M.L. deRaismes Combes
On my first day as a Ph.D. student, my professor walked into the classroom, sat down, and proceeded to tell us that anyone not planning to do large-N quantitative work would never get an academic job. For good measure, he added that anyone who was interested in a variety of topics – be they methodologies, subjects, or disciplines – would languish in unemployment because the academy did not reward breadth of knowledge over depth. Now, this professor was not trying to be cruel. On the contrary, he genuinely believed he was giving us sound advice to help make our time as students the most profitable it could be. Of course, it had the exact opposite effect on me: I remember feeling a heaviness in the pit of my stomach and a pervasive dread spread over me: what the hell was I doing here?
How I have, these short years later, inserted myself into a discipline that remains rather aloof – to put it nicely – to the type of scholarship I do, should, perhaps, reveal some sort of strategy designed to overcome or circumvent the doctrinal and methodological hostility I felt on my first day of class. And yet, not unlike Brent Steele’s characterization of ‘comfortable’ constructivists (in this volume), and despite persistent admonishments from colleagues and would-be advisors that I will never get a job or funding (ha, what’s that?!!), I decided early on in my pursuit of a doctorate to jettison strategy altogether. In its stead, I have (stubbornly) pushed forward on the path that initially led me to a Ph.D., engaging with the types of questions that interest me, using the only methods that have ever made sense to me.
To many, this is a dumb move for a young scholar. And for a while, I worried that they were right. Fortunately, the inadvertent repercussion of my decision has ultimately been acceptance into a rich but small fellowship of like-minded scholars who continuously push me to think, write and teach ‘outside the box’. So now, as I finish my degree, despite an air of methodological devil-may-care nonchalance, I pursue my particular brand of Constructivism1 exactly because I believe doing so, however begrudgingly, creates space within the discipline for others to follow suit. Indeed, as important as it may be for constructivists to engage with non-constructivists, I argue that the greatest tactical necessity for using our methods is in inculcating a sense of community and belonging (in many ways, providing ontological security in an otherwise flagrantly insecure field, job market, and world). This is especially imperative for students curious about, but discouraged away from, Constructivism. Getting a Ph.D. is already hard and lonely enough!
I structure this chapter around seminal moments in my education when, to paraphrase, the power of words was made manifest. The struggle since then has been how to maintain that initial connection to the creative use of language while still engaging with the broader discipline, particularly as I maneuver through the socialization practices of getting a Ph.D. at an American university. I tell this tale with three tactics in mind. First, I navigate these waters not only to highlight how I got where I am (literally and in relation to my choice of methods), but tactically to show that such journeys are possible. Second, I write tactically, merging autobiography, literary analysis, and social theory into a single narrative meant to demonstrate the philosophical richness and creative use of interpretive methods. Finally, I suggest that fostering a community of “misfit toys” is tactically essential to draw in students and junior scholars, particularly in the US, where sympathetic ears aren’t always easy to come by. The result is a guided tour through my own disciplining process and the people that intellectually and practically lit the way for me. I invite others to come along.
I came to Constructivism more as a wayward child trying to find her path back home. When I was an undergraduate, that path was a circuitous one that traveled through Francophone literature, history, and colonial/postcolonial identity studies. As a French major, my focus was always the text (loosely construed). I had no formal methods training as an undergraduate at all. ‘Discourse analysis’ wasn’t a thing that I consciously did. It was simply a given, the way breathing is. I didn’t learn until much later that there was all this baggage attached to the term. By that point, it was too late.
Let me back up a bit. The first moment I consciously recognized the power of words to do stuff was in a high school Advanced Placement English class. We were reading Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead out loud in class. My favorite part is toward the beginning of Act II when Rosencrantz exclaims, “Fire!” Guildenstern jumps up and asks, “Where?” Rosencrantz then quite calmly replies, “It’s alright – I’m demonstrating the misuse of free speech. To prove that it exists.” When I heard/read this that first time, I practically fell out of my chair laughing… until I realized that I was the only one, and everyone else in the room was staring at me like I was possessed. But honestly, I thought Stoppard was being so clever in this short exchange, and I’ve always wondered why no one else thought it was as funny as I did.
The second seminal moment took place a few years later in a college French class on postcolonial literature. My professor had us read Aimé Césaire’s tour de force, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. In it, Césaire stands on a ridge overlooking his city, a city in the death throes of France’s mission civilisatrice. He looks down upon his home and, very much the way Genesis describes our creation, wills it into a new being through words:
Nous dirions. Chanterions. Hurlerions.
Voix pleine, voix large, tu serais notre bien, notre pointe en avant;
Des mots ?
Ah oui, des mots !2
The rest of the poem, including a nod to The Lord’s Prayer, centers on the power of words to create: just like John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God.”
Both of these literary texts have profoundly shaped how I see the social and political world; in fact, how I understand knowledge acquisition at all. Stoppard shows us the power of words to cause a response; namely, Guildenstern’s panic and instinct for flight. He also illustrates that words do not necessarily derive their power from a literal thing to which they refer. Although it is an actual fire that Guildenstern is afraid of, Rosencrantz’s claim about free speech nonetheless demonstrates that the social meanings ascribed to words exist and exert influence on us. To push this further, Rosencrantz’s next line about the audience remaining unmoved (“Not a move. They should burn to death in their shoes”) also illustrates that context matters. After all, the audience does not move because they are not supposed to move in their role as ‘audience’.
Césaire’s poem more lyrically portrays the power of words to create the self, to will a new [black] identity into being (la négritude). Words for him act as a spear (“notre pointe en avant”) pushing forward, piercing complacency, puncturing the status quo, disrupting anomie/apathy. His very words not only invoke the need for a new identity, they also represent that identity, so that the act of reading or hearing the poem is in fact an act of ‘négritude’. Both illustrate that our social interactions – the words and practices we choose to use to explain ourselves, to communicate – are not merely referents to some putative reality ‘out there’ the way Saussure and other structuralists have theorized. Instead, we inhabit multiple realities that interact at any given time to produce a certain impression or image of the world, and the words we use to communicate that experience are our “pointe en avant”.
Still, as I learned in that first Ph.D. class, not everyone agrees with me, or even agrees on how and why words matter. The dividing line, I came to learn, is often captured by the dialectic ‘rational/relational’. The former is centered on a belief in deductive reasoning and logic as the only legitimate sources of scientific knowledge. A narrow reading of rationalism therefore suggests that, “the decision-making procedures that drive human choices are both invariant and also structured by unmediated and objective features of the world” (Jackson and Nexon 2013, 557). This line of thinking succumbs to a mindset that privileges belief in a law-driven singular Nature to which we must all submit. Knowledge production is therefore a question of unearthing or demystifying some of that objective Truth by deducing its name. Ontologically, then, words only matter because they correspond to real things, practices, and behaviors.
In contrast, relational scholarship is predicated on a monistic outlook positing that our reality is intersubjective: all that is humanly knowable of and in the world is determined through the course of social relations (Wittgenstein 2009; Hacking 1999, 73–92; Jackson 2011; see also Amy Skonieczny’s contribution to this volume). Moreover, because we are always within a world of signifying practices, we already inhabit a certain ‘grammar’ that privileges some discursive formations over others.3 Thus, instead of assuming pre-given unitary actors that approach the world through a Cartesian/dyadic understanding of its correspondence to Knowledge, this relational or interpretive model examines the social processes by which actors and identities come into being and are continually reproduced. Moreover, it questions the seeming stability/inevitability of these identities, proposing that such constancy is the result of particular practices that obfuscate the performative and processural nature of meaning making (Butler 1997).
Of course, I didn’t know any of this back in college. It just seemed obvious to me that art and literature – words and images – were infused with power, often political, which manifested differently depending on the circumstances. Yet, rationalism remains the standard operating procedure in the American academy, where the meaning of causation hews closely to that of the physical sciences. The objective “is the production of universal laws, theories that in Popperian terms are falsifiable” and can explain phenomena in such a way as to demonstrate the necessary and sufficient conditions for event X to happen (Howarth 2000, 126). It would certainly be hard to demonstrate that poetry is either of these things in studying global politics. To a rationalist, poems are just words on paper. Literature, and the humanities more broadly, are not political.
But can’t discourse result in certain practices (forgetting, for the moment, that discourse is, in and of itself, a practice)? Can’t the way something is talked about versus some other way have very real consequences? Relational approaches are generally written off by rationalists as descriptive or normative, not causal, and hence, not real science. But this only holds if ‘causal’ has a fairly narrow definition centered on statistical validation and reproduceability across cases. The outcome is important. ‘To cause’ something to happen, however, might easily also refer to the way a particular combination of temporally and spatially bound inputs – never to be repeated again in exactly the same way – leads to a particular incident. In this case, it is the relationship that is important.
To illustrate, I return to my undergraduate studies. As both a former French colony and a country long defined by war, Vietnam encapsulated several of my major interests. For many years, I pursued the study of Vietnam via literature, film, art, religion, history and politics. In this process, I came to see Ho Chi Minh as a rather tragic/flawed hero (as opposed to ‘evil Communist’). In 1945, Minh declared Vietnamese independence in a speech he began by directly quoting from the declarations of his two greatest influences, the United States and France, only to be denied by both. His words, in this case, were ignored, mistrusted, othered. And it was this denial that largely pushed Minh toward Lenin and Communism. I was always struck by this, given the disastrous three decades of war that followed under the presumption of staunching the spread of the ‘Red Terror’. On the surface, one might argue that his words didn’t actually matter, since they had no appreciable influence on either the US or France. But that is to miss their role in the broader discourse of colonialism/anti-colonialism after World War II. In some sense, Minh’s speech highlights the success of la mission civilisatrice: after all, he opted for these ideals over the Confucian ones traditional to Vietnam.4 Moreover, the failure of his words highlights the underlying hypocrisy of the ‘White Man’s Burden’ and helps explain the tenacity with which the Viet Minh and then the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong pursued a particular (and unified) Vietnamese identity.5
Beyond Ho Chi Minh, this approach to discourse translates into a claim that significant aspects of global interaction are historically and socially contingent, rather than inevitable consequences of human nature or other essentialist characteristics of world politics (Jackson and Nexon 1999, 2002). This contingency reveals itself in how social practices get articulated and the power of those articulations to resonate.6 As such, power is exercised rather than possessed. In other words, language serves as both the tool of meaning making and an instrument of power. Flyvbjerg elaborates,
The link between power and discourse is thus paramount: Ho Chi Minh’s declaration of independence is not only a reflection of the imposition of colonial power (highlighting the influence of Western liberal thought), it is also a moment of contestation, and hence, an attempt to re-appropriate power, and to do so in a particular way by using the oppressors’ own words against them, in this case verbatim.7 Moreover, Minh’s use of Western ideals in his speech helps define his country and its people in a particular way: a singular sovereign state with equal rights to all inhabitants (north, central, south; peasant and prince alike).8 Ironically, Vietnam did not exist geographically as it does now until the French came and dredged the Mekong Delta to make it inhabitable. Indeed, the French had to force people from the north and from present-day Cambodia to populate the area and work on the growing number of French rubber plantations. If ‘Vietnam’ has historically only consisted of the northern territory down to around Hué, why would Ho Chi Minh fight so hard for unification with the south?
Answering this question demonstrates that identity plays a central role in the interplay between language and power,9 particularly with regard to how human beings situate themselves (and get situated) within its assemblage. Our social interactions at any level of analysis are always informed by and informing who we present ourselves to be at any given moment – just ask any middle school-aged girl. I never quite understood the maxim, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” In my experience, the words always hurt the worst because they were meant to divide, and the pain of division lingered long after bones healed. Similarly, identity is largely understood as the practice of distinguishing Self from Other,10 a practice that is inherently value-laden. ‘Othering’ necessarily enacts and reifies relations of power. This sets the stage for the second act in my journey to Constructivism.
I first encountered Carl Schmitt and Lewis Coser my junior year of college in a Sociology of War class. I was immediately drawn to Schmitt’s ‘friend/enemy’ dialectic and Coser’s [retooling of Simmel’s] notions on the processes of group identity formation. Central to both, though perhaps not explicit, is the imposition of otherness via discursive practices. Here seemed to be an explanation for the mechanisms behind what makes political conflict and war possible; but perhaps more importantly to me at the time, those mechanisms also shed light on the social isolation I experienced growing up. For anybody who has ever been persistently teased by her peers, it seems obvious that words are the hard and true currency with which ‘we’ is set apart from ‘them’, even when that is not the intention.11 Croft adds, “[discourses] construct the space for ‘our’ legitimate activity, and the space for the behavior we will (and will not) tolerate from ‘them’” (2006, 1).
Related back to the discipline, International Relations in some sense, then, is really all about identity formation and the construction of difference. For the same class, we watched a Macedonian film entitled, Before the Rain (1994). In it, three intersecting plotlines portray the region’s ongoing ethnic tensions and violence. Yet, like an Escher drawing, these three stories intersect back in on themselves in an otherwise impossible time progression. The fluid use of sequential time, the backbone of traditional storytelling, is completely upended in this movie, which consequently upends all the assumptions that get made along the way about who these characters are, why they act the way they do, and what any of it means. Ethnic conflict, the result of extreme othering, has multiple purposes vis-à-vis identity here: familial, religious and village ties echo Coser’s points on in-group cohesion, just as the ostracism of certain others, including former in-members, highlights the ugly utility of defining the out-group. Schmitt’s understanding of the political as the moment of distinguishing friend from enemy is also reflected prominently in the movie, but in a way where the viewer is forced to acknowledge the ‘political’ in supposedly very un-political situations. The disjointed experience of watching this film highlights exactly the disjointed experiences portrayed within the film, and it leaves the viewer questioning the very essence and nature of national identity.
Still, the typical approach to identity in the field of IR – aside from ignoring it completely – maintains a commitment to that rationalist divide between ideas and the material world. This means that the dichotomous relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is most often portrayed as one between a reified and knowing sovereign subject and a separately conscious Other. We have pre-determined, static, and discrete identities that – depending on which school of thought one subscribes to – either help explain our interests and actions in the world or are functionally similar and thus irrelevant.12 Mainstream constructivists, for instance, in their attempt to bridge the epistemological gap between the rational and the relational, seem to piece together an awkward and ultimately unconvincing union between acknowledging the inherent contingency of the social world and preserving ‘identity’ as a variable in the standard causal frameworks of neopositivism (Wendt 1999, 2000, 179–80; cf. Campbell 1998, 217ff; Zehfuss 2001, 2002, 10, 36; Steele 2008, 26; Berenskoetter 2010, 3599; Guillaume 2011, 19ff).
Although neither Coser nor Schmitt explicitly focus on the relational and unfixed nature of identity formation in their works, they do highlight that the process of ‘othering’ is necessarily self-reflexive: Self and Other are mutually constituted. Combining this insight with the contingency of social relations and the power of words contests the idea that states are already atomized units with pre-given identities before they interact with other equally discrete units. For IR, this means that “[f]oreign policy shifts from a concern of relations between states that take place across ahistorical, frozen, and pre-given boundaries, to a concern with the establishment of the boundaries that constitute, at one and the same time, the ‘state’ and “the international system” (Campbell 1998, 61–2).
For me, it clarified what I had experienced and felt all along in my own life and in my studies: Self/Other, foreign/domestic, us/them are all subject positions and practices that construct difference and establish boundaries, both deliberately and subconsciously. Still, these differences are never absolute and must be renegotiated over and over again against alternative understandings of difference to promote any semblance of stability. As such, emphasis is placed on the linguistic repertoires through which a particular identity/set of identities is produced and validated over others. Césaire with his declaration against a persisting colonial inferiority complex: “Assez de ce scandale!” Ho Chi Minh with his declaration:
By the end of college, the relationship between identity and discourse – actual or literary – had come to define my approach to global affairs and knowledge acquisition/ontology more broadly, even if I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to articulate this. Identity wasn’t an inanimate or static thing to be had or possessed; it was a living, breathing narrative constantly in motion, often despite appearances. As such, the challenge and the thrill of learning for me was in trying to see all the moving cogs and sprockets behind the façade, to pin them down, but for a moment.
After 9/11 and the onset of the ‘War on Terror’, I moved to Paris to pursue a dual degree Master’s program in International Relations, with a focus on the Middle East. I quickly latched onto a course on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that incorporated postcolonial literature into its syllabus. Presented to me were themes I recognized as old friends: language and identity, identity and power, power and Self/Other constitution. Of course, this wasn’t made methodologically explicit at the time. Rather, it was presented as just the way one made sense of the conflict. No baggage. Not yet.
Like Vietnam beforehand, the conflict between Israel and Palestine captured my attention because of the tenacity with which both ‘sides’ crafted and clung to particular representations of themselves vis-à-vis the other, representations so completely incompatible. Foucault contends that the task of the analyst is to problematize certain conditions of the present by retracing the often-circuitous route of discursive commonplaces attached to events of the past. Although I was not yet versed in anything called ‘discourse analysis’, much less Foucault’s distinction between archeology and genealogy, tracing the construction and evolution of these entwined identity narratives helped me better understand the existing animosity and violence between the two.13
Part of this process, even if I was not consciously aware of it at the time, necessitated recognizing the moments when each ‘side’s’ narrative could have gone in a different direction. Finding these moments of possibility and paying attention to the exercise of power in the production and performance of those instances helps determine how a certain identity or ‘reality’ is produced versus some other.14 Jackson elaborates that such a process highlights the means by which actors attempt to fortify and reproduce certain stories to appear as if they held some intrinsic truth (2006, 44). Specifying these discursive practices also reveals the underlying fragility and malleability of narratives otherwise assumed to be monolithic, particularly as they travel through time.
But my time pursuing a Master’s degree was marked less by academic revelations and more by actual experience, much of which was enabled by my proximity to the Middle East. I completed an internship with an NGO in Nablus, West Bank, teaching children from three refugee camps. The Second Intifada had quieted down by the time I arrived, but Nablus was still a closed city, with all borders closely guarded by the Israeli Defense Force. Maneuvering through the multiple cultural and political landmines of being an American non-Arab-speaking Christian woman was exhilarating, despite the occasional faux pas. I went back to the West Bank the following year to live with a family I had befriended, in their village just outside the city.
Although I went specifically to do research for my Masters thesis,15 living with that family – only two of whose members spoke English – reinforced my belief that identity is an ongoing performance of boundary making. Except in this case, despite all the otherwise visible differences between us, I was taken in and thoroughly ‘adopted’. I was made Self. This extraordinary experience also reinforced my belief that [political] power came in all shapes and sizes, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes unexpected, and sometimes inadvertent. And finally, while the way we talk about things is typically the mechanism connecting identity and power, it turned out that my poor Arabic didn’t actually impede this relationship. In fact, it made me all the more cognizant that discourse is not just words, but actions and practices as well: the practices of occupation, the practice of family, the practices of daily life (cooking, eating, cleaning, sleeping, lounging, visiting, traveling, shopping), even if I still didn’t have the ‘correct’ methods vocabulary to express this.
Practices are performances of processes that do something, both in the sense of altering one’s environment through physical or discursive deeds as well as in the sense that such performances “cannot be thought or understood ‘outside of’ discourse” (Neumann 2012, 58; Adler and Pouliot 2011, 7; see also Peltonen, this volume, for a discussion of concepts in practice). I saw this, for instance, in the everyday practice of separating ourselves by gender and age, lining up, identity cards out, waiting to be questioned and sometimes detained in order to cross the Huwara checkpoint and go back home. I saw this in the manner of dress I adopted, the limits on my freedom of movement, my careful association with members of the opposite sex, and the slight blurring of all these gender-based restrictions simply because I was – and looked – foreign. My time in Palestine cemented my belief that identity is better understood as the practice of how we render ourselves intelligible as actors at any given moment in time. As noted above, this does not happen exclusively through verbal communication, but by modes of behavior as well.
Back to that first day of class and the question: what on earth am I doing here? My Paris professors had encouraged me to apply for a Ph.D., and, thinking it would be more of the same, I did. Applying to US schools from overseas, my criteria were practical: east coast and funding (this coinciding with the financial crisis). It seems strange now, but I knew very little – if anything – about the academy, the ‘publish or perish’ maxim, or the importance of a good advisor. I chose the School of International Service in Washington, D.C. because it had at least a few faculty members that worked on Palestine or the Middle East, and because the school described itself as ‘interdisciplinary’, which I took to mean less restrictive, more creative. Yet, for the duration of my first semester as a doctoral student, I struggled with whether identity could live in a world of variables and regression models. I wrote papers on the topic, created my own dataset, and did the statistics, but nothing satisfied me. I realized fairly quickly that I couldn’t betray my ontological understanding of the world or contort it to fit someone else’s ideas of what scholarship meant. But I didn’t have the academic language yet to either convey this to others or recognize who my compatriots in the discipline were.
Up to that point, I had no idea that there was such a strong distinction between the discipline as practiced in the US and the discipline as practiced elsewhere. It was a rude awakening. I had not systematically been taught any methods in France. My thesis – I came to find out amusedly – used both Large-N survey data and semi-structured interviews, but at the time I was doing the research, I merely did what I thought could answer my research question. Now, in D.C., I was living in a world of right and wrong answers, with specific processes to determine which ones were which; a contentious internal politics of who’s who and where in the field; and no real sense of the overarching topography of any of it.
I was exceptionally fortunate, however. Although he made me work for it, Patrick T. Jackson became a lifeline in my second semester. I saw themes in his “Conduct of Inquiry” class that I recognized, even if some of the authors were new to me. Searle, Foucault, Wittgenstein; yes, here was my lifejacket! In fact, reading Wittgenstein was a complete revelation. As a Francophile, I’ve always been a bit skeptical about German philosophers, but I scarfed down Philosophical Investigations with a relish I hadn’t yet experienced in the program. This. Was. It. Rules of the game matter; context matters; existing parameters, while invisible and difficult to always see, matter. Whether it appears to be a duck or a rabbit matters. (Actually, not so much whether it appears; more like because it can appear.) These conversational entries mirrored my own thoughts, the ones that kept me company on quiet nights. How do you describe red without using the word ‘red’? What is red’s essence? Can we know anything outside of the language we have to describe it?
Still, there was plenty of disciplining to do. I was thrown head first into a sea of terminology and history that reshaped all I had learned before then into a new, and admittedly overwhelming, jargonese. I often felt discouraged that there was too much to learn and so many seemingly superfluous ways of saying any of it. The isolation and stark loneliness I felt walking into the hotel lobby at my first big International Studies Association conference threatened to turn me off academia altogether. Even so, PTJ patiently shepherded me through introductions of like-minded scholars and offered counsel on ways to do so on my own. Since then, through an annual Aberystwyth summer program (Gregynog Ideas Lab), ISA Northeast, visiting exchange students, and PTJ’s extended network of friends and colleagues, I have found my own center of gravity within the field. As I continue to work to strengthen that core, it becomes easier for me to engage with others who have different “philosophical wagers” (Jackson 2011). For this reason, I am now trying to unlearn some of the jargon I needed at the start of the program so that I can find simpler ways to explain my work to those who still run regressions and count things.
However, I must reiterate that I couldn’t have gotten to this point without a robust support system. Slowly but surely over the last few years, I have located others who think as I do, and I have crafted a network of friends, allies and mentors from around the world, all of whom I treasure. Two resources in particular have been central to this process: the community of scholars that has formed around the ISA Northeast conference, and the one that has blossomed from the summer Gregynog program. Both quite profoundly changed my entire experience of the academy. All of these allies help me translate the above beliefs about how knowledge works into scholarship and commentary about how the world works. They reward my creativity and challenge me to go further. They bolster me when the ‘Imposter Syndrome’ hits, or when the whole process seems too overwhelming. They remind me that some words matter more than others. They remind me that I belong somewhere. It is this sense of belonging that I find so crucial to pursuing the more ‘radical’ forms of Constructivism. I worry that not all Ph.D. students are as lucky as I’ve been.
And so I arrive at the end, which is really not an end at all, but a beginning. I am still in my infancy within the discipline of IR – I’ve not yet left the cradle of my Ph.D. Once the training wheels come off, I know my type of scholarship will present challenges for me as I face the job market, publishing, and ultimately, tenure. Maybe I have done myself a disservice career-wise, but I wouldn’t have – or perhaps couldn’t have – done it any other way. The small (global) community I have gathered around me, the like-minded students and professors who have allowed me entrance into their own academic circles (present company of this volume included), sustain me both intellectually and personally. And while I fight the tendency to consider this community an insular space, the simple fact that there are so few of us (especially in the US) necessitates working and interacting with colleagues who might not understand my particular brand of Constructivism. I have found, however, that this presents some wonderful opportunities to challenge and be challenged by alternative methods, to walk others through my thinking process, to find common ground using common language.
And tactics? Well, mine for the duration of my candidacy have been geared to elbowing out some space to contest the notion that my methods are fluffy; that creativity and science are incompatible. I continue to do this by forging ahead, publishing, participating, even though it sometimes feels as if I am on an endangered species list, watching others with more conventional positivist research garner the accolades, fellowships and funding. I no longer despair, however, because I know I have friends and allies who do similar kinds of work, and to whom I flock at conferences, through correspondence, online. It really does make all the difference, and it is something I certainly plan to pay forward as I advance in my career.
As for methods, it is so easy to get caught up in endless polemical debates about whether words matter, which words matter, what is identity, and if everything is power, then what’s the point of anything? And some may say that poems never won wars or engaged in policy making. But it is important to realize that those people are asking different types of research questions. And after all, we are all seeking greater clarity into how and why the world works the way it does. Really, I think it would be delightful if there were general Truths out there about the political world and the way it works, so that understanding anything just becomes a question of finding the right equation and the right variables. Things would be much simpler. Alas, however, I do not see the world this way; I’ve drunk the constructivist Kool-Aid. I am the constructivist Kool-Aid.
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