{"id":16,"date":"2008-07-01T16:13:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-01T21:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2008\/07\/01\/folksonomy-as-a-political-methodology-in-the-study-of-race\/"},"modified":"2008-07-01T16:13:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-01T21:13:00","slug":"folksonomy-as-a-political-methodology-in-the-study-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2008\/07\/01\/folksonomy-as-a-political-methodology-in-the-study-of-race\/","title":{"rendered":"Folksonomy as a Political Methodology in the Study of Race"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>There has been some good recent scholarship (<a href=\"journals.cambridge.org\/production\/action\/cjoGetFulltext?fulltextid=1172868\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1141455\">here<\/a>) in political science challenging the use of the hypothetico-deductive model to explain how race impacts the political process.  Traditionally, political scientists have taken race or ethnic identification to logically precede group-based interest-formation and mobilization. <\/p>\n<p>The reality of race and ethnicity is that they are multifaceted, inter-sectional and contextual constructs that cannot be captured through survey research that asks respondents to check a box next to the ethnicity with which they identify.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Attempts by statistical researchers to &#8216;control for third variables&#8217;&#8230; ignore the ontological embeddedness of locatedness of entities within actual situation contexts.&#8221;  (Emirbayer 1997, 289).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is true, but then the question remains, how do you validly and reliably study identity in the political process.  One interesting approach might be to employ <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Folksonomy\">folksonomies<\/a> to race questions in political science.  Rather than asking people to classify themselves according to the <i>controlled vocabulary<\/i> of the survey researcher, a folksonomy would allow the respondent to use as many self-identifiers they want to describe themselves.  You can use <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Social_network\">social network analysis<\/a> to group respondents based on the similarity of their self-tagging structures into clusters and then test whether cluster membership is related to a desired political outcome.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: bold\"><br \/><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There has been some good recent scholarship (here and here) in political science challenging the use of the hypothetico-deductive model to explain how race impacts the political process. Traditionally, political scientists have taken race or ethnic identification to logically precede group-based interest-formation and mobilization. The reality of race and ethnicity is that they are multifaceted, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":129,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/129"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}