Academia would benefit from “the motivation to see things as they are and not as” one wishes “they were.”
What If Academia Had a ‘Scout Mindset’?
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Ajay Verghese
Ajay Verghese is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. He received his Ph.D. in 2013 from The George Washington University, and was a postdoctoral fellow from 2012-13 at the Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University. His research interests include Indian politics, ethnicity, political violence, historical legacies, religion, and methodology. His first book, The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016, and his articles have been published in Modern Asian Studies, Terrorism and Political Violence, Journal of Development Studies, Politics & Society, and Politics and Religion. He is currently writing his second book, which examines secularization in Hinduism, a project that has been funded by the Fulbright Program and the American Institute of Indian Studies.
Recent Posts
Fieldwork and Your Health
Fieldwork – “leaving one’s home institution in order to acquire data, information, or insights that significantly inform one’s research”(Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read 2015: 1) – has long been a cornerstone of social science research. It is a remarkably diverse enterprise: ‘doing fieldwork’ can mean carrying out archival research, interviews, surveys, focus groups, participant observation, ethnography, or experiments. Fieldwork is also quite valuable: it helps orient scholars toward under-addressed ontological questions, including whether many of the concepts that we routinely study actually...
Bringing Ontology Back In
Political science has long had debates over methodology - i.e., ways of knowing about the world - but has had fewer over ontology - i.e. what exists in the world. This was noted by Peter Hall in his 2003 book chapter, “Aligning Ontology and Methodology in Comparative Research,” but other authors like Colin Hay and Liam Stanley have made the same critique. Why is this a problem? Two examples, one personal and one not: When I was a graduate student, it wasn’t until I reached India for my first fieldwork trip that I realized it was possible the very thing I wanted to study — ethnic...