Credibility in Policy Expertise: The Function of Boundaries Between Research and Policy

As science becomes an increasingly crucial resource for addressing complex challenges in society, extensive demands are placed upon the researchers who produce it. Creating valuable expert knowledge that intervenes in policy or practice requires knowledge brokers to facilitate interactions at the boundary between research and policy. Yet, existing research lacks a compelling account of the ways in which brokerage is performed to gain credibility. Drawing on mixed‐method analysis of 12 policy research settings, I outline a novel set of strategies for attaining symbolic power, whereby policy experts position themselves and others via conceptual distances drawn between the “world of ideas” and the “world of policy and practice.” Disciplinary distance works to situate research as either disciplinary or undisciplinary, epistemic distance creates a boundary between complex specialist research and direct digestible outputs, temporal distance represents the separation of slow rigorous research and agile responsive analysis, and economic distance situates research as either pure and intrinsic or marketable and fundable. I develop a theoretical account that unpacks the boundaries between research communities and shows how these boundaries permit policy research actors to achieve various strategic aims.     

A missing link? Network analysis as an empirical approach for critical physical geography

Critical physical geography (CPG) calls for integrative research on material landscapes and the socio-political dynamics of scientific knowledge production. Network analysis, a rich tradition of tools and approaches for analyzing relational information, has seen little use in the CPG literature to date. This represents a fruitful opportunity, as many of CPG's core interests—knowledge politics, histories of scientific concepts, and ecosocial relations—can be effectively analyzed using network techniques. In this article, I argue for adapting network approaches to CPG. First, I provide an overview of various network concepts, approaches, and their origins. I then discuss bibliometric network techniques for “science mapping” including co-word, co-authorship, and citation analyses. Next, I describe discourse network analysis, a recent mixed-method approach from political science. Finally, I discuss overlaps with emerging approaches from qualitative and visual network analysis. In each section, I provide existing and hypothetical examples, as well as software and visualization techniques, that demonstrate how network approaches could add new insights to CPG and related scholarship. Linking CPG with the diverse traditions of network analysis has the potential to produce new empirical understandings and bring the field into conversation with a growing body of research that spans the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities.     

A simulation of the transmission of HIV and AIDS in regional populations within the United Kingdom

"The spread of HIV-1 in the United Kingdom is simulated by a model which integrates behavioural and epidemiological processes within a multi-regional population projection framework and represents the spatial heterogeneities in the distribution of HIV which have significant effects on transmission patterns. Analyses determine the significance of different parameters in contributing to prediction uncertainty and highlight the importance of behavioural change and international population movements."     

James Buchanan's normative theory of the state

This paper examines James Buchanan's normative theory of the state and in particular his attempt to establish a legitimating linkage between the individual and the state. It begins by outlining Buchanan's consent‐based theory of the state and the distinction he draws between the explanatory and justificatory roles of his theory. It proceeds to examine the role of his conceptual contract as a justificatory argument for existing and proposed political institutions. It finds that while the conceptual contract may provide an account of the contingent rationality of the state, it fails to have normative significance in terms of Buchanan's value individualism and subjectivism. Buchanan has also failed to address some of the problems associated with securing and enforcing contractual agreement. These conclusions point to wider problems with rational choice theories of the emergence of the state.     

A leper in purple: the coronation of Baldwin IV of Jerusalem

Baldwin IV, the leper king of Jerusalem, was one of history's more startling monarchs. His coronation in 1174 has been interpreted as anomalous or, alternatively, as evidence of unique cultural and political trends within the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Inherent in all these evaluations, however, is the unquestioned acceptance that Baldwin was known to be leprous at the time of his coronation. This is an assumption that is supported by neither medical understandings of the disease, nor by a consideration of the evidence that survives from the period. Though clearly suffering from advanced leprosy at the time of his death, there is nothing to suggest that Baldwin's disease could have been diagnosed prior to his taking the throne and so there is no need to consider his coronation as anything other than a conventional one.