With the coming of age of the field, Critical and Interpretive Policy has gradually become mainstreamed into existing political science and public policy venues. Please contact us at contact@ipa.science if you would like to alert the network of any policy or political science activity that is methodologically interpretivist in orientation such as conferences, panels, master classes, summerschools or courses.
Interpretivist Methods in the Social Sciences
Where: Australian National University
When: First semester, annually
Who: Dr April Biccum
Course information
The 20th Century witnessed profound challenges to classical knowledge paradigms in the social sciences. Approaches to the study of society and politics diversified. Critical, social, post-structuralist, post-colonial and ‘post-modern’ interventions drew attention to structures and practices of meaning-making and to the relationship between knowledge paradigms and power. Interpretivist scholars made substantial contributions to developments in the theories of language and communication, and in the ‘second order observation’ involved in varieties of discourse analysis. Scholars across a variety of disciplines are working in interpretivist traditions that depart from the positivist paradigm adopted constructivist, thick descriptive, inductive and context-based approaches to assess, explain and understand sites and assemblages of ‘meaning making’.
The aim of this course is to introduce students to the long tradition of Interpretivist Social Science, and to invite them to consider how its theoretical claims might inform their own epistemological and methodological decisions. The course offers practical training for students interested in modes of enquiry into the increasingly communicative, media driven, institutional and text based world in which we live that are not covered by conventional quantitative and qualitative approaches. In addition to equipping students with skills for interpretivist research design, data generation, analysis, inference, interpretation and critique, it addresses fundamental questions about the logic, conduct and significance of social scientific inquiry and the politics of knowledge in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
Learning outcomes:
Upon successful completion, students will have the knowledge and skills to:
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Interpretive Political Science Intensive Course
Where: National Centre for Research Methods, University of Southampton
When: Annually
Who: Professor Rod Rhodes, Professor Jack Corbett, Dr John Boswell and Dr Tamara Metze
Course information
Many students in the social sciences, especially in political science, public policy and public administration who decide to undertake qualitative or interpretive research feel they are unqualified to do so. They express deep-seated confusion about the reliability and generalizability of data, results, and conclusions. They feel that interpretive approaches lack the type of specialised training that has become commonplace in quantitative political science. The aim of this course is to redress this gap. We will equip students with a toolkit that will enable them to both conceptualise and execute an interpretive project.
The course covers:
By the end of the course participants will:
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Every year MethodsNet runs various workshops as well as a Summerschool and a Winterschool. Courses deal with all stages of a project and cover positivist and interpretative perspectives. You can take courses on a standalone basis or combine them over one or more events to provide a fuller, more comprehensive course of training. Main courses run for one-week at Winter School, and for one-week or two-weeks at Summer School. For more information, see https://www.methodsnet