From Case to Phenomenon: Incorporating the Multi-Sited Approach in Political Science

In the fall of 2022, the three of us gathered in a seminar room armed with a whiteboard, a marker, and our shared dissatisfaction. As doctoral researchers in political science, the methodological tools introduced to us raised more questions than answers. In particular, the landscape of our research, marked by phenomena spanning diverse socio-cultural contexts such as migration and transnational social movements, increasingly felt at odds with the stringent confines of standard case comparison methods. Studying phenomena across different locations pushed us to depart from John Stuart Mill’s (1843) conventional controlled case comparison and look for ways to overcome the limits of methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002).