One of the benefits of working in an interdisciplinary field is the opportunity to witness how different academic communities view one another. From the position of a political scientist, I commonly hear say, historians or anthropologists summarize what they understand political scientists to believe. Having done a fair bit of participant observation within the tribe of the tsitneics-lacitilop, those descriptions are often frustrating, describing something akin to what I understand were debates within the discipline during the 1990s. It is now 2016.
Personal frustrations aside, such outdated or erroneous views of what “political scientists believe or argue about” are problematic for a couple of more general reasons. For one, they may stand in the way of interdisciplinary collaboration by proposing that political scientists do not study certain things or work in certain ways. They also encourage fence-building between disciplines, by portraying disciplines as having settled debates, doing work that…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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