The IMM Group is seeking proposals for the 2021 APSA Annual Meeting!
The call for proposals for APSA 2021 has been extended to January 28, 2021.
The Interpretive Methodologies and Methods related group provides a forum for the discussion of methodological and methods issues related to interpretive research, as well as issues arising from their position within contemporary political and other social sciences.
Interpretive methodologies and methods are informed by philosophical traditions such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, pragmatism, and symbolic interaction. Notwithstanding their differences, these traditions presuppose that the meaningfulness and historical contingency of human life differentiates the social realm from the natural one, with implications for how research is conducted. Although diverse in their modes of identifying or generating and analyzing data, research processes in the interpretive tradition are typically characterized by:
- an empirical and normative prioritizing of the lived experience of people in research settings;
- a focus on the meaning(s) of acts, events, interactions, language, and physical artifacts to multiple stakeholders; and
- a sensitivity to the historically- and/or situationally-contingent, often-contested character of such meanings.
We call for paper, panel, and roundtable proposals that explore interpretive methodological issues or that apply interpretive methods (e.g., political ethnography, grounded theory in Strauss’s more phenomenological tradition, discourse analysis) in ways that demonstrate their “comparative advantage” for empirical research across all subfields of political science. Especially welcome are proposals that reflect on how political science itself is situated in the webs of meaning and historical context that it studies.
For further information about the APSA 2021 Annual Meeting please visit the 2021 APSA Annual Meeting homepage or see the IMM @ APSA page.
Interested presenters may contact the 2021 IMM program chair, Natasha Behl (Natasha.Behl@asu.edu).
