scholarly journals Building sustainable global collaborative networks: Recommendations from music studies and the social sciences

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick E. Savage ◽  
Nori Jacoby ◽  
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis ◽  
Hideo Daikoku ◽  
Manuel Anglada-Tort ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Collaborative Networks ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The Social ◽  
Epistemological Perspectives

Global collaborative networks have been established in multiple fields to move beyond research that over-relies on “WEIRD” participants and to consider central questions from cross-cultural and epistemological perspectives. As researchers in music and the social sciences with experience building and sustaining such networks, we participated in a virtual symposium on February 7, 2021. to exchange knowledge, ideas, and recommendations, with an emphasis on developing global networks to investigate human music-making. We present 14 key take-home recommendations, particularly regarding 1) enhancing representation of researchers and research participants, 2) minimizing logistical challenges, 3) ensuring meaningful, reproducible comparisons, and 4) incentivizing sustainable collaboration and shared research practices that circumvent research hierarchies. Two overarching conclusions are that sustainable global collaborations should attempt shared research practices including diverse stake-holders, and that we should fundamentally re-evaluate the nature of research credit attribution.

Reflections on Positionalities in Social Science Fieldwork in Northern Botswana: A Call for Decolonizing Research

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette Alfina LaRocco ◽  
Jamie E. Shinn ◽  
Kentse Madise
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Doctoral Degrees ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Research Assistant ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
Research Investment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conducting Research

AbstractIn this article, two white, Western female researchers reflect on the methodological, ethical, and practical dilemmas experienced while conducting social science fieldwork in Botswana for their doctoral degrees. In addition, their shared research assistant examines her role as a social and cultural interlocutor, which was essential to the researchers’ successful navigation in their various field sites. Drawing on distinct but common experiences conducting research in northern and western regions of rural Botswana, the authors reflexively consider a series of interwoven issues tied to their positionalities: the disparity in benefits and return on research investment between the researcher and research participants; the nature of commodified or transactional relations, especially in an impoverished region highly dependent on foreign tourists; the complex nature of researcher–research assistant relationships; and the contradictory dynamics of being female researchers in a patriarchal society while also embodying privileges of whiteness and Western nationality. Building on these reflections, the authors engage with current debates in the social sciences to argue that researcher reflexivity is not an adequate end point and should result in engagement with ethical and epistemological questions regarding the decolonization of research practices more broadly.

scholarly journals The contribution of cognitive anthropolinguistics to educational linguistics

1999 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 119
Author(s):  
José Manuel Martín Morillas
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Social Psychological ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
Educational Linguistics ◽  
The Social ◽  
Pedagogical Grammar ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
And Linguistics

In this paper it is argued that, despite the welcome psycho-social emphasis in educational linguistic theories witnessed in recent decades, and with it, a rapprochement of the social sciences to the psychological sciences, the relationship between these fields has not gone far enough. The actual challenge is a move towards the unification of the social, psychological and language sciences (anthropology and sociology; cognitive science; and linguistics). A step in this interdisciplinary direction is offered by the discipline called 'cognitive anthropolinguistics', and its central concept of 'cultural cognition'. The paper discusses the implication of this concept for the field of educational linguistics, followed by a brief illustration of a cognitive-cultural application of that concept, namely the concept of 'ethnic stereotype', as part of a socio-cultural guide for a cross-cultural pedagogical grammar.

Who owns 'culture'?1

1996 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Thomas Lawson ◽  
Robert N. McCauley
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Early Childhood Development ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Childhood Development ◽  
Cross Cultural Study ◽  
Fieldwork Experience ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cross Cultural Research ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractNo one owns the concept 'culture'. Anthropology's long-standing proprietary claim on the concept rests on three sorts of contentions - none of which are convincing. Anthropology's overwhelmingly interpretive approaches to cultural materials have led to a preoccupation with the details of cultural materials at the expense of formulating explanatory theories. This has, among other things, rendered fieldwork experience sufficient for professional credentials. However, if the details are all that matter, then comparative and cross-cultural research, as well as most of the social sciences, make no sense. Contrary to this view, it is proposed here that theories reveal which details matter. Cognitive accounts of the sort we advanced in Rethinking Religion (1990) offer a firm theoretical basis for cross-cultural study of religious materials. Other types of research concerning non-human primates, early childhood development, and various social and cognitive impairments also offer insight into culture (without relying on fieldwork studies).

“Life Begins When They Steal Your Bicycle”: Cross-Cultural Practices of Personhood at the Beginnings and Ends of Life

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 8-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynn M. Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
American Policy ◽  
To Come

A friend once told me I was wasting my time writing about cross-cultural perspectives on the beginnings of life. “Your work is interesting for its curiosity value,” he said, “but fundamentally worthless. What happens in other cultures is totally irrelevant to what is happening here.” Those were discouraging words, but as I followed the American debates about the beginnings and ends of life, it seemed he was right. Anthropologists have written a great deal about birth and death rites in other societies and about non-western notions of personhood, but to date our findings have had little impact on American policy, ethics, or law. The recognized experts on contentious topics such as abortion and euthanasia tend to come from the fields of philosophy, bioethics, theology, law, and biology, but rarely from the social sciences. I was a bit surprised, therefore, to be invited to address the Thomas A. Pitts Memorial Lectureship on “Defining the Beginning and the End of Human Life.”

Interviews as a Means to Understand (and Silence) Contemporary Africa and Its Voices

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrycja Stys
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Research Design ◽  
Research Process ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
The Social ◽  
Rich Data ◽  
Context Specific

Interviewing is commonly utilized in all disciplines of the social sciences. Across Africa, interviews are undertaken in a variety of diverse contexts by researchers from within and without the continent. Although the challenges many face are context specific, they are certainly not Africa specific: from research design and preparation, to implementation in cross-cultural, extremely rural, or conflict-affected environments. In order to overcome these challenges, researchers must first recognize that interview data encompass much more than respondents’ answers to posed questions. Interview data, obtained in the process of organizing and conducting interviews, are the information collected before, during, and after the interview encounter; and analyses of the context in which they are pursued, including encountered difficulties. Together, these rich data further our understanding of contemporary Africa, as they do of other continents. It is rare, however, for published outputs to fully engage with the processes of preparing for, enacting, and interpreting the interview encounter. Such omissions limit our understanding of the research process and impede methodological transparency, thereby obscuring possible biases in data and the conclusions drawn from it.

scholarly journals Doing things with description: practices, politics, and the art of attentiveness

2020 ◽  
pp. 146879412097597
Author(s):  
Nicole Vitellone ◽  
Michael Mair ◽  
Ciara Kierans
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Research Practices ◽  
The Social

In a number of linked articles and monographs over the last decade (e.g. Love, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017), literary scholar and critic Heather Love has called for a descriptive (re)turn in the humanities, repeatedly taking up examples of descriptive methods in the social sciences as exemplifying what that (re)turn might look like and achieve. Those of us working as sociologists, anthropologists, science and technology studies scholars and researchers in allied social science fields thus find ourselves reflected back in Love’s work, encountering our own research practices in an unfamiliar light through it. In a period where our established methods and analytical priorities are subject to challenges on many fronts from within our own disciplines, it is hard not be struck by Love’s provocative invocation of the social sciences as interlocutors and see in it an invitation to contribute to the debate she has sought to initiate by revisiting our own approaches to the problem of description. Inspired by Love’s intervention, the eight papers that form this Special Issue demonstrate that by re-engaging with description we stand to learn a great deal. While the articles themselves are topically distinct and geographically varied, they are all based on empirical research and written to facilitate a reorientation to the role of description in our research practices. What exactly is going on when we describe an ancient papyrus as present or missing, a machine as intelligent, noise as music, a disease as undiagnosable, a death as good or bad, deserved or undeserved, care as appropriate or inappropriate, policies as failing or effective? As the papers show, these are important questions to ask. By asking them, we find ourselves in positions to better understand what goes into ‘indexing and making visible forms of material and social reality’ (Love, 2013: 412) as well as what is involved, more troublingly, in erasing, making invisible and dematerialising those realities or even, indeed, in uncovering those erasures and the means by which they were effected. As this special issue underlines, thinking with Love by thinking with descriptions is a rewarding exercise precisely because it opens these matters up to view. We hope others take up Love’s invitation to re-engage with description for that very reason.

Visualizing the Reality of Educational Research Participants Using an Amalgamation of Grounded and Positioning Theories

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark McCrohon ◽  
Ly Thi Tran
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Educational Research ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Stepwise Approach ◽  
Research Participants ◽  
Ideal Candidate ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ontological Reality

This article discussed the development of a framework that visualizes the ontological reality of educational research participants that is incumbent on existing grounded and positioning theories. The proposed framework constructs the ontological reality of participants from qualitative data collected in semi-structured interviews. This framework results in a visual representation of the educational participant’s reality. The article discussed how the use of versioning improves the auditability and replicability of the framework. The stepwise approach of this framework makes it an ideal candidate for automation, desirable to an emerging generation of qualitative researchers from the social sciences, including education and nursing.

Challenges for Science

2021 ◽  
pp. 170-195
Author(s):  
Harvey Whitehouse
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Transdisciplinary Research ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Transdisciplinary Collaboration

The book ends by calling for a new kind of science of the social, one that recognizes the immense challenges posed by the sheer complexity of sociocultural phenomena and the fact that our evolved psychology is not well designed to grasp, let alone address, those challenges. Nevetheless, we live in a time when the potential rewards of transdisciplinary collaboration are richer than they have ever been before. This chapter describes some of the main hurdles to achieving that potential and discusses how these might be overcome. The very enterprise of social science is inherently unnatural, given our uniquely human evolved psychology, and this may explain why the study of the social has proven harder to get off the ground, in comparison with many other life sciences. The resulting lack of consensus on basic matters of epistemology and method has contributed to the creation of theoretical and methodological divisions in the social sciences in the alternate guises of the ‘two cultures problem’ and the ‘silo effect’. The solutions proposed here advocate new forms of problem-centred transdisciplinary research based on the kinds of cross-cultural collaborative programmes described in detail throughout the book.

Building Quantitative Cross-Cultural Databases From Ethnographic Records: Promise, Problems and Principles

2021 ◽  
pp. 106939712110657
Author(s):  
Joseph Watts ◽  
Joshua Conrad Jackson ◽  
Chris Arnison ◽  
Elise M. Hamerslag ◽  
John H. Shaver ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Human Populations ◽  
Meta Data ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Database Construction ◽  
The Social ◽  
Promise Problems

Quantitative cross-cultural databases can help uncover structure and diversity across human populations. These databases have been constructed using a variety of methodologies and have been instrumental for building and testing theories in the social sciences. The processes and assumptions behind the construction of cross-cultural databases are not always openly discussed by creators or fully appreciated by their users. Here, we scrutinize the processes used to generate quantitative cross-cultural databases, from the point of ethnographic fieldwork to the processing of quantitative cross-cultural data. We outline challenges that arise at each stage of this process and discuss the strengths and limitations of how existing databases have handled these challenges. We suggest a host of best practices for cross-cultural database construction, and stress the importance of coding source meta-data and using this meta-data to identify and adjust for source biases. This paper explicitly discusses the processes, problems, and principles behind cross-cultural database construction, and ultimately seeks to promote rigorous cross-cultural comparative research.

The Problems of Religious Modernity

2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 506-528 ◽  
Author(s):  
Levent Tezcan
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Cross ◽  
Specific Culture ◽  
Said Nursi

AbstractThis paper discusses the problems of the Islamization of modernity that are mostly ignored in the social sciences on the topic of Islam. The case study deals with a transnationalized Turkish-Islamic group of the followers of the populist theologian Said Nursi in Germany. The author presents an outline of the community character and interprets also the reactions of the community in the cross-cultural field in the aftermath of September 11, with regard to this specific culture of the group. In conclusion, he draws attention to the question of how the Islamic reformists imagine the host societies in Europe and of which symbolic repertoire has been used to connect on the current integration discourse.

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