An introduction to JHR’s new Methods Focus series

Abstract

Since the 1990s, questions of methodology and how they relate to the work of academic publishing have taken center stage in debates over research integrity and scholarly impact on policy. How can we best ensure that the peer review process fairly advances rigorous scholarship? In what ways can academic journals provide a service beyond assisting their authors in job searches and in gaining promotion and tenure? And how can editorial staff use journals not only to highlight current scholarly trends but also to push conversations about the future of various academic fields and critical intersections with policy? These questions are even more pertinent for interdisciplinary journals, such as the Journal of Human Rights. Our journal has a broad readership, in terms of both geographic representation and disciplinary background. How can we best engage our diverse readers in a common conversation? How do we make methodologies intelligible across disciplines, so readers can scrutinize as well as learn from the practices of disciplines other than their own? Our decision to develop a quantitative Harvard Dataverse portal two years ago was a first effort at addressing these questions. 1 The move was guided by two primary goals. The first was to allow scholars working on quantitative research on human rights to better engage with the data and findings published in the pages of JHR. Second, we wanted to provide a space for collaboration where scholars of varying disciplines could develop new approaches to quantitative human rights data analysis. As Benjamin Carbonetti (former managing editor of JHR and now our journal's data consultant) explained in a research overview introducing the Dataverse site to our readers, "Both of these goals fit with part of our mission statement to 'broaden the study of human rights by fostering the critical re-examination of existing approaches to human rights, as well as developing new perspectives on the theory and practice of human rights'" (2016: 157). Beginning in this issue, we take this effort one step further with the introduction of our new Methods Focus series. The series will be an ongoing initiative, jointly curated by Carbonetti and myself. As scholars trained in distinct fields (political science and anthropology, respectively) and working from different methodological orientations (i.e., quantitative and qualitative, respectively), we reflect a good measure of the diversity of approaches in the field of human rights. Together, our aim is to engage thought leaders in human rights in more critical reflection on the methods currently employed across the field, along with the tradeoffs, limits, and potential of new tools and approaches. Methods Focus authors will explore both practical and ethical issues related to methodology. We envision these pieces serving several purposes. First, we see the Methods Focus series as a vehicle for creating space for focused conversations about methods, ethics, and the challenges and opportunities associated with conducting research on human rights. T...