Raiders Of The Lost Archive

Episode 23 -- Roger Petersen

How many civil wars were there in Iraq after the U.S. invasion – and how did they really end?  Roger Petersen of MIT describes a life of immersion, from road construction to honchoing a network of scholar-soldiers as they unspooled the complexity of a decade of war in Iraq.  How does one get honest answers out of warlords in situations where they (and their entourage) have all the power?  Is it possible to be a neutral observer in an ongoing war?  Can ethnographicsensibility be taught -- and if not, as the profession incentivizes students to become technically-oriented in our training sequences, what is lost?  Provocative, funny, blunt, and always thoughtful, Petersen's slow-rolled delivery is calibrated to get you wondering what you might learn if you got serious about active listening.

Episode 22 - Wendy Pearlman

Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she is Crown Professor of Middle East Studies. She studies the comparative politics of the Middle East, social movements, and forced migration, and has conducted with more than 500 displaced Syrians since 2012.  In this podcast we discuss how this data was curated ("midwife-ing") to create the award-winning We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017).  

Episode 21 - Kristine Eck

Kristine Eck (Uppsala University) discusses the challenges of working with contemporary and historical police archives.  For quantitative social scientists, how does "the data generation process" introduce measurement bias into the processes that we are actually describing when we employ data generated by the state for counterinsurgency?  How do ongoing state efforts to digitize archives aid and hinder political scientists and data scientists trying to quantify human rights abuses?  What are the citation norms for private correspondence by public figures who were in command decision roles during episodes of violence?  A frank, eye-opening discussion on how scholars access and use state-generated datasets on repression, with comparative cases ranging from the Malayan Emergency to Israel and from contemporary OECD countries to Nepal. 

Episode 20 - Ana Bracic

Ana Bracic (Michigan State University) discusses positionality, entree, and a variety of ethical considerations that informed her work with a highly-vulnerable population in Central Europe.  The candid discussion of how her project on the Roma evolved from an idealized, perfect "magical dataset" ("something as ridiculous as a time-series cross-section dataset on some sort of dimension of Roma exclusion, and it didn't matter what it was, so long as it was the same one across all these observations...") to her actual project.  How was her mother an asset?  What happens if you come home from the field with data that, once analyzed, is shown to be completely unhelpful for your job market paper?  A can't miss episode for an aspiring junior scholar.

Episode 19 - Margaret Levi

The author of Rule and Revenue, In the Interests of Others, Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism, and Analytic Narratives describes some of her lesser-known her early-career work: police ride-alongs in Detroit after the social upheavals of the 1960s, interviewing Jimmy Hoffa, and day-drinking with scary police officers (before they went on duty).  A wide-ranging discussion of triangulating data to tell a compelling story, how and when to alter theories in the face of new data, and numerous inspiring examples of tenacity in the face of adversity dealing with hard-to-access archives.  With generous answers, always more cogent and coherent than the questions, this is truly a can't miss episode.

 

Episode 18 - Sarah Parkinson

Sarah Parkinson (Johns Hopkins) blunt and honest reflections on how her dissertation project evolved over more than a decade is a reminder that the field is supposed to change the scholar -- not always in ways that can be predicted in advance.  Parkinson discusses her evolutions, both in terms of methods employed and her social identification in the discipline.  There is something here that will be valuable to every young scholar, especially those considering work in areas adjacent to violence.  What does it mean to study the state from the bottom-up?  What do we, privileged observers, owe our most vulnerable subjects, really?  The second guest in the ARC (Advancing Research on Conflict) Consortium.

 

Episode 17 - Christian Davenport (Part Two: ”Hi, My Name Is Christian, Don’t Mind The Vehicle...”)

In part two of our "What Did You Do In 2022?" series, Davenport reflects on new tools for archiving as he tests new research frontiers, from BLM to Syria to Colombia.  How should we think about university liability -- and our own -- when handling very sensitive data?  How should these archival materials pass from one generation to the next?  A characteristically wide-ranging conversation on mortality, activism, and the scholarly enterprise.

Episode 16 - Jesse Driscoll (Part Two: ”True Tales from the Five-Sided Wind Tunnel”)

After taking a year off from podcasting, the first of a two-part "What Did You Do In 2022?" series.  Driscoll discusses a year of participant observation on the Joint Staff, working in the Europe/NATO/Russia division as a Ukraine Desk Officer.  A candid reflection on a disorienting year, as a micro-conflict scholar re-reads Thomas Schelling, signs NDAs, befriends both 'Russia Hawks' and 'Russia Understand-ists', and learns to write in the voice of the Pentagon. 

 

http://archiveraiders.weebly.com/

Episode 15 - David Laitin

David Laitin reflects on lessons learned from a lifetime of fieldwork -- and imagines the road ahead.  How did watching the Sardana folk dance in Cataolonia reveal the limits of Gramscian hegemony as an explanatory framework?  After one just decides, in middle life, to "learn Russian", how does one get started?  How does one arrange to take a family, with two young children in tow, to Nigeria?  True adventures on the social science frontier, as narrated by a uniquely experienced voice of authority. 

Episode 14 - Sarah Cameron

Sarah Cameron (University of Maryland) shares practical advice for conducting archival research in non-English languages, based on her her experiences living in Kazakhstan conducting research for her award-winning HUNGRY STEPPE: FAMINE, VIOLENCE, AND THE MAKING OF SOVIET KAZAKHSTAN.  Why start with children's elementary school textbooks to develop a research vocabulary?  The podcast's first bona-fide historian!