You may have noticed discussions on #AcademicTwitter regarding how studies in the US are written as though generalizable for the world. This is not uncommon: that’s the training that many are exposed to, focusing populations that are what in psychology is termed, WEIRD. Participants are mostly Western, Educated, from Industrialized, Rich and Democratic countries. Often times, scholars from the Global South find themselves having to justify their choice of case studies while scholars in the US or Europe write about broad trends without specifying that their research project draws on a sample of students in Poughkeepsie, New York, USA. (I am, of course, being a bit facetious but my general point stands).
These authors find a general question that is relevant to multiple literatures or to broader debates, and THEN use a case study to illustrate their response.
The first sentence I didn’t highlight sets the broader literatures that this paper contributes to. In yellow, I highlight pic.twitter.com/GnYyVjZFUN
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) April 20, 2022
… how the author’s choice of case study helps them showcase the value of one single case study in understanding the complexities of multiple methods. In blue highlight, you can see the broad, general questions in the literature that their specific case study answers. I find that this approach to writing a paper, where the answer to broader (global) questions is highlighted with one or more case studies, makes a convincing case for studies in countries of the Global South to be used to speak to the larger bodies of literature.
Hope this helps.
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