I'm a researcher and teacher in Colorado, USA. I earned my PhD in political science at the University of Kansas with an inquiry into the structure and limits of contemporary torture ethics. Before that I studied international affairs at the New School (MA) and before that I was a mechanical engineer (BSME), fabricator, machinist, and project manager.
In turbulent political times, it's tempting to grasp and focus on every new development as it happens. Decades of advances in addressing cause-and-effect questions have given political scientists powerful tools to do this. Yet difficult questions about the rightness or wrongness of public actions are not well suited for models and computers. Unless the public good can be reduced to "what people do" (it can't), political science will need to reclaim a broader concept of knowledge and the unfashionable area of normative theory once again.
I'm on Twitter @theLastTheorist
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Copyright 2018 Steve Torrente