Area Studies and Comparative Area Studies: A Primer on Recent Debates and Methodological Challenges (original) (raw)
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Oxford Scholarship Online, 2018
Two convictions lie at the heart of this volume. First, area studies scholarship remains indispensable for the social sciences, both as a means to expand our fount of observations and as a source of theoretical ideas. Second, this scholarship risks becoming marginalized without more efforts to demonstrate its broader relevance and utility. Comparative Area Studies (CAS) is one such effort, seeking to balance attention to regional and local contextual attributes with use of the comparative method in search of portable causal links and mechanisms. CAS engages scholarly discourse in relevant area studies communities while employing concepts intelligible to social science disciplines. In practice, CAS encourages a distinctive style of small-N analysis, cross-regional contextualized comparison. As the contributions to this volume show, this approach does not subsume or replace area studies scholarship but creates new pathways to “middle range” theoretical arguments of interest to both ar...
Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft, 2007
Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel bietet eine Einführung in jüngere Debatten über Area Studies und ihren weniger bekannten "Cousin" Vergleichende Area Studies. Obwohl aus politikwissenschaftlicher Perspektive verfasst, beziehen sich viele der in dem Artikel behandelten Aspekte auch auf andere Disziplinen. Wir zeigen zunächst einige der Entwicklungen und Debatten auf, die auf die Area Studies seit Ende des Kalten Krieges eingewirkt haben. Im Anschluss weisen wir auf einige zeitgenössische Verständnisse von Area Studies hin und präsentieren unsere eigene Definition von Vergleichenden Area Studies. Die Bedeutung sowohl von Area Studies als auch Vergleichenden Area Studies wird in einem weiteren Schritt herausgearbeitet. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit gilt im Folgenden zwei methodologischen Herausforderungen, vor denen Vergleichende Area Studies stehen: der Gebrauch von Konzepten und die Auswahl geeigneter Forschungsstrategien. Eine Zusammenfassung der zentralen Punkte schließt das Papier ab.
Comparative Area Studies: Epistemological and Methodological Foundations and a Practical Application
Vestnik RUDN. International Relations, 2020
In recent decades, area studies have been transformed from mostly descriptive ethnographic and historical accounts to theory-oriented and analytical approaches. They retain some of their depth and cultural specificity, but have been widened in a comparative sense to come up with some broader social scientific explanations. This has been enhanced by more recent systematic comparative methods such as “Qualitative Comparative Analysis” (QCA) and related procedures, which are particularly suitable for medium-N studies of specific regions at the macro-level and cross-area analyses in contrast to more common statistical approaches. This paper discusses the epistemological background of this approach as well as recent methodological developments. As an illustration, it provides an example of an ongoing large international “cross-area” research project concerned with successful democratic transformations in different world regions and more recent threats to democratic stability and some of ...
The Survival and Adaptation of Area Studies
SAGE Handbook of Political Science, 2020
In the post-Cold War era, there have been significant changes in resource streams, disciplinary trends, and the wider academic environment, and these have undoubtedly produced new kinds of challenges and pressures for area specialists housed in political science. However, viewed from a global perspective, it is clear that reports of the "death" of area studies have been greatly exaggerated. Rather area studies scholarship has continued to adapt to new environments, with cross-area research also expanding in directions that supplement area-based scholarship and highlight the latter's resilience and ongoing utility.
2018
Area studies scholarship, while it has been indispensable for the development of social scientific knowledge, risks becoming marginalized in the absence of concerted efforts to demonstrate its broader relevance to social science disciplines as they now stand. This chapter introduces a volume designed to showcase comparative area studies (CAS) -- a broad approach that explicitly seeks to leverage both the in-depth local knowledge of the area studies tradition and the use of the comparative method to generate portable "middle range" theories. CAS incorporates familiar elements from past comparative research, but draws them together into a coherent strategy for balancing context-sensitive understandings of diverse locales with cross-regional qualitative research on questions that matter to social science disciplines. This approach is not intended to subsume or replace area studies scholarship but creates new pathways to "middle range" theoretical arguments of interest to both area studies and the social sciences. The remainder of the volume is divided into two parts. The first part of the volume considers - from different vantage points - the epistemological, methodological and practical issues underlying CAS and cross-regional comparative research. While acknowledging the challenges and risks involved, the authors emphasize the distinctive gains from extending one's field of vision beyond one’s primary area of expertise. The second part of the volume presents studies that demonstrate how creatively designed contextualized comparisons across two or more regions can produce novel insights into research questions ranging from protests and rebellions to anti-corruption campaigns, resource booms, and the organization of production. A final chapter recasts the significance of CAS in light of current methodological debates over the role and utility of qualitative research, suggesting that contextualized comparison across regions can partly compensate for some of the blind spots in the most common forms of qualitative and mixed-method research. As a whole, the volume demonstrates that the pursuit of area expertise and the search for social scientific knowledge need not be a zero-sum game as long as we make a conscious effort to connect scholarly debates taking place within separate area studies communities to each other and to theoretical debates unfolding in social science disciplines.
From Area to Area: The Changing Face of Area Studies
How best can we study North Korea, a state increasingly at the vanguard of the global arena, a quagmire of geopolitical activity? In complementing the wider debates on the discipline of Area Studies, this paper seeks to highlight the importance brought by analysis on North Korean Studies as a discipline. The importance of cultural and linguistic understanding is key, in order to study not only the 'darkest place on Earth', but also other 'areas' and 'regions' more widely.
The Contingencies of Area Studies in the United States
Philippine Studies Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 2003
This essay ofers a set of reflections on the "crisis" of area studies in the post-Cold War era in the United States. Setting aside for the moment the institutional aspects of this crisis, it delves instead into the contingent and accidental ways by which practitioners of area studies in the U.S. encounter that which is foreign and distant, then subsequently seek to consolidate this encounter as an integral part of an intellectual and politico-ethical trajectory of their lives.
Area Studies: Nature and Scope
Central Asia
The paper briefly describes the nature and scope of the Area Studies. It highlights the relationship between Area Studies and other traditional disciplines of social sciences, humanities and arts. The “multidisciplinary lens” is essential for Area Studies because no single academic discipline is capable of capturing and conveying a full understanding of another nation, or society or culture’s Social Mechanisms. The Social Mechanisms comprising Structure and Super-structure can be political, legal, economic, educational, religious and anthropological etc., are study objects of various disciplines/sciences. These are interrelated systems and therefore are interdisciplinary. As these Social Mechanisms involve human beings/societies which in turn are objects of Area Studies and therefore Area Studies are multidisciplinary as well interdisciplinary. Various academic theories have been developed by human beings for the welfare of human beings. Area Studies own all academic theories becaus...