Standard errors: an autoethnographic reflection on political science research on foreign aid

Abstract

Mainstream political scientists and post/decolonial scholars both seem animated by an interest in social justice, yet they rarely engage with one another's work. As a political scientist who spent fifteen years in the mainstream before retraining in post/decolonial scholarship, I try to understand the resistance to different conceptions of what counts as a valid research design. I begin with an analytic autoethnography because understanding how we are trained into these judgments is a question of embodied experience. My analysis suggests that an epistemological commitment to positivism is only part of the explanation—that political scientists also develop a moral-aesthetic investment in objectivity that delimits engagement with work produced using alternative methodologies. I then discuss how engaging with post/decolonial scholarship may fundamentally challenge mainstream research on foreign aid in political science.