BLOOMINGTON, Ill. – Seven Illinois Wesleyan students will attend the annual International Association for Political Science Students (IAPSS) Academic Conference & General Assembly in Greece from May 5 through May 11.
The IAPSS Conference is hosted by Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the University of Macedonia in Serres. During the conference, the group will present their research entitled, “The Disparity of Knowledge in the Global Context” and attend a series of workshops with students from around the world.
Students attending the conference are: Babawande Afolabi, a sophomore business and economics double major with a minor in political science from Nigeria; Arielle Cassiday, a sophomore international studies major from Spring Grove, Ill.; Andrew Clott, a sophomore political science and sociology double major from Chicago; Maria Gobbi, a first-year international studies major with a French minor from Evanston, Ill.; Charlie Sell, a sophomore political science major from Wauconda, Ill.; Monica Shah, a sophomore international studies major from Downers Grove, Ill.; and Monica Simonin, a first-year anthropology major from Belleville, Ill.
Other students involved in the research, though not attending the conference, are Erica Podrazik, a sophomore political science major from Lombard, Ill. and Nathan Wheatley a sophomore political science major with an economics minor from Glenn Ellyn, Ill.
The students’ conference presentation culminates work that began on the first day of a course taught by Juan Gabriel Gómez Albarello, visiting assistant professor of political science. In the syllabus for his class “The Politics of Developing Societies,” Gómez Albarello asked his students to work on a paper that they could eventually submit to a conference. Under their professor’s direction, the students began to collect data to construct a preliminary version of the paper, which investigated the inconsistency of sources that scholars cite in political science research articles.
Their research revealed that in political science articles, citations of scholars writing in Western nations vastly outweigh citations of scholars from developing countries. After compiling their research into a formal report, the students discovered that, of the 53 articles included in the study, 86 percent of the cited sources were from the United States and the United Kingdom, rather than citing sources produced in developing nations. This vast source disparity between Western countries and developing nations in scholarly articles is “not just a bias,” said student Nathan Wheatley. “It’s a reflection of a neo-colonial relationship that mirrors the relationship between the former colonies and their former colonizers on every level— economic, social, political and now educational.”