Review -The Politics of Political Science by Paulo Ravecca

Experiences is a theoretical meditation on the relationship between knowledge and power that is empirically informed by the history of political science in Chile and Uruguay. It explores how the academic shift from a strong presence of Marxism in the 1960s to the overwhelming dominance of liberalism in the 1990s ̶ a very marked one in these two countries though with manifestations all over Latin America ̶ was not strictly the result of "scholarly progress." Indeed, this political mutation within the social sciences at large, and in political science in particular, is related to a complex set of transformations that includes the political defeat of the left, the effects of the 1970s right-wing dictatorships in the Southern Cone, and the regional hegemony of the United States.

Routledge, 2019

In this thought-provoking book, Paulo Ravecca presents a series of interlocking studies on the politics of political science in the Americas. Focusing mainly on the cases of Chile and Uruguay, Ravecca employs different strands of critical theory to challenge the mainstream narrative about the development of the discipline in the region, emphasizing its ideological aspects and demonstrating how the discipline itself has been shaped by power relations. Ravecca metaphorically charts the (non-linear) transit from “cold” to “warm” to “hot” intellectual temperatures to illustrate his—alternative—narrative. Beginning with a detailed quantitative study of three regional academic journals, moving to the analysis of the role of subjectivity (and political trauma) in academia and its discourse in relation to the dictatorships in Chile and Uruguay, and arriving finally at an intimate meditation on the experience of being a queer scholar in the Latin American academy of the 21st century, Ravecca guides his readers through differing explorations, languages, and methods. The Politics of Political Science: Re-Writing Latin American Experiences offers an essential reflection on both the relationship between knowledges and politics and the political and ethical role of the scholar today, demonstrating how the study of the politics of knowledge deepens our understanding of the politics of our times.

This paper shows, on the one hand, an outlook on political science journals published in Spanish and Portuguese and, on the other, the habits and perceptions of Latin American political scientists related to publications. The first part offers a data set including more than 150 political science journals including the publisher's country, starting year, inclusion in international or regional data bases and impact indexes based on google scholar metrics. Concerning to the second part, the paper shows the results of an internet survey answered by more than 150 Latin American political scientists. The survey reports their publications habits, regarding the relative place that different types of publications -as journal articles, books and book chapters-have in their publication record, the relative importance they attribute to those types of publication, along with other characteristics of the respondents (education, career length, preferred language to publish, academic approach). Additionally, the data set includes impact indexes based on google scholar metrics. Both data sets allows a characterization of the political science production in Latina America and poses the question of the quality of such production. Furthermore, using impact indexes as dependant variables, the paper develops models intended to explain the impact of both, journals and researchers. As conclusion the paper shows that the trajectory, together with the geographic area and the number of indexation systems a journal belongs, explain much of its impact. In the same vein, the career length, the geographic area of education and certain publication habits explain much of researchers' impact.

2019

In this thought-provoking book, Paulo Ravecca presents a series of interlocking studies on the politics of political science in the Americas. Focusing mainly on the cases of Chile and Uruguay, Ravecca employs different strands of critical theory to challenge the mainstream narrative about the development of the discipline in the region, emphasizing its ideological aspects and demonstrating how the discipline itself has been shaped by power relations. Ravecca metaphorically charts the (non-linear) transit from “cold” to “warm” to “hot” intellectual temperatures to illustrate his—alternative—narrative. Beginning with a detailed quantitative study of three regional academic journals, moving to the analysis of the role of subjectivity (and political trauma) in academia and its discourse in relation to the dictatorships in Chile and Uruguay, and arriving finally at an intimate meditation on the experience of being a queer scholar in the Latin American academy of the 21st century, Ravecca guides his readers through differing explorations, languages, and methods. The Politics of Political Science: Re-Writing Latin American Experiences offers an essential reflection on both the relationship between knowledges and politics and the political and ethical role of the scholar today, demonstrating how the study of the politics of knowledge deepens our understanding of the politics of our times.

PS-Political Science and Politics 39 (1): 196-203, 2006

The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund (Sylff) Research Abroad. The Tokyo Foundation, Japan. , 2013

This article develops a decolonising critique of contemporary Latin American focused Political Science (LAPS) demonstrating the complicity of its politics of knowledge in the reproduction of the logic and rationalities of coloniality. These logics and rationalities are premised upon the dehumanisation of the raced and gendered other who is denied rationality, agency and political subjectivity. I demonstrate the monological and dehumanising epistemological consequences of this through deconstruction of the foundational myths and disciplinary boundaries of the discipline; the legitimate subject of the political; and the knowing-subject of political analysis that foreground contemporary LAPS. I end with a question and a challenge: how might we learn to create a political science otherwise? KEYWORDS: Decolonial critique, politics of knowledge, Latin America, political science, popular classes

Science in Context, 2020

Brazilian Political Science Review, 2022

This article presents a meta-analysis of the history and the literature on the current state of political science in Mexico with the aim of obtaining an overall picture of the characteristics and profiles of political scientists and political science. It notes that there has been a process of change in the profiles of authors and the foci of texts, with a tendency to formalize analysis and a growing influence of the American tradition, along with a process of professional academic specialization and the growth of academic entities offering academic and research programs in political science.

In most accounts Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship is understood to have impeded the development of political science in Chile. This article seeks to destabilize this understanding by showing that important elements of the infrastructure of the discipline were created during, and sometimes by this authoritarian regime. More concretely, through an in-depth and extensive examination of the political science produced during the Chilean dictatorship, I identify and characterize an institutional and intellectual space that I will call Authoritarian Political Science (APS). The findings challenge the dominant narrative that links the institutionalization of our discipline in Latin America to liberal democracy in a linear fashion, and suggest the need for a nuanced, empirically informed and theoretically dense understanding of political science’s multiple historical trajectories. Excerpt: “The exploration of the institutionalization of political science becomes purposeless or –even worse– banal without the analysis of the content and the socio-political role of the discipline. Knowledge is structurally implicated in power relations. Therefore, exploring academic discourses is just another way of studying politics. By expanding the awareness of the impact that context has had on ‘our’ science, this kind of epistemological exercise of self-clarification helps to prevent our academic practice from becoming a mere reflection of the dominant powers of our times, whether they be authoritarian or liberal-democratic”. El análisis desafía la dicotomía entre lecturas materialistas y culturalistas del poder. La disciplina de la ciencia política es entendida aquí como texto que funciona en, y a través de, mecanismos de poder concretos que incluyen políticas públicas que, a su vez, redistribuyen bienes materiales y simbólicos. Economía política y discurso son movilizados para entender la política de la ciencia política.