​But soon I start backtracking. It would be an irresponsible move, I reason –a disservice to my students, who are expected to know this stuff. Any new choices would be just as arbitrary as the old ones, and after teaching them for so many these years I have grown fond of these writers. And so, I tone down my radical fancies. I make some additions on account of personal curiosity, student interest, intellectual fad, or the urgency of events. But making room for incoming authors by dropping syllabus fixtures is a painful process. I have trouble letting go of my past infatuations, even as I embrace new ones.

Perspectives editors sat with Professor Cynthia Miller-Idriss to discuss her new book Seeing the World: How U.S. Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (with Mitchell Stevens and Seteney Shami - Princeton UP). Their book draws on interviews with scholars and university leaders to understand how international research is perceived and valued across American social sciences. 

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Perspectives Editors: Your book on area studies and the social sciences foregrounds the distinction between context and decontextual work. Could tell us about the sorts of institutional practices that sustain this separation between the contextual work and theoretical social science?
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Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Sociology, out of the disciplines that we studied, was the wariest of international contextual work. The debate is often framed as “this deep rich context is not worth it, if it’s done overseas” unless you can relate it back to the U.S. I think that the discipline of Sociology has clung to its core interests for good reasons. It really is oriented around race, gender, social class, and it has been for really long time focused on these key issues of inequality. That’s core to the discipline and always will be, but for some reason that I don’t fully understand myself even though we’ve tried to trace it in this book, that interest in inequalities doesn’t really extend to inequalities outside of the U.S. in a systematic way. In terms of labor markets and publications, Sociology does worse in terms of how much time and energy it devotes to regions outside of the U.S. According to the department chairs that we spoke with, in part because they believe that the market demands it, they don’t believe that students should spend their time on it - a self-fulfilling prophecy in some way. They believe that unless you already have the language -if you come in already speaking it, that may be a different story- that you’re never going to get good enough in the language while in graduate school or on the tenure track for that to be a good investment of your time. One of the department chairs said that he could never in good faith even recommend that an undergraduate starts taking Mandarin, because Chinese sociologists will just run circles around any Americans sociologist who tries to study China.

It was an exceptionally warm February day in Kawasaki, Japan, in 2009 that Chinsu (pseudonym) brought up Brecht’s poem. I was conducting fieldwork for what would become Chapter 2 of my book (Kim 2016) examining the prolonged and vehement competition between North and South Korea to create their own citizens out of colonial-era Korean migrants stranded in the former metropole. Chin-su told me how he came to change his nationality in his Foreigner’s Registry from Chōsen (the term often associated with North Korea) to Kankoku (South Korea) at the request of his soon-to-be-in-laws. 

The narrative sections of ethnographic studies on decision-making in frontline agencies and social control institutions, abound with examples of agents – whether these be police officers, judges, health workers, or social welfare bureaucrats – who bend, stretch and even defy agency rules to assist “deserving” clients and persons (Fassin 2015, Zacka 2015, Lara Millan 2014, Marrow 2009, Maynard Moody and Musheno 2003). ​To date, however, existing studies do not investigate the theoretical importance of this discordance between established rules and understandings of moral worth as a motivating factor of the decision-making process, even though the empirical data they provide often suggest that it is precisely this discordance which influences how frontline actors proceed to evaluate their clients.