Political Analysis: Accessing the World – Facts and Data

Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus- 2006- ‘The Present as History,‘ in Robert Goodin and Charles Tilly (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 490-505. How was Dean’s speech portrayed in the US media? Why was this a problem for the Dean campaign? What does Jackson mean by ‘the cultural politics of evening’? How is this different from a neo-positivist analysis of events? (492) How does his analysis raise doubts about efforts to produce law-like generalizations? What does it mean to say a ‘fact is a particular ordering of reality in terms of a theoretical interest"? (494) Why are eye-witness accounts not a decisive source of information about ‘what happened"? (494-5) Why are cultural resourm important in understanding how ‘events’ come to take on the meaning they do? (496-7) What is the significance of narratives? (497) What does Jackson mean when he says events have historicity at the moment of the occurrence? (497-8) What is ‘eventing’ and why is it important? (498-9) How do ‘facts’ depend on the perspective adopted and narrated? (500) How do we explain ‘eventing’? (501) Was Dean ever screaming? (502)