Andrew Davison is professor of political science at Vassar College. He is the author of Secularism and Revivalism in Turkey: A Hermeneutic Reconsideration (1998) and Border Thinking on the Edges of the West: Crossing Over the Hellespont (2014), among other publications.
In a discipline where naive empiricism predominates, Close Encounters subverts an entire way of thinking—making clear the universal value of interpretation to the study of politics. As someone long ago inspired by Davison's teaching, it is a gift to see that explosiveness manifested on the page. -- Jason Blakely, author of <i>We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power</i> This book’s proposal of poetical attunement as an ethical orientation for political thought is articulated through brilliant analyses across linguistic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. As a radically novel hermeneutics of data and texts, it promises a new genre of social and political science scholarship. -- Sibel Irzik, author of <i>Deconstruction and the Politics of Criticism</i>