Necessary Travel:New Area Studies and Canada in Comparative Perspective

Recent, unpredictable incidents in diverse locations – Paris, Nice, Ankara, Sinai, California, Manchester and London – reinforce how governments and scholars must look beneath the surface for understanding of the turbulent post-9/11world. In particular, what does ‘expertise’ mean in this new era? This book answers that question? The volume is about a particular kind of expert – a type suffering from ‘bad press’ for a long time – namely, scholars who carry out area-based research. The term ‘expert’ itself even comes in for some humor about how it might be defined – someone who knows more and more, about less and less, until eventually they know everything about nothing. Behind the old joke is a grain of truth: Expert standing becomes unimpressive to us, in both intellectual and practical terms, when it is seen as parochial and lacking in vision. This volume will explore Area Studies (AS), a prominent type of expertise, along a range of dimensions. As we move towards the third decade in the new millennium, attention shifts to the somewhat unexpectedly positive future of NewArea Studies (NAS) as a resurgent intellectual movement. NAS has departed from what the editors have dubbed Traditional Area Studies (TAS) – commonplace till the millennium. Both the editors of this volume, and its contributors, are leading scholars in area-based work across continents. Together they have participated and observed as area-oriented research struggled to overcome protracted and intense criticism since the Cold War. Thus, the volume marks the resurgence of area-based research in its new guise as NAS – the crux – understanding increasing complexity around a shrinking globe. Taken together, the contents of this volume make the the case for a New Area Studies grounded in necessary travel, using new and wider methodologies involving reflective practice and production of knowledge with local people. It argues the necessity of such broad and deep approaches in order to appreciate what is going on in the world in the 21st century and to help us see off the arrival of more and increasingly nasty unpredictable shocks

Capabilities, Well-Being and Multiculturalism: A New Framework for Guiding Policy

This paper develops an Integrated Capabilities Framework for investigating human well-being in multicultural settings, shows how it can be made operational through fieldwork and argues it has practical and policy relevance for studying immigration, multiculturalism, and social cohesion in Canada.Cet article élabore un cadre intégré des compétences dans le but d’examiner le bien-être humain dans un contexte multiculturel, explique comment ce cadre peut devenir opérationnel lors du travail sur le terrain et fait valoir sa pertinence pratique et stratégique pour étudier l’immigration, le multiculturalisme et la cohésion sociale au Canada

Blurring genres: An agenda for political studies’

The first step in mapping a research agenda for political science that draws on the Humanities is to describe where we are now. We describe the dominant intellectual trend affecting all British universities over the past four decades – neoliberalism in the guises of marketisation, and managerialism. Two consequences follow - the mainstreaming of research, and the search for relevance. The case for blurring genres is an opportunity to withdraw from this instrumental rationale and reclaim the intrinsic value of the Humanities and Social Sciences; to reject air of gloom and doom surrounding the Humanities; and to counter the unrelenting pressure for marketization and relevance. Shared trends in political science and the New Area Studies identify the space for working with the Humanities. There is a shared concern with interpretive approaches, and qualitative methods that focuses on the meaning of human action, fieldwork or thick descriptions, narrative analysis, historical contingency, and plausible conjectures. We suggest an ambitious mind map built on four values shared by the Humanities and the ‘soft pure’ Social Sciences; empathy, enlarged thinking, edification, and the examined life