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Julie Novkov, jnovkov@albany.edu (SUNY, Albany)
Kevin Bruyneel, kbruyneel@babson.edu (Babson College)

The Theme for the APSA 2010 Meeting is The Politics of Hard Times: Citizens, Nations, and the International System under Economic Stress. Scholars who work with Interpretive Methodologies and Methods are well situated to make a much needed contribution to this important topic. The Interpretative Methodologies and Methods Group of APSA provides a forum for discussion of method and methodology related to interpretive research.  We encourage paper, panel and roundtable proposals that address the “Politics of Hard Times” through a range of approaches, from the practical to the philosophical, from the particularities of specific methods to strategies for effectively developing and conducting interpretive research to issues in the philosophy of (social) science.  We welcome panels that directly or creatively engage the Conference Theme by means of exploring the intersections between interpretation and various fields of scholarship (e.g., interpretation and IR, interpretation and public policy, interpretation and comparative policy, interpretation and political culture and so on). We also encourage work that overlaps with approaches such as feminist theories, queer theory, critical race theory, and critical legal studies.
Background:  Interpretive methods are informed, explicitly or implicitly, by presuppositions deriving from phenomenology, hermeneutics, and some critical theory (of European (Continental) background) and pragmatism, symbolic interaction, and ethnomethodology (developed in the US). Their concerns often overlap with such other approaches as feminist theories, semiotics, critical race theory, and critical legal studies. Although diverse in their modes of generating and analyzing data, research processes in the interpretive tradition are united by an empirical and normative prioritizing of the lived experience of people in research settings (what anthropologist Clifford Geertz referred to as “experience-near” research, also known as “emic” research), a focus on the meaning(s) of acts, events, interactions, oral and written language, and physical artifacts to multiple stakeholders, and the potential for plurality in meaning-making of those artifacts, leading at times to conflict.