Sources and Methods

Our guest this week is Naheed Mustafa, a freelance writer and award-winning broadcaster based in Toronto. She has reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Canada for a variety of international publications. She is also a prolific twitter user and (for those who already know Naheed on twitter), author of the #commuterchronicles.Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Will McCants, a fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy and director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World at the Brookings Institution. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins University and has served in government and think tank positions related to Islam, the Middle East and terrorism, including as State Department senior adviser for countering violent extremism. He is the author of "Founding Gods, Inventing Nations: Conquest and Culture Myths from Antiquity to Islam" and the forthcoming "The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State".Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com. We also wish to thank Tinderbox (eastgate.com/tinderbox) for sponsoring this week's episode.

Our guest this week was Leah Farrall, a Research Associate in Counter Terrorism at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre (USSC) and also a Senior Lecturer in Security Studies at Massey University. Leah was formerly a senior Counter Terrorism Intelligence Analyst with the Australian Federal Police and served as the organization’s al Qaeda subject matter specialist while working on a range of international and domestic counter terrorism investigations. She also served as the senior Intelligence Analyst on the Jakarta Regional Cooperation Team (JRCT) in Indonesia and at the Australian Federal Police’s Forward Operating Post after the second Bali bombings. She holds a PhD in Politics, and her work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications. She has just published a book together with Mustafa Hamid entitled 'The Arabs at War in Afghanistan'. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com. We also wish to thank Tinderbox (eastgate.com/tinderbox) for sponsoring this week's episode.

Our guest for the show is Aaron Zelin, founder of the essential resource and website, jihadology.net. Aaron is a fellow at The Washington Institute, where his research focuses on how jihadist groups are adjusting to the new political environment in the era of Arab uprisings and Salafi politics in countries transitioning to democracy. He received his M.A. in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from Brandeis University; and a B.A. from Indiana University. We discuss how to study and understand countries at several steps removed, why learning languages is essential, and how he found a way to stand out from the crowd within policy circles.Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest for the show is Andrew Abbott, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Sociology Department. He studied at Harvard and the University of Chicago for his undergraduate and graduate degrees, and also taught for 13 years at Rutgers University. He is well-known for his theoretical analysis of professions and their development and is the author of six books and some seventy articles and chapters. We spoke to him about research methods, writing and the state of 'the academy'. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Gregory Johnsen, author of "The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia". Johnsen went to Jordan with the Peace Corps and first went to Yemen on a Fulbright Fellowship. In addition to his book, he has also written for the New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy and others. He holds a BA in History, an MA in Near Eastern studies from the University of Arizona and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. He was the 2013 - 2014 Michael Hastings National Security Reporting Fellow at Buzzfeed. We talk to Gregory about writing books, learning languages and how to get to know complicated places. Show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

Our guest this week is Paul Clammer. Paul writes travel guidebooks for a living, and he has contributed to over two dozen guidebooks for Lonely Planet, including acting as the head author on their Morocco and Dominican Republic & Haiti guidebooks, as well as covering tougher destinations such as Pakistan, Nigeria and Mauritania for them. He also was the driving force for their 2007 Afghanistan Lonely Planet guide. We discuss the art of travel writing, the market for guidebooks as well as the ethics of tourism in places like Afghanistan. Full show notes are available at sourcesandmethods.com

This week we're joined by Louie Palu, a photographer who has spent long periods documenting Kandahar (Afghanistan) and Guantánamo Bay. Suzanne Schroder also joins the episode as a guest host. We talk about photography, documenting history and the challenges of journalism.Show notes, as always, are available at sourcesandmethods.com

This week we talk with Molly Crabapple, an artist and writer who has worked in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Dhabi's migrant labor camps, and with rebels in Syria. Crabapple is a columnist for VICE, and has written for publications including The New York Times, Paris Review, and Vanity Fair.We talk about art, journalism and the tensions that can exist when your work traverses the boundaries between the two. Molly also shares some advice for those who hope for a career in art.Shownotes available at sourcesandmethods.com

This week we catch up with Jason Lyall, an associate professor at Yale University (USA). His research explores the dynamics and effects of violence in conventional and guerrilla wars, with emphasis on Afghanistan and Russia’s Northern Caucasus (particularly Chechnya). His work draws on diverse methods, ranging from historical and cross-national comparisons to field, survey and “natural” experiments.

We get into the weeds about the use of polling to understand other countries, the academic work he's published so far and the ways he gets himself to keep producing useful work. Full shownotes can be found at sourcesandmethods.com