Reflection 8

I’m not entirely sure whether it was this week or last week that we were discussing marginalized groups and challenges to international relations theory in Professor Jackson’s class. After an utterly relaxing fall break – which included ordering pizza three times in one night, taking my first trip as a college student to the National Zoo, spending far too much money at Pentagon City, and dining on some fine West Asian fare at the Afghan Grille in Woodley Park (highly recommended) – I’m far too relaxed to bother checking the syllabus. Regardless, I wanted to be a bit of a narcissist in this posting, and build momentum for an issue I addressed that didn’t really gain traction in class discussion.

In class, whenever it was, I argued that social scientists tend to periodically reinvent the wheel. Many critics of the international relations mainstream focus on political activity outside of state-to-state, such as the kind of gender relationships that Rachel alluded to in her last reflection. They feel that the mainstream is myopic in addressing only state-to-state interactions. In truth, the critics are the myopic ones. They fail to recognize that there are vast bodies of knowledge discussing political relations between non-state entities, like people and corporations: these vast bodies of knowledge are generally referred to as sociology, anthropology, and economics. Critics of international relations theory want to reinvent the wheel; they want to claim credit for discovering entire fields of social science. Although I don’t hold a PhD, and I don’t regularly peruse an extensive catalog of academic journals or attend scholarly conferences, I’ve had enough exposure

Academia today is highly specialized – perhaps too much so. There is little danger that any possible field of knowledge will avoid being classified, criticized, and quantified (consider PTJ’s own article in the book Harry Potter and International Relations); the easiest way for a young scholar to make their mark on the body of academic knowledge is by finding some obscure and comfortable niche to work in. The danger is that knowledge will be classified, criticized, and quantified redundantly. Social scientists are so specialized that they overlook existing discussions of a given phenomena, and create substantially similar theories. These redundant theories are worse than useless: they may present a stunted, less nuanced, less developed view of a given social phenomenon, they may fail to consider some empirical evidence and theoretical criticisms, and they almost certainly confuse academic discourse by creating an impenetrable thicket of overlapping technical terms. The fringe movements of international relations are largely redundant academic movements, but they’re hardly the only members of the club.

As a political science major and the child of a political scientist, political science is the academic discipline from which I can best draw examples. Michele probably remembers our Comparative Politics professor’s criticisms of academic work on political social movements. Professor Cowell-Meyers has pointed out, on multiple occasions, that the sociologically trained scholars writing on the movements characterize define them as characterized by contentious power relations. Some of these scholars have gained prominence and probably tenure for their definitions. But to political scientists, their definitions are obvious and simplistic; All power relationships are contentious. I’m also reminded of a political scientist who remarked that he didn’t have time to read Jared Diamond’s seminal book Guns, Germs, and Steel because he was too busy with readings in his field. The scholar wasn’t directly affected by Guns, Germs, and Steel, but in my view it still had relevance: understanding how geography formed the current political and economic order is important for anyone studying that order.

Academic myopia isn’t an easy thing to cure. The easiest solution is to call for a return of the “Renaissance Man” – the general academic who read and wrote on a wide variety of topics. But this solution would probably be worse than the problem it purports to fix. Specialization isn’t always a bad thing – it has birthed the comprehensive body of academic knowledge that exists today. If academics did not claim relatively small areas of research, the result would be more, not less, redundancy: nearly every scholar would write on the same, obvious, easily observable topics. And I have a vested interest (in the form of a University of Notre Dame faculty tuition benefit) in preserving academic jobs; without specialization, there would simply be fewer such jobs. and fewer such tuition benefits, around.