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479 books match the query 'Methodology' and 29 start with m

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Macroanalysis

Matthew L. Jockers

University of Illinois Press, 2013

In this volume, Matthew L. Jockers introduces readers to large-scale literary computing and the revolutionary potential of macroanalysis--a new approach to the study of the literary record designed for probing the digital-textual world as it exists today, in digital form and in large quantities. Using computational analysis to retrieve key words, phrases, and linguistic patterns across thousands of texts in digital libraries, researchers can draw conclusions based on quantifiable evidence regarding how literary trends are employed over time, across periods, within regions, or within demographic groups, as well as how cultural, historical, and societal linkages may bind individual authors, texts, and genres into an aggregate literary culture.

Moving beyond the limitations of literary interpretation based on the "close-reading" of individual works, Jockers describes how this new method of studying large collections of digital material can help us to better understand and contextualize the individual works within those collections.

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Making Sense of Business Reference

A Guide for Librarians and Research Professionals

Celia Ross

American Library Association, 2020

“It reads as if you have an expert coach in business reference helping you each step of the way." That’s how Academic BRASS summarized the first edition of this unique, unparalleled resource authored by Ross, a past winner of the Gale Cengage Learning Award for Excellence in Business Librarianship. Now she’s revised and updated it to tackle even more “bizref” headscratchers related to investment and finance, consumer behavior and statistics, company, and industry research. In addition to general reference strategies in each chapter that give you the lay of the land, inside you’ll find

overviews of more than fifty databases for articles, company and industry, directories, consumer, international, or raw data;
33 real-life "Stumper" questions, all new for this edition, drawn from librarians in the field;
why asking “who cares about this kind of question” reveals potential sources;
techniques for applying reference interview techniques to business questions;
advice on where to find the numbers for answering finance questions;
expanded coverage of venture capital research and business information literacy;
“Start Making Sense” suggestions for further skill-building; and
questions to consider when building a bizref collection.

This is the guide to keep at your side when serving business students, job-seekers, investors, or entrepreneurs in your library.

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Making Sense of Business Reference

A Guide for Librarians and Research Professionals

Celia Ross

American Library Association, 2013

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Making Senses of the Past

Toward a Sensory Archaeology

Edited by Jo Day

Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

Since the nineteenth century, museums have kept their artifacts in glass cases to better preserve them, and drawings and photographs have become standard ways of presenting the past. These practices have led to an archaeology dominated by visual description, even though human interaction with the surrounding world involves the whole body and all of its senses. In the past few years, sensory archaeology has become more prominent, and Making Senses of the Past is one of the first collected volumes on this subject. This book presents cutting-edge research on new theoretical issues. The essays presented here take readers on a multisensory journey around the world and across time.

In ancient Peru, a site provides sensory surprises as voices resound beneath the ground and hidden carvings slowly reveal their secrets. In Canada and New Zealand, the flicker of reflected light from a lake dances on the faces of painted rocks and may have influenced when and why the pigment was applied. In Mesopotamia, vessels for foodstuffs build a picture of a past cuisine that encompasses taste and social activity in the building of communities. While perfume and flowers are examined in various cultures, in the chamber tombs of ancient Roman Palestine, we are reminded that not all smells are pleasant. Making Senses of the Past explores alternative ways to perceive past societies and offers a new way of wiring archaeology that incorporates the senses.

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Managing Grey Literature

Technical Services Perspectives

Michelle Leonard

American Library Association, 2021

An important resource for scholarly research, grey literature is relevant to every discipline. It’s also often more current than commercial publications. Unfortunately, though it provides a richness of content, this type of scholarly resource is often overlooked when conducting research. This book aims to change that, describing the importance of grey literature and offering a holistic approach to successfully integrating it into library collections. Readers will learn

an overview of grey literature that discusses its importance to researchers, scholars, and students;
collections policies for selection and deselection, complete with a suggested workflow;
information about vendors, OA, and other aspects of acquisitions;
guidance on cataloging, such as collection categories in the public-facing catalog, and preservation; and
methods for promoting grey literature in library collections, including institutional repositories; and
tips for marketing, branding, outreach, and best communication practices for colleagues, administrators, and patrons.

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Marginal People in Deviant Places

Ethnography, Difference, and the Challenge to Scientific Racism

Janice M. Irvine

University of Michigan Press, 2022

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits twentieth-century ethnographic studies of deviance, arguing that ethnographies that focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from Los Angeles hoboes to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups offered an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism and then offers a social history of certain American outsiders and a prehistory of the academic fields of ethnic studies and sexuality studies. Through the stories Irvine recounts in this book, she identifies an American paradox represented in a simultaneous desire for and rejection of outsiders and describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.

Place plays a crucial role in this work as Irvine examines its role in shaping ethnographies about outsiders and therefore understandings of social difference. Irvine has visited the sites of each of the ethnographies about which she writes, collecting photos, videos, and archival materials that will help readers understand the importance of place in the generation of particular ethnographic stories. The open-access online edition of this book is richly illustrated to help convey the deep sense of emplacement of the ethnographies discussed in this book and includes a series of interviews with sociologists about how they conduct their work and understand their forebears.

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Marginalism and Discontinuity

Tools for the Crafts of Knowledge and Decision

Martin H. Krieger

Russell Sage Foundation, 1989

Marginalism and Discontinuity is an account of the culture of models employed in the natural and social sciences, showing how such models are instruments for getting hold of the world, tools for the crafts of knowing and deciding. Like other tools, these models are interpretable cultural objects, objects that embody traditional themes of smoothness and discontinuity, exchange and incommensurability, parts and wholes. Martin Krieger interprets the calculus and neoclassical economics, for example, as tools for adding up a smoothed world, a world of marginal changes identified by those tools. In contrast, other models suggest that economies might be sticky and ratchety or perverted and fetishistic. There are as well models that posit discontinuity or discreteness. In every city, for example, some location has been marked as distinctive and optimal; around this created differentiation, a city center and a city periphery eventually develop. Sometimes more than one model is applicable—the possibility of doom may be seen both as the consequence of a series of mundane events and as a transcendent moment. We might model big decisions or entrepreneurial endeavors as sums of several marginal decisions, or as sudden, marked transitions, changes of state like freezing or religious conversion. Once we take models and theory as tools, we find that analogy is destiny. Our experiences make sense because of the analogies or tools used to interpret them, and our intellectual disciplines are justified and made meaningful through the employment of characteristic toolkits—a physicist's toolkit, for example, is equipped with a certain set of mathematical and rhetorical models. Marginalism and Discontinuity offers a provocative and wide-ranging consideration of the technologies by which we attempt to apprehend the world. It will appeal to social and natural scientists, mathematicians and philosophers, and thoughtful educators, policymakers, and planners.

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Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture

Edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg

University of Illinois Press, 1988

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Materiality

Daniel Miller, ed.

Duke University Press, 2005

Throughout history and across social and cultural contexts, most systems of belief—whether religious or secular—have ascribed wisdom to those who see reality as that which transcends the merely material. Yet, as the studies collected here show, the immaterial is not easily separated from the material. Humans are defined, to an extraordinary degree, by their expressions of immaterial ideals through material forms. The essays in Materiality explore varied manifestations of materiality from ancient times to the present. In assessing the fundamental role of materiality in shaping humanity, they signal the need to decenter the social within social anthropology in order to make room for the material.

Considering topics as diverse as theology, technology, finance, and art, the contributors—most of whom are anthropologists—examine the many different ways in which materiality has been understood and the consequences of these differences. Their case studies show that the latest forms of financial trading instruments can be compared with the oldest ideals of ancient Egypt, that the promise of software can be compared with an age-old desire for an unmediated relationship to divinity. Whether focusing on the theology of Islamic banking, Australian Aboriginal art, derivatives trading in Japan, or textiles that respond directly to their environment, each essay adds depth and nuance to the project that Materiality advances: a profound acknowledgment and rethinking of one of the basic properties of being human.

Contributors. Matthew Engelke, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Bill Maurer, Lynn Meskell, Daniel Miller, Hirokazu Miyazaki, Fred Myers, Christopher Pinney, Michael Rowlands, Nigel Thrift

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Memory against Culture

Arguments and Reminders

Johannes Fabian

Duke University Press, 2007

In Memory against Culture, the renowned anthropologist Johannes Fabian assesses the contemporary practice of anthropology and its emerging shape as a global discipline. In twelve essays ranging from theoretical reflections to re-examinations of past ethnographic work, Fabian addresses central theoretical debates within the discipline and throughout the social sciences—about language and time, history and memory, and ethnography and recognition. Together the essays illuminate Fabian’s pluralist vision of an anthropology that always makes the other present by opening itself to conversational and transnational practices, refusing epistemological claims that privilege any one voice, language, or point of view.

Fabian returns to his landmark book Time and the Other to consider how the role of the other in anthropological inquiry has been transformed over the past two decades. He explores the place of linguistics in contemporary language-centered anthropology, and he ponders how studies of material culture imbue objects with “otherness.” Meditating on the place of memory and forgetting in ethnography, he draws from his own ethnographic work in the Congo to ask why Africa, the site of so much early anthropological study, continues to be forgotten in the wake of colonization. Arguing for the importance of remembering Africa, Fabian focuses on the relationship between thought and memory in the Swahili language. In so doing, he suggests new methods for investigating memory practices across cultures. Turning to the practice of ethnography, he examines the role of the Internet and the place of field notes and other memoranda in ethnographic writing. At once wide-ranging and incisive, Memory against Culture is a significant reflection on the state of the field by one of its most thoughtful and engaged practitioners.

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Mentorship/Methodology

Reflections, Praxis, and Futures

Leigh Gruwell

Utah State University Press, 2024

Mentorship/Methodology brings together emerging and established scholars to consider the relationship between mentoring practices and research methodologies in writing studies and related fields. Each essay in this edited collection produces a new intellectual space from which to theorize the dynamics of combining mentoring and research in institutions and communities of higher education.

The contributors consider how methodology informs mentorship, how mentorship activates methodology, and how to locate the future of the field in these moments of intersection. Mentorship, through the research and relationships it nourishes, creates the future of writing studies—or, conversely, reproduces the past. At the juncture where this happens, the contributors inquire, Where have current arrangements of mentorship/methodology taken writing studies? Where do these points of intersection exist in performance and practice, in theory, in research? What images of the field do they produce? How can scholars better articulate and write about these moments or spaces in which mentorship and methodology collide in productive disciplinary work?

By making the “slash” more visible, Mentorship/Methodology provides significant opportunities to support and cultivate diverse ways of knowing and being in rhetoric and composition, both locally and globally. The volume will appeal to students and scholars of rhetoric, composition, and technical and professional communication, as well as readers interested in conversations about mentorship and methodology.

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Metatheory in Social Science

Pluralisms and Subjectivities

Edited by Donald W. Fiske and Richard A. Shweder

University of Chicago Press, 1986

What is the nature of the social sciences? What kinds of knowledge can they—and should they—hope to create? Are objective viewpoints possible and can universal laws be discovered? Questions like these have been asked with increasing urgency in recent years, as some philosophers and researchers have perceived a "crisis" in the social sciences. Metatheory in Social Science offers many provocative arguments and analyses of basic conceptual frameworks for the study of human behavior. These are offered primarily by practicing researchers and are related to problems in disciplines as diverse as sociology, psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, and philosophy of science.

While various points of view are expressed in these nineteen essays, they have in common several themes, including the comparison of social and natural science, the role of knowledge in meeting the demands of society and its pressing problems, and the nature and role of subjectivity in science. Some authors hold that subjectivity cannot be studied scientifically; others argue that it can and must be if progress in knowledge is to be made. The essays demonstrate the philosophical pluralism they discuss and give a wide range of alternative positions on the future of the social and behavioral sciences in a postpositivist intellectual world.

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Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany

John M. Marston

University Press of Colorado, 2014

Paleoethnobotany, the study of archaeological plant remains, is poised at the intersection of the study of the past and concerns of the present, including agricultural decision making, biodiversity, and global environmental change, and has much to offer to archaeology, anthropology, and the interdisciplinary study of human relationships with the natural world. Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany demonstrates those connections and highlights the increasing relevance of the study of past human-plant interactions for understanding the present and future.

A diverse and highly regarded group of scholars reference a broad array of literature from around the world as they cover their areas of expertise in the practice and theory of paleoethnobotany—starch grain analysis, stable isotope analysis, ancient DNA, digital data management, and ecological and postprocessual theory.

The only comprehensive edited volume focusing on method and theory to appear in the last twenty-five years, Method and Theory in Paleoethnobotany addresses the new areas of inquiry that have become central to contemporary archaeological debates, as well as the current state of theoretical, methodological, and empirical work in paleoethnobotany.

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Methodological Matters

Narratives for Emerging Researchers in Rhetoric and Composition

Erin Kathleen Bahl

Utah State University Press, 2026

Methodological Matters offers a series of investigative reflections from experienced and emerging researchers to provide guidance for researchers who are navigating important complexities early in their careers. Each chapter explores a larger research-related question by narrating how one researcher negotiated a unique methodological challenge while working on a dissertation in the field of rhetoric and composition.

Given the constraints placed on new researchers’ time and resources, one way to navigate research-related precarities is to learn from others who have successfully traversed the same investigative terrain. This volume curates investigative reflections from researchers who, at the time of writing, were in the process of completing (or had just completed) their dissertations. Three parts explore issues of identity, craft, and practice in conducting research as an emerging scholar in rhetoric and composition, and the collection concludes with critical reflections on the role of precarity in conducting research.

Both a curated series of investigative reflections from emerging researchers and a resource guide with tangible tools for use in graduate seminars and fieldwork, Methodological Matters amplifies voices of those who learned how to do research in precarious contexts while simultaneously situated within the sometimes frustrating developmental phase located between “student” and “practitioner.”

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Methodology and Epistemology for Social Sciences

Selected Papers

Donald T. Campbell

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Since the 1950s, Donald T. Campbell has been one of the most influential contributors to the methodology of the social sciences. A distinguished psychologist, he has published scores of widely cited journal articles, and two awards, in social psychology and in public policy, have been named in his honor. This book is the first to collect his most significant papers, and it demonstrates the breadth and originality of his work.

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Methods That Matter

Integrating Mixed Methods for More Effective Social Science Research

Edited by M. Cameron Hay

University of Chicago Press, 2016

To do research that really makes a difference—the authors of this book argue—social scientists need questions and methods that reflect the complexity of the world. Bringing together a consortium of voices across a variety of fields, Methods that Matter offers compelling and successful examples of mixed methods research that do just that. In case after case, the researchers here break out of the traditional methodological silos that have long separated social science disciplines in order to better describe the intricacies of our personal and social worlds.

Historically, the largest division between social science methods has been that between quantitative and qualitative measures. For people trained in psychology or sociology, the bias has been toward the former, using surveys and experiments that yield readily comparable numerical results. For people trained in anthropology, it has been toward the latter, using ethnographic observations and interviews that offer richer nuances of meaning but are difficult to compare across societies. Discussing their own endeavors to combine the quantitative with the qualitative, the authors invite readers into a conversation about the best designs and practices of mixed methodologies to stimulate creative ideas and find new pathways of insight. The result is an engaging exploration of a promising new approach to the social sciences.

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Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies

Edited by Rachel King and Trinidad Rico

University College London, 2024

An interdisciplinary and insightful examination of heritage studies.

Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies offers succinct and accessible analyses of the current debates, intellectual legacies, and practical innovations on heritage value today. Using archaeology, anthropology, history, and geography, this multidisciplinary textbook is designed to support students, researchers, and practitioners, inviting them to review discussions of key problems and argumentative interventions in heritage studies.

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Methods and Methodology in Composition Research

Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan

Southern Illinois University Press, 1992

In original essays, fourteen nationally known scholars examine the practical, philosophical, and epistemological implications of a variety of research traditions. Included are discussions of historical, theoretical, and feminist scholarship; case-study and ethnographic research; text and conversation analysis; and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Issues that cross methodological boundaries, such as the nature of collaborative research and writing, methodological pluralism, the classification and coding of research data, and the politics of composition research, are also examined. Contributors reflect on their own research practices, and so reflect the current state of composition research itself.

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Methods for Transdisciplinary Research

A Primer for Practice

Matthias Bergmann, Thomas Jahn, Tobias Knobloch, Wolfgang Krohn, Christian Pohl, and Engelbert Schramm

Campus Verlag, 2012

To solve real-world issues, the model of transdisciplinary research, which approaches from both the hard and social sciences, has recently come to the forefront. By integrating multiple disciplines as well as the expertise of partners from the societal practice, researchers are able to look at a problem from many angles, with the goal of making both societal and scientific advances. Methods for Transdisciplinary Research provides scholars with a model for conceptualizing and executing this type of work, while offering a systematic description of methods for knowledge integration that can be applied to any field, making it an indispensible guide for every transdisciplinary researcher and teacher.

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Milton Friedman

Economics in Theory and Practice

Abraham Hirsch and Neil de Marchi

University of Michigan Press, 1991

Contrasts Friedman's statements on methodology with his practice as an economist

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Mixed Methods Research

Exploring the Interactive Continuum

Carolyn S. Ridenour and Isadore Newman

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

In Mixed Methods Research: Exploring the Interactive Continuum, the second edition of Qualitative-Quantitative Research Methodology, authors Carolyn S. Ridenour and Isadore Newman reject the artificial dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative research strategies in the social and behavioral sciences and argue that the two approaches are neither mutually exclusive nor interchangeable; rather, the actual relationship between the two paradigms is one of isolated events on a continuum of scientific inquiry.

In their original model for research—the “interactive continuum”—Ridenour and Newman emphasize four major points: that the research question dictates the selection of research methods; that consistency between question and design can lead to a method of critiquing research studies in journals; that the interactive continuum model is built around the place of theory; and that the assurance of validity of research is central to all studies. With this edition, the authors incorporate the concept of research purpose into their analysis.

To contextualize their new argument and to propose strategies for enhancement, Ridenour and Newman review the historical and contemporary debates around research frameworks and define the nature of scientific validity. Establishing five criteria that render a study “scientific,” they propose ways to strengthen validity in research design. They argue that by employing multiple methods, researchers may enhance the quality of their research outcomes. By integrating the quantitative research standards of internal and external validity and the qualitative research standards of trustworthiness, Ridenour and Newman suggest a principle for mixed methods research.

Ridenour and Newman apply this theoretical concept to a systematic analysis of four published research studies, with special emphasis on the consistency among research purpose, question, and design.

Ridenour and Newman have completely rewritten their conclusions in light of their evolving analyses. They incorporate their most recent ideas into the qualitative-quantitative continuum and emphasize the “model of consistency” as key for research to meet the standard of “scientific.”

This book occupies a vital place at the junction of methodological theory and scientific practice and makes connections between the traditionally separate realms of quantitative and qualitative research.

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Model Behavior

Animal Experiments, Complexity, and the Genetics of Psychiatric Disorders

Nicole C. Nelson

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Mice are used as model organisms across a wide range of fields in science today—but it is far from obvious how studying a mouse in a maze can help us understand human problems like alcoholism or anxiety. How do scientists convince funders, fellow scientists, the general public, and even themselves that animal experiments are a good way of producing knowledge about the genetics of human behavior? In Model Behavior, Nicole C. Nelson takes us inside an animal behavior genetics laboratory to examine how scientists create and manage the foundational knowledge of their field.

Behavior genetics is a particularly challenging field for making a clear-cut case that mouse experiments work, because researchers believe that both the phenomena they are studying and the animal models they are using are complex. These assumptions of complexity change the nature of what laboratory work produces. Whereas historical and ethnographic studies traditionally portray the laboratory as a place where scientists control, simplify, and stabilize nature in the service of producing durable facts, the laboratory that emerges from Nelson’s extensive interviews and fieldwork is a place where stable findings are always just out of reach. The ongoing work of managing precarious experimental systems means that researchers learn as much—if not more—about the impact of the environment on behavior as they do about genetics. Model Behavior offers a compelling portrait of life in a twenty-first-century laboratory, where partial, provisional answers to complex scientific questions are increasingly the norm.

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Model Cases

On Canonical Research Objects and Sites

Monika Krause

University of Chicago Press, 2021

In Model Cases, Monika Krause asks about the concrete material research objects behind shared conversations about classes of objects, periods, and regions in the social sciences and humanities. It is well known that biologists focus on particular organisms, such as mice, fruit flies, or particular viruses when they study general questions about life, development, and disease. Krause shows that scholars in the social sciences and humanities also draw on some cases more than others, selecting research objects influenced by a range of ideological but also mundane factors, such as convenience, historicist ideas about development over time, schemas in the general population, and schemas particular to specific scholarly communities.

Some research objects are studied repeatedly and shape our understanding of more general ideas in disproportionate ways: The French Revolution has profoundly influenced our concepts of revolution, of citizenship, and of political modernity, just like studies of doctors have set the agenda for research on the professions. Based on an extensive analysis of the role of model cases in different fields, Krause argues that they can be useful for scholarly communities if they are acknowledged and reflected as particular objects; she also highlights the importance of research strategies based on neglected research objects and neglected combinations of research objects and scholarly concerns.

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Models, Numbers, and Cases

Methods for Studying International Relations

Detlef F. Sprinz and Yael Wolinsky-Nahmias, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2004

Scholars and students of international relations must contend with increasingly sophisticated methods for studying world politics. Models, Numbers, and Cases is a comprehensive assessment of the three main approaches to international relations: case study, quantitative methods, and formal methods. Clearly written chapters explain the most important methodological and theoretical issues in the field, and demonstrate the practical application of these methods to international political economy, environmental policy, and security. Models, Numbers, and Cases is a concise and valuable guide to the challenging terrain of contemporary international relations study.

Detlef Sprinz is a Senior Fellow at the Department of Global Change and Social Systems of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and teaches on the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Potsdam, Germany.

Yael Wolinsky-Nahmias is Senior Lecturer and Associate Chair in the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University.

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