A tool for navigating your research career

In this cross-post, Christina Boswell introduces a newly developed tool to help researchers map the activities they are engaged with the aim of exposing where activity is clustered. The tool has been designed to help researchers be more strategic and selective in what they take on and supports reflection about career priorities and goals

COVID-19 has increased trust in science: can it do the same for the social sciences?

While many politicians have experienced declining levels of public trust during the pandemic, faith in science has generally held up well. However, as Christina Boswell argues, there are a number of reasons why social sciences may struggle to achieve similar levels of authority

One-way, mutually constitutive, or two autonomous spheres: what is the relationship between research and policy?

Academics are increasingly exhorted to ensure their research has policy "impact". But is this ambition predicated on an overly simplistic understanding of the policy process? Christina Boswell and Katherine Smith set out four different approaches to theorising the relationship between knowledge and policy and consider what each of these suggests about approaches to incentivising and measuring research impact

“What isn’t in the files, isn’t in the world”:Understanding state ignorance of irregular migration in Germany and the U.K.

While there is extensive literature on states and knowledge, there has been little focus on state ignorance: instances where states are identified as lacking knowledge relevant to addressing social problems. We present the first systematic analysis of how states perceive and respond to ignorance, developing a typology of responses (denial, resignation, and elucidation). We test and refine the typology through analyzing state ignorance of unauthorized migration in Germany and the UK, 1990–2006. Public authorities in both countries responded to ignorance through both denial and resignation. However, variations in control infrastructures and bureaucratic cultures meant that “resignation” took distinct forms. In the UK, pragmatism about the limitations of state capacity implied that officials were sanguine about their “ignorance,” with pressure emanating from external political scrutiny. In Germany, by contrast, officials faced an acute conflict between bureaucratic and legal norms of the rule of law, and constraints to enforcement. Both cases reveal profound state ambivalence about elucidating social problems over which they have limited control

Deportation targets in the Home Office: a long and troubled history

While the government has apologised for the treatment of Windrush citizens, Amber Rudd has resigned over her lack of knowledge about the Home Office's removals targets. Christina Boswell provides some context to recent events. She concludes that although deportation targets are a problematic tool of performance measurement, the culture that exists within the government makes it very difficult to go without it

Refugee policy and the limits of liberal universalism.

This thesis aims to construct a conceptual framework for characterising the relationship between duties to refugees and duties to fellow nationals. The need for such a framework is generated by the current impasse on the policy debate about the nature and scope of refugee rights. The thesis examines a range of liberal political theories to see if they can provide an adequate account, evaluating them on three criteria: normative desirability; practical feasibility; and internal coherence. The discussion criticises liberal theories on two levels. Firstly, it shows how liberal universalist theories raise a problem of moral motivation: they impose overly stringent ethical demands, and risk being counter-productive. Attempts to incorporate some notion of the significance of national ties or to justify a national social contract simply produce an incoherent amalgam of universalist and particularist premises. Secondly, the thesis argues that these problems reflect a more profound weakness in liberal theories of moral agency and motivation. Liberal theory relies on an assumed dichotomy between a personal and an impartial perspective. The moral agent is assumed to abstract from her personal characteristics to adopt an "ethical" view-point. This notion of impartiality is descriptively implausible, and produces a highly problematic rationalist theory of motivation. The thesis argues instead for an account that sees the agent as motivated by her personal disposition and community values to respect refugee rights. On this account there is no necessary conflict between particularism and duties to non-nationals. I develop this non-rationalist account by providing (1) a philosophical theory of motivation; substantiated by (2) a theory of the psychology of moral development. The thesis shows how this non-rationalist account is consistent with a substantive commitment to universal duties. Moreover, it fulfils the two additional criteria of internal coherence and feasibility, thus providing a superior conception of the relationship between duties to compatriots and to refugees