POLITICAL SCIENCE
Michaelle Browers
- Arab Shi‘i Political Thought Since 1958: A Generation’s Politicization
NEH Fellowship
The work focuses on a generation of Arab Shi‘i intellectuals who studied in Najaf, Iraq, in the 1960s. They went on to found some of the most important Shi‘i political and social organizations in various Arab countries, particularly Lebanon. Their discourse of resistance took hold, first, in communist and socialist guises and, later, by revitalizing Islamic notions of protest and revolution and reconceptualizing authority and political agency. Dr. Browers argues that this trend differs from the understanding of Shi‘i Islamism that emerged in Iran since it developed in response to the political marginalization of the Shi‘i compared to other religious and ethnic groups in Arab countries and was negotiated against competing nationalist, Arab nationalist, socialist, and traditionalist discourses.
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Cross-ideological Alliances in the
Arab Region: Strategic Framing and Ideological Transformation
Awarded 3
months during summer 2006 in Egypt, Lebanon, and Yemen Source: Council
for International
Exchange of Scholars (CIES), Fulbright Scholar Award
- Reformation in Contemporary Islamic Thought
Awarded American Center of Oriental Research (ACOR) Council
of American
Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) Fellowship for Postdoctoral
Scholars; CAORC Multicountry Fellowship
Source: Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, United
States Department of State (DoS)
Dr. Browers will undertake the first
systematic examination
of the writings of a growing number of important Islamic
thinkers
who are revising orthodox approaches to traditional Islamic
texts. Her research locates these thinkers and the responses
to their work in the debate over whether we are witnessing
a "growing Islamic fundamentalism" or an "emerging
Islamic Reformation" in the Middle East.
John Dinan
The Meaning and Development of State Constitutional Education
Clauses
Awarded $15,117 for the period 5/15/06 to 12/31/06
Sponsor: Anonymous
Many recent state court decisions have interpreted state
constitutional education clauses, in particular, their adequacy,
equity, and uniformity provisions, in ways that have had
significant consequences for state education policy. This
project investigates the meaning and development of these
clauses in order to determine whether they were intended
to grant a judicially enforceable right to an equitable,
adequate, and uniform education or to serve other purposes.
Dr. Dinan will analyze the speeches surrounding their adoption
and revision in the 114 extant state convention debates to
determine the extent to which delegates aimed to create judicially
enforceable rights that would be used to overturn legislative
judgments or hortatory and aspirational ideals, leaving the
details of the funding and operation of state school systems
to the legislature.
Katy Harriger
CIRCLE Study on College Students and Civic Engagement
Awarded $1,200 for the period 9/7/06 to 12/31/06
Source: Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning
and Engagement (CIRCLE)
The Center for Information and Research
on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE)
at the University of Maryland and the Kettering Foundation
are partnering with nine campuses across the country to
study college student civic engagement. Professor Harriger
will
work with John Dinan, Associate Professor of Political
Science, to organize and host three focus groups of randomly
selected
Wake Forest students. They will be asked questions about
their level of involvement with politics and civic life,
their attitudes about the political process, and the opportunities
they have for engagement at Wake Forest. The data gathered
will be used in a nationwide report and made available
to Wake Forest.
Sarah Lischer
Going Home to Fight? Explaining Refugee Return and Violence
Awarded $13,305 for the period 9/30/10 to 6/20/11
Source: International Peace Research Institute, Oslo This project asks under what conditions military groups, organized in exile, continue to apply violence for political purposes when they return to their country of origin. First, a framework will be developed to determine the extent to which returnees from militarized refugee contexts engage in violence after repatriation. Prevalence will be mapped, and a comparative study of all relevant post-Cold War cases conducted, particularly Afghanistan and Rwanda.
Luis Roniger
- Exile, transnational migration, and the transformation of public culture: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay
Awarded $7,360 for the period 10/1/11 to 9/30/12
Source: Bi-National Science Foundation
This project analyzes the roles, literary and scientific works, public standing, and institutional insertion of intellectuals and academics who returned to these countries after their democratization in the 1980s, addressing an important and poorly researched area in the sociology of culture of postauthoritarian periods.
- Latin America: A Continent of Exile
Awarded $8,000, Fall 2006
Source: WFU Social, Behavioral, and Economic
Science Research Fund
This project aims to study political exile in the twenty Latin
American independent polities, inquiring about its role and
transnational impact as a major mechanism of political exclusion
used by both authoritarian and democratic regimes.
David Weinstein
- Exile and Interpretation
Awarded $9,746, Spring 2007
Source: WFU Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Research
Fund
Exile and Interpretation: Reinventing European Intellectual
History, co-authored with A. Zakai of the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, will examine how migration and
the exile from
continental Europe in the 1930s transformed the Jewish
intellectuals Baron, Auerbach, Popper, and Strauss into
ardent champions
of Europe’s finest values and traditions, leading them
to reshape modern intellectual history and its practice as
part of their fight against totalitarianism. Their intellectual
legacy powerfully informed diverse scholarly disciplines—history,
historiography, literary criticism, political theory and the
history of political thought—after World War II.
No study has analyzed the works of this group as a whole
nor
contextualized
their shared cultural and political tragedy. In short,
the book will interrogate the impact of migration, exile,
refuge,
anti-Semitism, world war, and totalitarianism on political
theory, textual interpretation, the construction of intellectual
history, the ideological appropriation of canonical philosophical
texts, the politics of historiography and the formation
of academic disciplines. It will appeal to a wide audience:
intellectual historians, political theorists, and sociologists
of knowledge
who are interested in the impact of intellectual exile.
Funds will be used to complete two months of advanced intensive
German at Munich’s Goethe Institute, followed by archival
research at the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, University
of Munich; Simon Dubnow Institute, Leipzig, Germany; the
Karl Popper Archive, University of Klagenfurt, Austria; and
the
Karl Popper Archive, University of Vienna, Austria.
- Exile and Interpretation:
Popper's Reinvention of the History of European Political Thought
Awarded
$9,562 for the period 5/1/05 to 4/30/06
Source: WFU Social, Behavioral, and Economic
Science Research Fund
In 1937, Karl Popper was exiled from Vienna because he
was Jewish. This study seeks to demonstrate how exile influenced
his interpretation and reinvention of political philosophy’s
canon. It will demonstrate how antitotalitarianism motivated
his peculiar brand of antihistoricism, which, in turn, informed
his equally idiosyncratic method of textual interpretation.
More generally, the study will enhance our understanding
of how the practice, in addition to the content, of intellectual
history is invariably driven by its historical context, making
it indelibly ideological. The study will be developed as
a
chapter in a book on exile and interpretation co-authored
with A. Zakai of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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