Episode 20 - Ana Bracic

Ana Bracic (Michigan State University) discusses positionality, entree, and a variety of ethical considerations that informed her work with a highly-vulnerable population in Central Europe. The candid discussion of how her project on the Roma evolved from an idealized, perfect "magical dataset" ("something as ridiculous as a time-series cross-section dataset on some sort of dimension of Roma exclusion, and it didn't matter what it was, so long as it was the same one across all these observations...") to her actual project. How was her mother an asset? What happens if you come home from the field with data that, once analyzed, is shown to be completely unhelpful for your job market paper? A can't miss episode for an aspiring junior scholar.