'Politicized research' is not research

The 'search' part of research is essential to the task. There must be a possibility of reaching an unexpected conclusion.

This post is not about getting people to eat less meat per se, but about the meta issue of what it is we’re doing when we do science. My view is that if you know before collecting data what conclusions you’ll reach and there’s no chance that the data will change your mind, you’re not doing research.

Sociology grad students in political life

As Noah Smith and Joseph Heath have recently noted, sociology grad students are increasingly part of American politics: 1) Darializa Avila Chevalier (CUNY Grad Center), presumptive congresswoman 2) Evan Cliff MacKay (Harvard), candidate for state representative and 3) Leanne Fan (CUNY Grad Center), a political organizer who helped draft Graham Platner. Most of the attention on these three has been on Chevalier, and most of it has centered on her policy positions and social media, but the fun thing about academics’ entering politics is that we also have their articles to look at. Here is the abstract of Chevalier, D. A. (2023), The securitisation of immigration through the Tactical Terrorism Response Team, published in Critical Studies on Terrorism, 16(3), 537-559.

This article considers a significant stage in the convergence of US counterterrorism policy and immigration enforcement exemplified by the emergence of a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unit known as the Tactical Terrorism Response Team (TTRT). In my analysis I show: (i) that TTRT agents engage in a process I call social homicide which subjects travellers to a condition of bare life; (ii) that the increasing production of border violence highlights that the convergence of securitisation and immigration enforcement is a praxis of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia; (iii) that securitisation and exclusionary immigration policy have made use of invisibility to create and expand a permanent state of exception; and (iv) that border enforcement through securitisation is used as a mechanism for the surveillance and control of social movements inside the United States. Given the limited public information on TTRT’s operations, this study explores the matter through a case study of Abdikadir Mohamed’s 2017 encounter with the unit, his subsequent immigration proceedings, and the FOIA lawsuit filed against CBP for more information on the TTRT.

Here’s what I think is happening in clauses (i)-(iv).

• (i) When the CBP’s TTRT interrogates and stops would-be travellers, it commits “social homicide” by stripping them of their legal and personal identities;

• (ii) Because of whom this happens to, it reinforces anti-black racism and islamophobia;

• (iii) This work happens in a very under the radar way that helps make it permanent;

• (iv) These tactics are deployed in fundamentally political ways to suppress social movements.

Now, I don’t know the specifics of TTRT, and I’m not saying that anything here is factually or conceptually mistaken. And it’s certainly written in a certain kind of scholarly register (“bare life” suggests we’re in Foucault territory here). But that doesn’t suffice for making something scholarship. In my view, scholarship requires an element of chance. There has to be some possibility that the data would come out a different way and you’d reach a very different conclusion. Can you imagine Chevalier arguing, e.g., that the case study revealed surprisingly non-racist practices? If not her, then who? Where would it be published? I am drawing a blank.

Thus my main issue with Chevalier’s paper is that it is fundamentally not research. There was no search in how it reached its conclusion. Empirics were adduced rather than discovered. But what makes research distinct is that conclusions follow data, not the other way around.

But surely meat reduction research is political too?

Most work I’m interested in is motivated by questions I consider important. (Joseph Heath again: “No one studies crime, status inequality, or domestic violence out of idle curiosity.”) My work is no exception. I think factory farming is bad and I want it to end ASAP. My colleagues and I try to figure out how to get there. Our work is empirical at its core, and that means we have only guesses in advance about where our projects will go. Sometimes we’re wrong, and our papers reflect that.

By all means, a published article in a scholarly register making a conceptual rather than empirical argument for a clear moral viewpoint is a fine thing. I linked recently to Rachels (2004) who does this for vegetarianism. But it was published by a philosopher, and philosophers publicly oppose this view all the time, e.g., Aeon J. Skoble’s “The Conscience of an Omnivore.” The research taking place here is the authors’ reading other people’s arguments, thinking them through, and stating their reasoned assessments. The search was through idea space rather than data, but there was still a search. I don’t think you can say the same thing about Chevalier’s paper.

That search is the key difference between “research motivated by moral and political convictions,” which I do, and “politicized research,” which I view as an oxymoron.

Miscellany

In lieu of footnotes, here are some remarks that don’t quite fit in the text.

1. To be fair to Chevalier, she likely sees her work as scholarship but not data-driven, positivist science. Instead, she (like many sociologists) is working in the critical theory tradition, which, as best I can tell, is a three-part process in which one 1) observes a social phenomenon; 2) puts it into a new light, and illustrates its exemplarity, with theoretical buttressing (i.e., makes nonobvious connections to other social phenomenon); and 3) thereby illuminates how some previously obscure underlying sociopolitical structure might seem natural/inevitable but is in fact contingent on (e.g.) social understandings, political practices, economic conditions, and coercion (whether overt or covert). In such cases the “lack of search” is about the narrow range of structures that one is permitted to illuminate.

2. I’m picking on sociology but it’s almost certainly not the worst offender. That, according to a recent report, would probably be feminist philosophy or anthropology. Rebecca Tuvel, who knows something about the subject, comments [emphasis added]: “One of the reasons the Hypatia affair was such a watershed moment is that it raised the question of whether feminist philosophers are primarily academic philosophers pursuing arguments wherever they lead or social-justice advocates whose scholarship is principally directed toward certain anti-oppressive conclusions.”

3. Obviously some putatively positivist scholarship is also not really research. Megan Stevenson provides this fine example (on which I comment). But typically the abstract doesn’t give it away the way an anthropology paper does. Alas you may need to read the paper.