about degrees of freedom and poor theorizing all the live long day. At least one woman clearly gave me a dirty look (in all fairness, I did say her paper was "a fact in search of a theory" - but it WAS!).
The problem is really a tension that is undercutting my subfield. So, I do American political development (APD) - which is the study of shifting governmental authority in the United States, particularly of the centralization of American state power in the national government. APD is also closely related to studies of comparative politics, notably state building in other countries. Given the dearth of good data from the 18th and 19th centuries, a good deal of APD is done through historical analysis. The problem comes when people in APD want to be *historians* and not *social scientists.*
See, social scientists have theories of causality, variables they manipulate, variables they control for, and expected outcomes. While experiments or data manipulation are usually the way we would prefer to get at these problems, we can't really do that in APD. So, we rely on good historical analysis - using comparative case studies and careful process tracing to figure out the how and why of state building. Which I'm totally on board with. Other people ..... not so much. They just want to tell a really complicated historical story that is not reducible to a tight, lean, and generalizable theory. (I heart the 2x2 square!) Then they sort of sit back smugly for having uncovered some fact that other APD scholars "overlooked" - without actually incorporating their little piece into a bigger narrative at all.
I was actually caught in "some shit" about this of my own. Earlier in the year, when I ventured to the Western in Las Vegas to present my paper, *my* discussant made a big point about trying to advance methods and theory in APD (he ripped me a new one, in a collegial way that I found useful). This weekend, when I was attending a panel, someone *brought up* that discussant's comment from Las Vegas. In so doing, they characterized the panelists at being "angry" that the discussant had pushed for better methods. I just sat there aghast - because I *wasn't* angry. I *agreed* - I want good theory/hypotheses/advanced methods. It was stunning to see just how bullshit moves.
In other news, I was also terribly offended when someone on yet another panel referred to political science as "in the end, the study of individuals." As if there aren't whole branches that study, you know, institutions. Fucking morons.
Anyway, this is all just academic whining. The conference was good - I had dinner with a friend I hadn't seen in a while, and ran into some folks from my program for good chit chat. Made a "contact" or two. Conferences.... whatever.
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
toothpickmoe:
No, you sound like someone who is pretty well immersed in what they're doing. Wait, is that the definition of an obsessive freak?
spamtwo:
I don't use names I just refer to them as designers and developers, mostly it's just designers