Letter from the section president

As the newly elected president of the Qualitative and Multi-Methods section of the American Political Science Association, it is my pleasure to introduce an especially charged issue of the newsletter. I write “pleasure” because although I had nothing to do with the theme or articles selected, I am glad to endorse healthy contention. An idea, like political life, often gains vitality through agonistic debate—through the creative frictions produced when staking out positions or defending commitments in public. It is my hope that subsequent issues will also produce imaginative openings for new kinds of discussion. To welcome ideas that shift the grounds on which our arguments previously found traction—this is our obligation as intellectuals. We are lucky to have a vocation enabling us to do what we love. Whether by generating an elegant game theoretic model, puzzling over a passage of philosophical import, doing fieldwork, mining the archives, solving a math problem, interpreting a film, conducting an experiment, writing questions for a survey, or devising new theories of political change and retrenchment, we have the good fortune of participating in worlds that are sustaining and affirming. Despite our tendencies toward justification, we would do well to acknowledge that our methodological choices are often based on what makes us happy and at ease in our environments. For some, joy comes from destabilizing conventional ways of thinking. For others, it is the activity of establishing new conventions or enriching old ones that invigorates.