Within the political-economy of the social sciences, Area Studies (AS) is supposed to supply contextually-informed knowledge on (non-Western) areas to the other social sciences, in exchange for theory to guide further empirical investigations. Based on this assumption, there are regular calls for greater engagement with AS to counteract the shortcomings of International Relations’ (IR) knowledge-base on many areas, perspectives, and practices of the international. However, there has been little work empirically detailing knowledge-exchange practices between IR and AS, so it remains an open question if the relationship functions as an exchange of ‘international’ theory-for-‘area’ empirics. This paper provides a macro-sociological analysis of the practices of IR–AS knowledge-exchange. By focusing on citation practice, it moves beyond accounts that treat the two disciplines as ‘black boxes’, to trace which parts of the ‘dividing discipline’ of IR are active in exchanging knowledge with which ‘area’ scholarships. Hence, it asks: Are there ‘area’ blindspots in IR's knowledge-production? And, what type of IR theory is exported to AS? This analysis informs an assessment of whether AS represents a significant resource for IR in its efforts to, one, better inform its knowledge-production about ‘other’ areas of the international, and two, assert its disciplinary-relevance within the academy.

We present recommendations for teachers and educators of science, based on the results of a survey carried out among secondary-school students from Poland, Australia, and the USA.

Accumulated evidence identifies discernible gender gaps across many dimensions of professional academic careers including salaries, publication rates, journal placement, career progress, and academic service. Recent work in political science also reveals gender gaps in citations, with articles written by men citing work by other male scholars more often than work by female scholars. This study estimates the gender gap in citations across political science subfields and across methodological subfields within political science, sociology, and economics. The research design captures variance across research areas in terms of the underlying distribution of female scholars. We expect that subfields within political science and social science disciplines with more women will have smaller gender citation gaps, a reduction of the “Matthew effect” where men’s research is viewed as the most central and important in a field. However, gender citation gaps may persist if a “Matilda effect” occurs whereby women’s research is viewed as less important or their ideas are attributed to male scholars, even as a field becomes more diverse. Analysing all articles published from 2007–2016 in several journals, we find that female scholars are significantly more likely than mixed gender or male author teams to cite research by their female peers, but that these citation rates vary depending on the overall distribution of women in their field. More gender diverse subfields and disciplines produce smaller gender citation gaps, consistent with a reduction in the “Matthew effect”. However, we also observe undercitation of work by women, even in journals that publish mostly female authors. While improvements in gender diversity in academia increase the visibility and impact of scholarly work by women, implicit biases in citation practices in the social sciences persist.

In recent years archaeologists have celebrated the emergence of a critical history of archaeology which has assumed a central position in disciplinary debates. This new historiography has been characterized by the adoption of an externalist or contextual approach primarily concerned with how social, economic and political conditions have influenced the interpretation of archaeological data. While externalism has played an essential role in the recognition of the history of archaeology as a field, I suggest in this article that it is time for historians to explore new ways of conceptualizing the social dimensions of archaeological knowledge. In particular, I consider how certain debates held by historians and sociologists of science during the last years can encourage historians of archaeology to enquire more critically about the blurry boundaries between ‘archaeology’ and its ‘context’.

Introduction: turns and returns

When politicians engage in archaeology, it is convenient for all concerned to say that they ‘turn’ to it: for both parties, this move confirms that the discipline itself is essentially neutral and independent from extrinsic considerations. Already subject to much suspicion, this comforting conception can be further undermined with the case of Field-Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950), for half a century South Africa's leading soldier, statesman and intellectual, as well as a driving force behind the setting up of the Commonwealth and the LJnited Nations (FIGURE 1).

Introduction

On August 3, 1908, two young French clergymen with a passion for prehistory, the brothers Amédée and Jean Bouyssonie, discovered in a cave near the village of La Chapelle-aux-Sains (Department of Corréze) an almost intact Neanderthal skeleton. Recognizing both the importance of their find and their own inexperience with such fossils, they handed the skeleton to Marcellin Boule, professor of palaeontology at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris.

What scientists include among the essential attributes of sustainable agricultural systems can influence the development of agricultural research agendas and how research is done. Current perspectives on sustainability place varying emphasis on environmental and agrarian values and propose different amounts and kinds of change in agricultural production, agricultural science, and rural social institutions. In a delphi study, agricultural scientists at North Central region land-grant universities considered environmental management and development of new farming technologies as essential to a definition of sustainable agriculture, but gave little importance to social or scientific restructuring. With some qualifications, we characterize their view of sustainability as a stewardship perspective that does not include social considerations and explicitly rejects radical social change.