Studying Political Scientists An Open Workshop on Methodology

Date: 9 December 2022
Organized by RC33 - The Study of Political Science as a Discipline

This workshop will explore the methodological challenges around studying political scientists, their situations, and trajectories. We invite you to share your work on this topic and, especially, the challenges you have faced (and the solutions you have found!). The workshop will also provide a venue for those who would like to be involved in collaborative, international and comparative projects on political science as a discipline in the near future, so please bring research proposals as well!

Surveys, bibliometric analysis, and interviews have been the most frequently employed methods to conduct research on political science as a discipline. However, we lack regular international surveys on political scientists. And while bibliometric analyses are frequently based on international indices, interviews are conducted and designed within a single country framework. How can we advance comparative research on the development of political science and on political scientists? We hope to engage a broad range of questions and to launch a nurturing dialogue on these challenges.

These are some of the questions/issues that we hope to address:

Which geographic and research areas are usually left unexplored or underexplored? Which useful methods are frequently left unemployed or underemployed? How to choose and implement comparative methods? How to conceptualize, interpret and measure power relations within political science? How to account for the challenges produced by heterogeneity/inequality within countries? How to engage in collaboration given the inequality between the Global North and the Global South? How
can set-theoretic methods contribute to the study of political science as a discipline? How can ethnographic approaches enrich the study of political science as a discipline? How can feminist methods broaden this field? How to maintain reflexivity and openness while conducting research on political scientists?

If you are interested in participating please write to Mehtap Söyler, soeylerm@gmail.com and Paulo Ravecca, paulo.ravecca@cienciassociales.edu.uy. In case you would like to give a short presentation send us an abstract with the research you will be presenting and the challenges that you would like to address.

Register here!