Category Archives: Bite Size Theory

Bite Size Methodology: Methods of Discovery

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“Most teaching on methods assumes that the student will start a research project with a general question, then narrow that to a focussed question, which will dictate the kind of data needed, which will in turn support an analysis designed to answer the focussed question. Nothing could be further from reality. Most research projects – from first-year undergraduate papers to midcareer multiyear, multi-investigator projects – start out as general interests in an area tied up with hazy notions about some possible data, a preference for this or that kind of method, and as often as not a preference for certain kinds of results. Most research projects advance on all of these fronts at once, the data getting better as the question gets more focused, the methods more firmly decided, and the results more precise. At some point – the dissertation-proposal hearing for graduate students, the grant-proposal stage for faculty, the office hour with the supervising faculty member for any serious undergraduate paper – an attempt is made to develop a soup-to-nuts account of the research in the traditional order. Now emerges the familiar format of puzzle leading to literature review leading to formal question, data, and methods. Even then, the soup-to-nuts menu is likely to be for a different meal than the one that ends up in the final paper.”

Andrew Abbott, 2004, Methods of Discovery: Heuristics for the Social Sciences. W.W.Norton.

Bite Size Theory: Lineages of Political Society

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“Most scholars find everyday politics excruciatingly boring. This may be the result of our habit of following politics through the news headlines where only the extraordinary, the spectacular, and the sensational find a place. Further, those who set store by the political subject engaging in the heroic politics of the street can never fail to find it if they regularly follow the headlines.”

Partha Chatterjee, 2011, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy. Columbia University Press.

Bite Size Theory: Thinking in an Emergency

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“Insofar as I am making an argument about finding and following good habits, I am also making an argument about finding and following, binding ourselves to, good constitutional procedures. Conversely, I am suggesting that our contempt for our laws, the suspension of constitutional requirements overseeing our entry into war, is in part based on our contempt for the habitual that is undeserved.

Elaine Scarry, 2011, Thinking in an Emergency, W.W. Norton.

Bite Size Theory: Democracy Past and Future

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“The differentiation of the political today, then, follows from the fact that more and more modes of representation, types of supervision, procedures of monitoring, and manners of expression of preferences are becoming available and distinguishing themselves from one another. Paradoxically, democracy thus seems to be diluted precisely because the possibilities of relating to institutions and one another are multiplying.”

Pierre Rosanvallon, 2006. Democracy Past and Future, New York, Columbia University Press.

Bite Size Theory: Wittgenstein and Justice

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“Perhaps what characterizes political life is precisely the problem of continually creating unity, a public, in a context of diversity, rival claims, unequal power, and conflicting interests. In the absence of rival claims, and conflicting interests, a topic never enters the political realm; no political decision needs to be made. But for the political collectivity, the “we”, to act, those conflicting claims and interests must be resolved in a way that continues to preserve the collectivity.”

Hannah Pitkin, 1972. Wittgenstein and Justice: On the Significance of Ludwig Wittgenstein for Social and Political Thought, University of California Press.

Bite Size Theory: Fire and Ashes

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“The challenge of writing about democratic politics is to be unsparing about its reality without abandoning faith in its ideals.”

Michael Ignatieff, 2013, Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics. Harvard University Press.

Bite Size Theory: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling

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“The study of politics is concerned with power. It normally starts from things as they are supposed to be: individuals competing for resources within a given socio-economic framework. But perhaps this is the problem: what we set out to discover is what we know already because we have a sense of how the political system works. What we need to do is to come to the question of politics from a different angle – one that enables us to cast a different light on what is happening, for it is the light we cast, the questions we ask, which ultimately determines what we see.”

Patrick Chabal, 2009, Africa: The Politics of Suffering and Smiling, London, Zed Books.

Bite Size Theory: On the Postcolony

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“By defining itself both as an accurate portrayal of Western modernity – that is, by starting from conventions that are purely local – and as universal grammar, social theory has condemned itself always to make generalizations from idioms of a provincialism that no longer requires demonstration since it proves extremely difficult to understand non-Western objects within its dominant paradigms.”

Achille Mbembe, 2001, On the Postcolony, University of California Press.

Bite Size Theory: The Representative Claim

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“Representation is about claim-making, and it is purposeful: makers of claims are trying to achieve acceptance and other effects through the conceptions of subject and object that they construct.”

Michael Saward, The Representative Claim, Oxford University Press, 2010.

Bite Size Theory: Public Goods, Private Goods

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“The possibilities of real or hypothetical agreement or consensus in the world are extremely limited. This does not, of course, imply that it might not be an extremely good idea to conduct as extensive discussions as possible, develop discursive institutions, and so on. We might have all kinds of good reasons for this apart from the excessively cheerful idea that free discussion would give us automatic access to a common good.”

Raymond Geuss, 2001, Public Goods, Private Goods, Princeton University Press.