Research Ethics

As I am doing a fairly straightforward research paper, I doubt that I will have much trouble meeting the guidelines mentioned in the Belmont report. The main thing that all research papers have to be aware of is of course the risk of accidental plagarism, ex inadequately quoting sources, misquoting, mistakenly hijacking another person's theoretical concept. It all seems rather overwhelming at times for this simple undergraduate student! As ideas have been circulating through humanity for eons, it is hard to be original and at the same time be stringently attentive to who you are quoting from or whose idea you may be altering. For example, when writing a comparative politics essay relating the nation-building process of Iran and Turkey, one will undoubtedly use observations that someone else MUST have published at some point, like the fact that the two nations' are almost ideological opposites in the way they think government should be run (secular vs theocracy). In in instance like that, which is basically stating the obvious, do you still have to quote a source? Is it possible to discover a source, or is there a point where some observations go beyond intellectual copyright and are simply part of the public domain of knowledge? Any thoughts on that perhaps?

Reposte!

Hola,
The senior thesis I read in its entirety was a textual analysis of
Islamic religious texts, namely the plethora of Hadith attributed to
the Prophet Muhammed. Hadith essentially means "sayings of" and this
paper was basically a refutation of the Hadith in terms of its validity
to the Muslim faith.
The author, Shannon Capezzali, is of the mind that the Hadith
compilations, of which there are six "authoritative" versions, are in
fact not a legitimate supplement to the Quran, the revelatory book of
Islam. Rather, she claims that they are a disparate mishmash of dubious
sayings attributed to Mohammed that in fact have little grounding when
compared to the actual teachings of the Quran. She states that the
Quran itself was "revealed" to Muhammed, and from that revelation there
were to be no others. It is complete in and of itself, and needs no
outside assistance to clarify its teachings, and certainly needs
nothing that would actually refute the claims within it.
Capezzali's textual analysis of the Hadith centers on the myraid and
contradictory Hadiths in circulation within the Muslim faith, as she
deconstructs the supposedly scientific manner in which they were
accumulated (often decades or centuries after the Prophets death).
Hadith science itself was based upon the honesty, integrity and sound
memory(or lack thereof) of the sources from which the sayings were
derived, and not on the internal consistency between sayings and
external consistency with the Quran, the only message by which Mohammed
is absolutely assured of delivering. She goes on to say that the very
reification of Mohammed's Hadiths goes against the most powerful
injunction in Islam, that of worshipping other sources other than the
Quran. She argues that the Hadiths (like any text) can justify whatever
the person viewing them wants to hear, and have been used to legitimize
violent, ridiculous, and un-Islamic beliefs and actions.
I chose this thesis because I intend to delve into religious studies in
the course of my career, and it is useful to read previous research on
the subject. I have a basic understanding of Muslim faith, and am
trying to see further into the controversies surrounding the world's
second largest religion. During the reign of the Abbasd Empire in the
Middle Ages,the Middle East was at the pinnacle of its military,
scientific, and cultural prowess. During that time, it is claimed that
the doors of ijtihad (interpretation) of religious texts such as the
Quran, Hadith, or Sunna, were closed, ie. religious scholars had
already cannonized and codified every single text for every peice of
information possible and there was no need for the layperson to inquire
further. This is obviously a) wrong, and b) an oversimplification, but
it is an important aspect to know as to why Islam is where it is.
Capezzali's thesis continues in the spirit of modern scholars who
reject the end of interpretation and are actively trying to present
their faith in an interesting new light.
Anthony

Anthony's bio

I presume that this is the right spot to blog. Yeehaw, I've only blogged one other time in my life for Intro to Political Science on Opera.com. It was actually quite a good experience, as I got a chance to apply reasoning to all sorts lof current events and class readings, as well as attempt to scorch other people's arguments. Not bad.

Anyhow, my name is Anthony Joyce and I currently work at the Belk Library Circulation Desk. I am a checkout monkey; I give you books, take your books, scan them into or out of your possession, manage the torture that are rental laptops, and organize hordes of books in the back. This is not the only job I've held, but it certainly is the longest lasting (probably due to the fact it is a state job, and thus hard to get fired or replaced. Efficiency is not the operative word in state institutions. Just look at Syria.) I've had disparate other jobs, including a high school spat with bagging at Harris Teeter, checkout monkey at Kerr Drug, and pseudo-barista/advice-giver at a student bookstore called Higher Grounds at UNC.

My purported life aim thus far is to travel as far and wide as possible, with an emphasis on the region we call the Middle East, from Morocco in West Africa to Iran in the East. I've traveled a bit already, most memorably to Israel and Egypt in 2000, during the New Intifadah. That was probably the trip that set the gears turning in my head towards becoming a Middle East "specialist". I've also been around Europe alone for five weeks during my year off from high school, and then went to Yaroslavl, Russia for three months doing volunteer work in orphanages. It was really, really cold.

I'm a Middle Eastern Studies major, despite the fact that no such thing exists here at App. I've focused primarily on political science courses taught by Curtis Ryan, a guru in the ways of comparative politics. Prior to declaring (which was only 6 months ago, three years into college) I applied the "shotgun" approach to classes; take whatever-the-hell and see what sticks. I tried out photography, psychology, anthropology, philosophy and sociology, but never felt compelled to devote myself exclusively to any of them.

What stuck was an intermixture of political science, history, political philosophy, religion, and other fancy sounding disicplines or subsets of. My concentration will be applied abroad; I'm going to Egypt to the American University of Cairo in September. I'll be learning Arabic and hopefully recieving a wider range of coursework to my liking, and attempting to develop more in-depth knowledge of the region. Gotta get the facts straight before you can really call yourself anything more than a curious layperson, though there is no shame there.

I'll be at the AUC for a year, then onto either grad school, the Peace Corp, or the US Foreign Service, which I essentially plan to use for my own academic and intellectual ends, hopefully doing my part to undermine the contrarily ideological and grossly hypocritical foreign policy we have been pursuing in the region for the past 50 years or so. The worst part about any ideology is the extent to which its proponents will always "make exception" to their values in certain cases. Nothing wrong with promoting democracy, but for god sakes, look at Saudi Arabia! We don't make a bloody peep about human rights or elections to them. And it certainly isn't as if the citizens of Middle Eastern nations don't notice this disparity. Sigh. Anyhow, hope you enjoyed my ravings and I look forward to class with all.
Anthony