In this session, Tamir Moustafa will discuss his current research, which draws on the historical records of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to examine the political and administrative contexts that shaped the funding priorities of the NSF Political Science Program. He shows that NSF funding was principally channeled toward quantitative research, while work employing qualitative methods received little support, and work advancing normative, critical, or interpretive approaches received virtually no support. The project makes visible the material forces that shaped knowledge production and it underlines the NSF’s instrumental role in consolidating behavioralism and marginalising non-positivist approaches. The project sheds new light on the history of the discipline and helps to contextualise some of the distinctive features of American political science.

Tamir Moustafa is Professor of International Studies and the Stephen Jarislowsky Chair at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. His research interests include comparative judicial politics, religion and politics, authoritarianism, politics of the Middle East, and, more recently, the politics of knowledge production. His current work is focused on how the National Science Foundation shaped American political science in the second half of the 20th century.

This is a hybrid seminar: if you are on campus please join us at Seminar Room 3.72 in the RSSS Building.

To join online: https://anu.zoom.us/j/3364169330?pwd=ZStOdm4vTWpwS1RMbmFYUisxWVB2UT09

Seminars are 1 hour in duration.

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