It's a small world afterall

One of the great pleasures of doing research is connecting the dots in our very small world. Last night I was doing some reading on academic freedom. I was reading a chapter on "Political Mobilization and Resistance to Censorship" (Downs, 2006) when I stumbled across a reference to to a book by political scientist Charles Epp (1998) "Wait, that's Chuck!" I thought. Sure enough, I hunted down the book on WorldCat, found a link to a Google Book preview, and confirmed that the author is someone I know from college, and the spouse of one of my wife's good friends. Wow, small world. But then the world got a little smaller, as I perused the acknowledgements of Dr. Epp's book and saw that he mentioned a political science faculty member that I've served on a committee with here at Baylor. I had this happy little moment, seeing diverse and distant threads from my life come together in this moment of research.

Downs, D. A. (2006). Political Mobilization and Resistance to Censorship. In Academic freedom at the dawn of a new century: How terrorism, governments, and culture wars impact free speech (pp. 61-78). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Epp, C. (1998). The rights revolution: Lawyers, activists, and supreme courts in comparative perspective. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.