FWS Student Highlights: Alex Kish

I am working with Professor Heba El-Shazli, and we are trying to identify bias in academic sources that cover the Israel/Palestine conflict.  Priscilla Forde and Wesley Richardson are two students who are also contributing to the project.  We search databases for articles that cover the Israel/Palestine conflict, read those articles, and apply a ‘bias checklist’ in order to determine the extent of a source’s bias.  This includes looking at an author’s background and credentials, determining whether or not they write for a publication with an ideological conflict of interest, and identifying flaws in the selection of source materials, analysis, or methodology.  Recently, I learned that software like NVivo can be used for discourse analysis and qualitative data analysis.  I am an incoming student at Case Western Reserve University School of Law’s class of 2019, and I want to specialize in international law.  Researching articles that cover the Israel/Palestine conflict hasn’t just given me a better understanding of the complexities of international relations, but also improved my ability to critically evaluate information and find the merits of arguments on two sides of a dispute.