Prof. Dr. Eric W. Schoon

Eric W. Schoon was a guest from January until April 2023. He is Associate Professor of sociology at The Ohio State University. His current research centers on three projects that each explore theoretical and practical dimensions of social science methodology. The first project examines how politics shape ethnographic practice, with a particular focus on the role of suspicion—both the suspicions that ethnographers face, and their own suspicions of others—in fieldwork. Based on interviews with ethnographers who have conducted long-term fieldwork in Turkey over the past 40 years, this research explores how political and social changes have shaped ethnographic practice in Turkey, and the consequences for knowledge production in and about this country. The second project builds on Schoon’s long-standing research on legitimacy in contentious politics to explore how methodology shapes the ways that legitimacy is theorized in the social sciences. Synthesizing across scholarship in the social sciences, he advocates a dyadic framework for operationalizing and measuring legitimacy. Finally, Schoon recently completed a co-authored book manuscript (under contract with Cambridge University Press) that advances a case-oriented approach to regression analysis. His work has appeared in outlets including American Sociological Review, Journal of Politics, Social Forces, Social Problems, Sociological Science, and Sociological Methods & Research.