The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past couple of decades a growing number of International Relations (IR) scholars have adapted and adopted ethnographic research and writing modes, hoping that ethnography would introduce an emancipatory research agenda and refurbish the discipline's parochial vestiges. This article discusses the promising and problematic implications of this move. It argues that the `ethnographic turn' in IR ignores recent anthropological literature on the topic and employs a selective and often instrumental notion of what ethnography is and does. By reviewing some of the most prominent ethnographic contributions made by feminist and social constructivist authors, this article demonstrates that, in international relations, the complexity of ethnography has been reduced to (1) an empiricist data-collection machine, (2) a writing style, or (3) a theoretical sensibility. However, this intervention also hopes to encourage students of global politics to rewrite international relations from an ethnographical stance and take full advantage of ethnography's radical promise.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it