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date: 13 February 2025

Interpretivism: Definitions, Trends, and Emerging Pathslocked

Interpretivism: Definitions, Trends, and Emerging Pathslocked

  • Marcos S. ScausoMarcos S. ScausoQuinnipiac University

Summary

Since the 1980s, scholars disputing the hegemony of positivist methodologies in the social sciences began to promote interpretive approaches, creating discussions about methodological pluralism and enabling a slow, and often resisted, proliferation of theoretical diversity. Within this context, interpretivism acquired a specific definition, which encompassed meaning-centered research and problematized positivist ideas of truth correspondence, objectivity, generalization, and linear processes of research. By critiquing the methodological assumptions that were often used to regard positivism as a superior form of social science, interpretive scholars were confronted with questions about their own knowledge production and its validity. If meanings could be separated from objects, phenomena and identities could be constructed, and observers could not step out of their situated participation within these constructions, how could scholars validate their knowledge?

Despite important agreements about the centrality, characteristics, and intelligibility of meaning, interpretivists still disagree about the different ways in which this question can be answered. On one side of the spectrum, some scholars of poststructuralism, feminism, green theory, queer theory, and postcolonialism aim to renounce methodological foundations of objectification and validation. This opens the possibility of empirically researching epistemic assumptions, which scholars interpret either as components of dominant discourses or as alternatives that create possibilities of thinking about more multiplicity, difference, and diversity. On the other side, a number of constructivist, feminist, postcolonial, and critical scholars attach meanings to social structures and view their interpretations as reflecting parts of intersubjectivities, lifeworlds, superstructures, cultures, and so on. Since they use their own strategies to validate interpretations, and they solve this methodological question, the scholars on this side of the spectrum either tend to pursue empirical research that does not analyze epistemic dimensions, or they generalize particular experiences of domination. This disagreement influences not only the kind of empirical research that scholars pursue but also creates some differences in the definitions of key interpretive notions such as power relations, reflexivity, and the role of empirical evidence.

Within these agreements and disagreements, interpretivism created an overarching methodological space that allowed for the proliferation of theoretical approaches. Since the 1980s, poststructuralist, feminist, constructivist, neo-Marxist, postcolonial, green, critical, and queer theories have sought to expand the study of meanings, uncover aspects of domination, listen to previously marginalized voices, unveil hidden variations, and highlight alternatives. This diversifying process continues to unfold, contributing to the analysis of these methodological questions even beyond binary understandings of only two epistemic tendencies. Many authors also deploy these perspectives to highlight diverse cases, voices, ways of knowing, struggles, oppressions, imaginaries, temporalities, and so on. For example, relational approaches contribute in international relations by creating new transdisciplinary debates and promoting other possibilities of thinking, being, feeling, and knowing global politics.

Subjects

  • International Relations Theory
  • Qualitative Political Methodology

Updated in this version

Updated and revised.

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