Grain of Sand Award Winner 2010: Bud Duvall
Winner: Bud Duvall (University of Minnesota)
Bud Duvall. Brilliant, impressive, important scholar. He made a mid-career change from being a cutting-edge quantifier/modeler to (for lack of a better term) a post-positivist orientation. He has long, long, long struggled to make an important space for critical, non-positivist, qualitative work against considerable odds at Minnesota, where he created and sustained the "Minnesota School" of scholars – an invisible college of his students that includes Tarak Barkawi (Cambridge, UK), Michael Barnett (Minnesota), Roxanne Doty (Arizona State), Mark Laffey (LSE), Himadeep Muppidi, Jutta Weldes (Bristol, UK), and Alex Wendt (OSU). He has placed his students around the world, ensuring that the current generation of students has mentors, too. He has been a big supporter of the work of many non-Minnesotans, as well, and he gets extremely high marks for being one of the most nurturing and mentoring presences in the IR field, even to people who were not his students and even to those who do not always find the inspiration he does in a lot of contemporary post-Marxist scholarship. . . but Bud is more than willing to have that debate/conversation.
He is extremely erudite – “one of the smartest people in the IR field.” He is the type of scholar who can read your half-baked paper and tell you what you’re really trying to say far better than you had a clue about it yourself. He requires and inspires students to become thoroughly trained not only in Marx but also in post-Marxist interpretive social theory. He has always maintained a central concern with power, with the stakes of using power in one way versus another. He is a force who has stayed true to his social theory roots, moving from Gramsci and Foucault to Althusser, Said, and many others.
Drawing combined inspiration from the opening lines of William Blake's ‘Auguries of Innocence’ and Wislawa Szymborska's ‘View with a Grain of Sand,’ the Grain of Sand Award honors a scholar whose contributions demonstrate creative and sustained engagement with questions of enduring political importance from an interpretive perspective. Echoing Szymborska's "We call it a grain of sand," the award underscores the centrality of meaning making in both the constitution and study of the political; drawing on Blake's "To see a world in a grain of sand," the award honors the capacity of interpretive scholarship to embody and inspire imaginative theorizing, the intentional cultivation of new lines of sight through an expansion of literary and experiential resources, and the nourishing of a playfulness of mind so necessary to the vitality of social science.
