GS2321: Borrowing Methods from Unexpected Sites

Christine Sylvester

- Professor Sylvester is a visiting chair who will be at the School of Global Studies for this academic year.
- She is a social scientist who has combined her research interests in international relations with her love for the arts.

The Social Science/ Humanities Divide
- Social science tends to separate itself from the humanities.
> This can be traced back to the Enlightenment.
> The social sciences only recently integrated quantitative methodology.

- Art was inappropriate because it was seen as the realm of the sublime, the emotional.

- Many people employ "throw-away" expressions in the social sciences such as "the art of diplomacy" or "the art of war."
> These terms do not signal a relationship between art and the social sciences.
> These terms, however, do imply that there are places where social science methodologies cannot go.

- Art is the gap between what the social sciences know and what it doesn't.

- Art/ Museums: International Relations where you least expect it
> Professor Sylvester wrote this book to address the (artificial) divide between the social sciences and the humanities.
> One of her arguments is that the site of the Twin Towers will always by the museum of international relations in the early 21st century.

- Today we will discuss how art can add humanity to your research.

Art and the Social Sciences
- Art gazing is a form of seeing, feeling, and visiting a work of art.
> It is differentiated from reading and listening.

- James Elkins, Painting in Tears

- Who and what is the art? The painting/ play/ sculpture or the audience and their reactions?

Fiction/ Literature and the Social Sciences
- Experiencing reality is often comparable to inhabiting a novel.

- A major problem in social science research is that written words cannot replicate the feelings and textures of lived experience. Literature, however, has the power and ability to do this.

- "People themselves are bits of imaginations, imagined by other people." (Zimbabwe author in exile)

- How can you let your informants speak and get away from you researching you researching them?

- Sylvester overcame this problem by borrowing from post-colonial literature by local authors.
> These works allowed her to give voice to her informants in Zimbabwe.
> Sylvester employs this method in Producing Women in Progress in Zimbabwe.

- Development studies never considers that poor, disempowered people are creating art in their minds.
> Social scientists often simply envision women in developing countries as poor, uneducated, wretched problems.

- Excellent book: Writers Writing about Conflicts and War in Africa
> The introduction is amazing.
> Art interacts with society and society with art.