Conversation: The challenges of teaching in a “nano department”

A panel at the 2016 American Academy of Religion conference staged, taped, transcribed, and edited this conversation about the challenges and opportunities of teaching in a “nano department” – an undergraduate religion or religious studies department (or combined religion and philosophy department) with only one, two, or three faculty members. Two things quickly become evident: one is the impossibility of coverage of the full religious studies curriculum, and the other is the necessity for collaboration with other departments. Neither of these is unique to nano departments, but there exists an intimacy between students and faculty in small departments, a necessary freedom to rethink the place of the study of religion in the liberal arts curriculum, and a disruptive value in what can be critiqued and contributed from a marginalized position. Arguably, nano departments are the canaries in the academic coal mine, charting the future of the humanities that cannot be discerned from the vantage point of Research‐1 contexts.     

Combining scenario planning and multi-criteria decision analysis in practice

The integrated use of scenario planning and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) has been advocated as a powerful combination for providing decision support in strategic decisions. Scenario planning helps decision makers in devising strategies and thinking about possible future scenarios; while MCDA can support an in-depth performance evaluation of each strategy, as well as in the design of more robust and better options. One of the frameworks proposed recently, by Goodwin & Wright, suggests the use of scenario planning with multi-attribute value theory, a mathematically simple, yet extensively researched and widely employed multi-criteria method. However, so far, such framework has been presented only using hypothetical problems. In this paper, we describe two case studies where this approach was used to support real-world strategic decisions. We discuss the challenges and limitations we encountered in applying it and suggest some possible improvements that could be made to such framework. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Learning Facts About Migration: Politically Motivated Learning of Polarizing Information About Refugees

Information processing during heated debates on asylum and immigration may often be influenced by prejudice rather than a desire to learn facts. In this article, we investigate how people process empirical evidence on the consequences of refugee arrivals through a novel survey experiment that disentangles politically motivated learning from other forms of learning and expressive responding. Specifically, we ask respondents to interpret a 2×2 table about the relationship between asylum seekers and crime rates. Crucially, respondents are randomly allocated to evaluate a conclusion that triggers their identity-protective stakes or not. In addition, we test for motivated responding as an alternative explanation by randomly providing some respondents with a response format that motivates them to report their inference truthfully. We find that information processing changes substantially when new information challenges existing asylum attitudes. Politically motivated learning is strongest among voters with strong negative prior attitudes towards asylum seekers. Our results also indicate that expressive responding can only partially account for this gap in correctly reported inferences. Our research has important implications for research on the consequences of refugee migration, theories of motivated reasoning, and survey methodology.