SCOPE AND METHODS OF POLITICAL SCIENCE POLS600 - Nicole Grove Fall 2015 The question of what constitutes the political has been approached in numerous ways, from situating it within universal or transcendent domains, to social movements and revolutions, to the affective and material worlds that shape our everyday lives. This course provides an introductory overview of the discipline of political science, and considers how social scientists and theorists working within the field have attempted to open up definitions and explanations of the political to critically reflect upon how research questions and concerns are constructed and applied. The course is divided into three interrelated components. The first provides an overview of the subfields within political science (IR, Comparative, Indigenous, American, and Theory), touching on select debates and turns in political inquiry. The second component will focus on problem-oriented research agendas, trans/interdisciplinary methods, and critical approaches to thinking about and engaging how the political is produced, however the concepts discussed will be useful to students interested in other research methods as well. They include but are not limited to mediation, causation, case studies, complexity, predictability, materiality and ecology. The purpose of the course is to help students situate themselves within the discipline, and to develop an attention to some of the methodological and ethical issues that may arise when conducting research and explaining political life. The third part of the course will incorporate presentations by faculty members within the Department on their current research agendas. By the end of the semester, students will be better prepared to begin their dissertation proposals, and be conversant in fields that extend beyond their own research interests. Friday 9:30am to 12:00 pm // Saunders 624 Office Hours: Thursday 10am to 12pm, Saunders 608 Email: nsgrove@hawaii.edu
Readings There are no required books for this course. All readings are available online, or will be made available for download via MediaFire. I will email students links to the readings well in advance of the dates we are scheduled to discuss them. If for any reason you are unable to access course documents, please contact me. Assignments Reading Presentation! Each student will present on one of the assigned readings. Presentations will be scheduled the first week of class, and presentations will begin the second week. Presentations should be approximately 20 minutes long. You should be able to contextualize your reading in the themes highlighted for that week. Journal Presentation! Students will pick a journal they d like to publish in, read two articles, and prepare a 10 minute presentation (5 minutes for each article) outlining the main points of the article and why they think these particular articles were chosen for publication. Students will present their findings over a period of four weeks. The schedule for these presentations will be distributed the first week of class, and presentations will begin in Week 4. Seminar Paper!!! Seminar papers should be between 20-25 pages. The paper should be an attempt to locate a topic relevant to your own research agenda within a particular area of the field, as well as a preliminary engagement with the methods and/or approaches you find most suitable to your particular research question. The hope is that the paper will function as a first draft of your dissertation proposal. All students are required to submit a single double-spaced page paper proposal in class and meet with me before beginning writing. Papers are due one week after the end of the final class.
READING SCHEDULE Week 1 What is Politics? Themes: the political; politicization Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, pp. 19-79. Max Weber Politics as a Vocation. Week 2 - Behavioralism and Its Critics Themes: behavioralism; classical realism; neorealism Kenneth Waltz Theory of International Politics, Chs. 1-3. Hans Jorgenthau, Reflections on the State of Political Science, in The Review of Politics, Vo. 17, No. 4 (Oct. 1955), pp. 431-460. Richard K. Ashley, The Poverty of Neorealism. In Keohane, R. (ed.) Neorealism and Its Critics, pp. 225-300. Week 3 - Social Science in a Complex World Themes: complexity; transdisciplinarity / interdisciplinarity; predictive analysis Bernstein, Lebow, Stein and Weber. God Gave Physics the Easy Problems: Adapting Social Science to an Unpredictable World, in European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 43-76. John Law, Mess in Social Science Research, Chs. 1-3. Recommended: Michael Shapiro, Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn (2012). Week 4 International Relations Themes: postcolonialism; security studies; gender; visuality Barkawi and Laffey, The postcolonial moment in security studies. In Review of International Studies (2006), pp. 329-352. Cynthia Enloe, It Takes Two, in Sturdevant and Stoltzfus (eds.) Let the Good Times Roll: Prostitution and the US Military in Asia (New Press, 1992), pp. 23-24. and Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Chs. 1, 3 and Conclusion.
Recommended: David Shim, Imaging North Korea: Exploring its Visual Representations in International Politics. In International Studies Perspectives, Vol. 14, Issue 3, pp. 289-306. Ferguson and Turnbull, Oh, Say Can You See? The Semiotics of the Military in Hawaiʻi. Week 5 Comparative Politics Themes: comparative politics and the Cold War; stability and order; scholarship on race in the social sciences; area studies Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, Chs. 1 and 5 Sheldon S. Wolin, The Politics of the Study of Revolution, in Comparative Politics, Vol. 5, No. 3 (April 1973), pp. 343-358. Hanchard and Chung, From Race Relations to Comparative Racial Politics: A Survey of Cross-National Scholarship on Race in the Social Sciences, in Du Boise Review: Social Science Research on Race, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (2004), pp. 319-343.!!! Recommended: Timothy Mitchell, The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science, in D. Szanton (ed.) The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines. Week 6 - Indigenous Politics Themes: indigenous governance; Hawaiian sovereignty Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire, Chs. 1-3 Noelani Goodyear-Kaopua, Introduction, in A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land and Sovereignty (Duke, 2014). Week 7 American Politics Themes: democracy; quantitative analysis; public policy Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. In Perspectives on Politics (2014).
Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. Winner-Take-All Politics: Public Policy, Political Organization, and the Precipitous Rise of Top Incomes in the United States. In Politics and Society, Vol. 38, no 2, pp. 152-204 (2010). Week 8 Political Theory Themes: applied political theory; aesthetics; agency; assemblages Robert Gooding-Williams, Look a Negro! Ch. 11 in Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising. Jane Bennett, The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout. In Public Culture, 17(3), pp. 445-6 Lauren Wilcox, Drone warfare and the making of bodies out of place. in Critical Studies on Security, Vol. 3, Issue 1, pp. 127-131. Recommended:! William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse Week 9 - Faculty Presentations, Readings TBD Week 10 - Faculty Presentations, Readings TBD Week 11 - Faculty Presentations, Readings TBD Week 12 - Faculty Presentations, Readings TBD Week 13 - Faculty Presentations, Readings TBD Week 14 - Faculty Presentations, Readings TBD Week 15 - Faculty Presentations, Readings TBD