How do you define "culture" in CR/IR ? (researchers' or students' perspectives)

Hi Bee,

I think that in when researchers set forth to do CR/IR, they should first of all define which perspective of culture they take. We all know that culture can be and has already been defined differently. Any researcher has to provide an operational definition of culture that is adopted in the research framework used.

Also, to answer your question whether culture will be defined from the researchers’ or students’ perspectives, I think that this depends on the focus of the researcher. What does the researcher want to do exactly? Is the research focusing on the broader notion of culture being national or ethnic? And in this case I doubt that we can reach results that are representative of national/ethnic cultures. In both case there is no room for homogeneity and I have the impression that researchers are inclined to look for and find some homogeneous trends which I doubt exist. Even if we adopt the stance of a small culture such as that of age, gender, etc… I think that it is still difficult to find trends. When doing research, we may have some expectations while research is all about expecting the unexpected by focusing on students’ cultures.