Peer research with young Muslims and the politics of knowledge production

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to draw on the authors’ experiences as a team made up of both “insiders” and “outsiders” in order to investigate how an insider-outsider peer research method facilitates productive forms of research into the lives of young Muslims, and to contribute to debates about ways of knowing youth. The authors aim to shift focus from a common claim that peer research methods simply improve research about youth to more deeply investigate how they enable, as well as limit, the production of particular kinds of knowledge, in this case, about Muslim youth in Australia. Design/methodology/approach – The research aimed to explore how “ordinary” young Australian Muslims engage in civic life. Yet the authors were faced with the challenge of accessing and recruiting “ordinary” youth in times of Islamophobia, wherein Muslim communities expressed serious concerns about their voices being misinterpreted, misused and misappropriated. Therefore, the authors sought to utilise an approach of outsider-designed and guided research that was then shaped and executed by insider peer researchers. It is this research design and its execution that the authors interrogate in this paper. Findings – As well as affording the authors access and the elicitation of rich, complex and high-quality data, the approach also fostered more complex stories about young Muslim identities and experiences, and enabled the authors to contest some common and homogenising representations. It also allowed opportunities for fundamental issues inherent in these kinds of qualitative research methods to be made explicit. These include the politics of performativity and issues of positionality in the peer research process. The authors suggest that the “insider” and “outsider” approach succeeded not so much because it got the authors closer to the “truth” about young Muslims’ civic lives, but because it revealed some of the mechanics of the ways stories are constructed and represented in youth research. Originality/value – The originality and value of this paper lie in its contribution to a debate about the politics of knowledge production about young people and Muslims in particular, and in its effort to move forward a discussion about how to be accountable in youth research to the various communities and to one another in insider-outsider research teams.

Merleau-Ponty’s Gordian knot: transcendental phenomenology, science, and naturalism

In this paper, I explore a series of fertile ambiguities that Merleau-Ponty's work is premised upon. These ambiguities concern some of the central methodological commitments of his work, in particular his commitment (or otherwise) to transcendental phenomenology and how he transforms that tradition, and his relationship to science and philosophical naturalism and what they suggest about his philosophical methodology. Many engagements with Merleau-Ponty's work that are more ‘analytic’ in orientation either deflate it of its transcendental heritage, or offer a "modest" rendering of its transcendental dimensions. This is also true, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent, of the work of the more empirically-minded phenomenological philosophers who engage very seriously with Merleau-Ponty – e.g. Hubert Dreyfus, Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and others. At the same time, many other scholars contest these proto-scientific and more naturalistic uses of Merleau-Ponty's work on hermeneutical and exegetical grounds, and they likewise criticise the deflated reading of his transcendental phenomenology that tends to support them. By working through some of the key passages and ideas, I seek to establish that the former view captures something pivotal to Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I extend these interpretations by arguing that, at least around the time of Phenomenology of Perception, his philosophy might be reasonably regarded as a form of minimal methodological naturalism.

Difference-form persuasion contests

We explore the equilibrium properties of two types of "difference-form" persuasion contest functions derived in Skaperdas and Vaidya in which contestants spend resources to persuade an audience. We find that both types of functions generate interior pure strategy Nash equilibria unlike Baik and Che and Gale with characteristics different to existing literature. For one type of function, we find that the reaction function of each player is "flat" and nonresponsive to the level of resources devoted by the rival so that the "preemption effect" as defined by Che and Gale is absent. Further, the equilibrium is invariant to the sequencing of moves. For the second type of function, which applies when there is asymmetry among contestants with regard to the quality of evidence, we find that the reaction functions of the stronger and weaker players have gradients with opposite signs relative to Dixit and therefore their incentive to precommit expenditures in a sequential move game is also different. For both types of functions, the extent of rent dissipation is partial. From the equilibrium analysis, we are also able to establish the potential effects of some specific factors affecting persuasion such as evidence potency, the degree of truth, and bias on aggregate resource expenditures and welfare.

Cycles in public opinion and the dynamics of stable party systems

We study a dynamic model of elections where many parties may enter or exit political competition. At each election a new political leadership arrives for each party. The leadership cannot choose the party's platform (ideological identities are fixed) but must decide whether or not to contest the election. Contesting elections is costly and this cost is higher if the party has recently been inactive. The distribution of voters' ideal policies, or public opinion, changes over time via a Markov process with a state independent persistence parameter. We characterise stable party systems where the set of contestants is invariant to the recent most observed opinion. We show that stable party systems exist only when public opinion is sufficiently volatile, while highly persistent moods lead to instability and change in the party system whenever public opinion changes.