I have been thinking about games a lot recently. Games as in game-theoretical models and generally any sort of spelled-out analytical model; but also games as in real-world, fun-not-work games, whether tabletop or digital. And I am particularly intrigued by the potential of mixing the two together and seeing what comes up; asking if there is anything that we analysts can derive from games (other than fun!).
I have never been a fan of conferences. Perhaps it all goes back to my unreasonable high expectations about intellectual debate, which is only marginally related to professional academic advancement. But stubborn that I am, I still can’t quite accept that our meetings are fated to be so stale, so stagnant, and so other adjectives that begin with “st”. Killing conferences as we know them may be the only way to salvage intellectual debate.
Ph.D. dissertations are a funny thing: some form the basis of a life-long examination of a single topic, some serve as training or staging grounds in which a new researcher can cut her teeth, and yet some may foreshadow future work in ways that are not easy to anticipate. My job in Manchester seemed at first to take me in an entirely new direction away from that 2012 Cornell dissertation, and yet recent turns of events keep bringing me back to it with a vengeance. Between 2009 and 2011 I became a bit of an expert on Sierra Leone and Liberia – or more specifically on their politics and post-conflict reconstruction. Now that the world’s gaze is once more fixed on the Mano River region – sadly for tragic reasons – I have decided to catch up with Freetown and Monrovia in order to find out whether my claims back in 2011 retain any scrap of relevance a couple of years – and elections – later.
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Let me tell you about my boat
Who wouldn’t want to conduct field research from aboard the Belafonte…
Last week I had a chance to cath up with some friends from gradschool in the US, all of them trained as political scientists. And as I expected, none of them had ever heard the term “political settlement”, which features so prominently in development debates this side of the Atlantic (to be honest, I myself first heard the term when applying for my current position in ESID). Why is the central concept in British development politics absent from American academia? And, is there a way to bridge the gap so that we stop talking past each other?
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Development by any other name…
I came across a thought-provoking piece in The Guardian on whether “development” is a “dirty word” which “eclipses the real issues”. The author, Deborah Doane, rightfully questions whether the term conjures an outdated kind of romanticism which distracts from the real problems of power and rights underlying most “developmental” issues. And to do so she invokes the work of George Lakoff, always a good reference if one is not familiar with the power of metaphors and the cognitive and political implications of language. Still, I wonder whether ruminations about terminology are really what stands in the way of “real” development.
Via BoingBoing.