Don't Talk to the Humans: The Crackdown on Social Science Research | Christopher Shea @ Lingua Franca
A Ph.D. candidate in history, Bill Edmonds is studying the response of Southern newspaper editors to the battles over integration in the 1950s and 1960s. He’s also an editor at the Tallahassee Democrat and has written about the same subject for his newspaper. So during the day, when he’s working on his dissertation, he is supposed to get permission from an IRB before he talks to a retired governor or columnist. He has yet to do so. At night, he can call up anyone he wants and grill them. Journalists assume their sources have a certain amount of agency; the university tends to cast the same sources as victims.