Research Digest No. 2
APSA Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Research Digest
Introducing Issue No. 2 of a new resource for scholars using interpretive approaches to study politics!
The APSA IMM Research Digest a quarterly round-up of articles drawing on empirical interpretive methods that are published in political science and field-adjacent journals. For details on the Digest’s goals, ethos, and compilation method, check out Issue No. 1 here. It contains methods-based and methods-applied articles from 2025 across a spectrum of interpretive approaches, research clusters, and regions that we hope serve as a cutting-edge research and teaching resource. And please share in your networks!
In this issue, we’re glad to include several (self-)submissions from readers. Along with our usual ten articles we include two bonus “state-of-the-art” pieces that assess research trends in subfields where interpretive methods are prominent: one from Annelies Moors on ethnography and epistemic diversity in an age of institutional surveillance and one from Jennifer Piscopo on the state of gender and LGBTQIA+ scholarship in leading political science journals. As always, articles are listed alphabetically by author rather than ranked and include a link to the piece. We aim for the Digest collectively to be representative across demographics, professional level, journal ranking, and region/subfield focus.
Please send your suggestions for recent articles (2025–present), along with any other suggestions for the Digest, to Lisel Hintz at Liselhintz1@gmail.
Happy reading, teaching, and citing!
IMM Research Digest No. 2 (March 2026)
Bonus Research on the State of the Art
Moors, Annelies. Doing Ethnography: Institutional Surveillance and the Struggle for Epistemic Diversity. (Cornell University Press, 2026).
Abstract:
In recent decades, academic research has come under increasing institutional surveillance and control. Doing Ethnography traces the rise of ethical review procedures, open science mandates, and integrity protocols, examining how these developments shape ethnographic practice. It critically explores key themes such as doing no harm, informed consent, transparency, anonymity, researcher positionality, and the sharing of field notes. The book argues that contemporary academia often enforces universal, bureaucratic forms of regulatory ethics. Rooted in quantitative and (post-)positivist paradigms, these frameworks frequently clash with ethnography's interpretive, intersubjective, and immersive fieldwork approach. In response, it calls for a situated, context-sensitive ethics of care attuned to the specificities of ethnographic engagement. Ultimately, Doing Ethnography offers both a critical reflection on institutional power and a plea to recognize and sustain the epistemic diversity on which academic freedom depends.
Piscopo, Jennifer. “Still Marginalized? Gender and LGBTQIA+ Scholarship in Top Political Science Journals,” PS: Political Science and Politics, published online 13 January 2025.
Abstract: Is political science research that explores gender and LGBTQIA+ politics still underrepresented in the discipline’s top journals? This article examines publication trends in gender research and LGBTQIA+ research in five top political science journals, between 2017 and 2023 (inclusive). I find that gender research and LGBTQIA+ research together account for 5% to 7% of published research in the selected top journals; however, most of this research is on gender politics rather than LGBTQIA+ politics. Overall, gender research and LGBTQIA+ research largely appears in top journals when it conforms to disciplinary norms about methods and author gender. The majority of published gender and LGBTQIA+ research is quantitative. Men author gender research at rates almost three times their membership in the American Political Science Association’s Women, Gender, and Politics research section and also are overrepresented as authors of LGBTQIA+ research. This study suggests that editorial teams’ signaling influences which manuscripts land at which journals.
Digest Articles
Anderl, Felix and Mariam Salehi. “Dangerous Arenas: Why Activists Struggle for Change in Technocratic Institutions,” Journal of International Relations and Development, published online 30 July 2025.
Abstract: Emancipatory activism is often channelled into institutions. While this can be interpreted as a success, it may also demobilize activism. The growing literature on the co-optation of emancipatory struggles and the technocratic exercise of power in transnational politics explains these dynamics with the depoliticizing character of institutions: struggles are depoliticized through institutionalization. Participation in institutional politics is therefore a dangerous undertaking for activists. But why do activists, who are aware of these depoliticizing effects and their corresponding trade-offs, still decide to participate? Bringing recent studies of technocracy in transnational politics into conversation with political theory of activism, we argue that activists in struggles such as social inequality, environmentalism and transformative justice are aware of institutional depoliticization and consciously navigate dangerous arenas in their activism. Based on aspirational politics, they combine incremental and radical visions for change. Such participation is best described with a “perspective of investment”. We conceptualize activists vis-à-vis the institutions they enter, and classify reasons why they do so. We show for the arenas of economic development and transitional justice that through aspiration even technocratic institutions that stabilize (neo)imperial orders can provide spaces of solidarity, resistance, and visions for a new international order.
Caballero, Guillermo. “Refining the Architect’s Plan: Illegibility, the Black Legislative Context, and a Case for Critical Institutionalism,” Politics, Groups, and Identities (2025) 13(5).
Abstract: Hanes Walton’s Invisible Politics: Black Political Behavior challenges the illegibility of Black political research in mainstream political science by developing a multidimensional framework. In this dialogue, I take up Walton’s call for redefinition by showing the importance of his framework and extending it by combining it with Hancock’s (2007) power thesis for legislative studies and the Black legislative context. Synthesizing these frameworks creates a critical institutionalist framework that makes legible how systems of oppression manifest through the interactions between lawmakers that emerge in the formal institutional process, which forces marginalized lawmakers to appraise the quotidian politics that, in turn, shape how Black lawmakers develop their legislative strategies. In the spirit of redefinition, the second intervention in this dialogue is making a case for moving away from the post-positivist paradigm to an interpretivist paradigm. I argue that the principles of interpretivism allow scholars to be more in register with the Black legislative experience. Walton’s work is canonical to political science especially to legislative studies. What makes Walton crucial for political science is his call to have frameworks that make the Black legislative experience legible while simultaneously allowing us to imagine what is possible to research in Black legislative studies.
Harris, Christina and Julie Radomski. “Methodology Matters: Emplotting Interpretivism in Contemporary Political Science and International Studies,” International Studies Perspectives (2026) 27(3).
Abstract: The visibility and adoption of interpretive research approaches in the post-Perestroika period have increased in the United States, yet common knowledge within political science (PS) and international studies (IS) departments still signals their marginality. This paper stems from the observation that interpretive scholars often share autobiographical narratives or “journey stories” describing how they came to embrace interpretive research despite socio-institutional obstacles. Based on semi-structured interviews and participant observation, it asks: What do the journey stories of both new and established scholars engaged in interpretivism reveal about the sociology of PS and IS academies? Our findings reveal a widespread perception that interpretivism is gaining a foothold in the United States while intimating the spread of neopositivist hegemony, to some degree, to academies abroad. We show how scholars make use of the label “interpretivism” and identify key diffusion pathways responsible for interpretivism’s wider recognition today. In addition, we find that despite shared assumptions of neopositivist hegemony, our interlocutors pursue interpretive research because it provides them with epistemological and experiential congruence. Their journey stories, we argue, point toward an evolving methodological landscape in PS and IS, which in turn shapes what forms of knowledge production are considered legitimate and valuable.
Holmes, Carolyn. “Blending Truth and Lies: Using an Ethnographic Sensibility to Study Online Misinformation,” Perspectives on Politics, published online 24 November 2025.
Abstract: Ethnographic methods of all varieties contend with the idea of the “truth” of accounts and the meanings attached to them, as well as the importance of context in mitigating truth or falseness in how these accounts are presented. Discerning truth from lies and the purpose of both in the context of making meaning in a time and place is at the heart of the ethnographic enterprise. Because powerful images or messages evoke emotional reactions on social media or contributory websites like message boards, the relative accuracy of the representations they make is often less important than their reach and the ways they make and remake “reality” for their audiences. A picture or an image, even one attributed to a context or a meaning wholly independent of the context from which it emerged, becomes part of how people online see or experience an event. The context in which information is presented and the speakers or presenters of this information also condition its uptake and resonance. This paper argues that ethnography is uniquely suited to understand the effects and reach of decontextualized information and the ways it makes meaning, both on- and offline.
Holtzman, Richard. “Still Making It Up as He Goes: Revisiting the Hyper-Rhetorical Presidency in Trump's Second Term,” Fast Capitalism (2025) 22(1).
Abstract: This article revisits the concept of the hyper-rhetorical presidency through an analysis of Donald Trump’s second term, emphasizing his continued reliance on improvisational rhetoric as a governing strategy. Building on prior work that interpreted Trump’s ad hoc communication style as symptomatic of a broader distortion in American governance, this essay situates recent examples—ranging from abrupt policy reversals to outrageous pronouncements—within a developmental trajectory of presidential rhetorical innovation. The analysis demonstrates how Trump’s improvisation reflects and accelerates a decades-long trend toward performativity and appearance over substance, driven by inflated public expectations and a fragmented media environment. By contextualizing Trump’s behavior within this evolving political order, the article argues that the normalization of hyper-rhetorical practices poses profound risks to democratic governance, signaling a “new normal” that increasingly resembles authoritarian patterns of communication.
Lorentzen, Jenny. “Explaining Changes in Women’s Representation in Peace Processes: The Adoption of a Gender Quota in the Agreement Monitoring Committee in Mali,” International Political Science Review, published online 13 March 2025.
Abstract: Dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in peace processes have in recent years received increasing attention in research and among policymakers and practitioners. Much of this attention has focused on inclusion in peace negotiations, whereas inclusion in post-agreement commissions or committee-type institutions has received limited attention despite the key role they play in peacebuilding. This article offers an in-depth exploration and process tracing of the introduction of a gender quota in the Agreement Monitoring Committee in Mali. It argues that changes in women’s representation in post-agreement committees in peace processes become possible when critical actors perform their work in the context of international gender equality norms and women’s mobilization. Based on analysis of documents and interviews with key actors involved in the peace process, it finds that critical actors use political accumulation, collaboration with women’s activists, and altering of the institutional environment to effect gender-based policy changes in peace processes.
Mouhib, Leila. “Towards an Anti-racist Classroom at University? Race, Empire, and International Relations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, published online 11 December 2025.
Abstract: This article aims to critically assess the perpetuation of racism and colonialism in university education, by developing a case study in international relation (IR) programmes. With a perspective rooted in a postcolonial analysis of colonial legacies in the IR system and a decolonial approach of pedagogy, I explore how IRs are taught in Belgium. I employ an interpretive approach using quantitative and qualitative methods, based on a content analysis of programmes and course materials. Findings suggest that both a decolonial approach of the discipline (decolonize the curriculum) and a decolonial approach of the classroom (decolonize pedagogy) are necessary. The commitment to creating an anti-racist space within the university necessarily leads us to go beyond the critical approach of the curriculum to develop a pedagogical approach challenging racial hierarchies inside the classroom itself. However, this commitment is challenged by the institutional settings of the university, an institution embedded in racial capitalism.
Okçuoğlu, Dilan. “Fieldwork in Fragile Borderlands and Conflict Zones: Fluid Positionality and an Ethics of Care,” Global Studies Quarterly (2025) 5(4).
Abstract: Research in conflict-affected areas often relies on rigid insider/outsider binaries and assumptions of researcher objectivity. These frameworks fail to capture the fluid, emotionally charged, and politically embedded nature of identity in fieldwork. This article addresses this gap by developing a framework of fluid positionality and ethics of care, grounded in twelve months of ethnographic research in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands during the 2013–2015 ceasefire. I argue that researcher identity is not static or predetermined but continually shaped through context-specific interactions, social perceptions, and power relations. Rather than treating identity as a fixed attribute—such as ethnicity, nationality, or institutional affiliation—this approach foregrounds its relational and dynamic character. Drawing on feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial traditions, I introduce belonging, vulnerability, and shared knowledge as intermediary concepts that help navigate the ethical, political, and affective complexities of research in contested spaces. Through grounded insights, I show how enduring experiences of violence, state surveillance, and political memory shape not only access and trust but also what can be known, said, and shared. I demonstrate that care—understood as attentiveness, responsiveness, and relational presence—is not merely a moral stance but a methodological imperative. Vulnerability, when embraced with reflexivity, becomes a site of ethical connection rather than a source of risk. By transcending binary thinking, this approach challenges extractive and depoliticized research models, contributing to growing debates in international relations and global studies on epistemic justice, methodological pluralism, and the ethical responsibilities of scholars—particularly those conducting research in their own marginalized or conflict-affected communities.
Özkazanç-Pan, Banu. “Towards a Multiparadigmatic Approach in Critical Cross-Cultural Management Research: Possibilities from Transnational Migration Studies.” International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, published online 6 February 2026.
Abstract: To address calls for multiparadigmatic approaches to critical cross-cultural management (CCM) research, this paper engages with ontological, epistemological, and methodological possibilities from transnational migration studies (TMS). Guided by a mobility lens and adding to existing critical approaches within CCM scholarship that have critiqued Western epistemologies and static cultural models for representation, this paper aims to expand critically-oriented paradigms for research related to ‘people on the move’ and migration experiences. As the ontological premise of TMS, the mobility lens focuses on movement, including experiences of inequality, dispossession, and displacement, and its implications for the formation of social groups that defy categorization and reification through references to national borders. By expanding upon three key concepts from TMS, transnational social fields, scalar notions of being and belonging, and historical conjunctures, the paper contributes to ongoing conversations in critical CCM about ethics and representation beyond methodological nationalism, rethinking the unit of analysis through encounters, and extending the ‘field’ in fieldwork. Building on these potential contributions, the paper engages in three epistemic reflections on ‘ethics on the move’, representation and surveillance, and interdisciplinarity as emergent considerations for future critical qualitative research on people, mobility, culture, and global work in the broader field of management and organization studies (MOS).
Wang, Xiao. “Analysis of Online Civic Engagement and Political Activism in China Through WeChat Group Posts During the COVID-19 Pandemic in 2022,” Discovering Global Society, published online 1 February 2026.
Abstract: This digital ethnographic research aims to examine civic and political activism in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, it observed interactions within a building group, a purchase group in Shanghai, and a class group comprising members in China and overseas in 2022. The results showed that members of the building group often engaged in online and offline activism to ensure access to adequate life necessities and safe COVID-19 testing procedures, as well as protesting stringent and arbitrary COVID-19 measures imposed by lower levels of the administrative units. On the other hand, several dominant, non-Chinese mainland-residing members of the class group levied anti-Chinese government rhetoric and strong opposition to zero-COVID. Despite the class members knowing each other well, many engaged in diffuse discussions that appeared to be venting their frustrations. No one from this group participated in actual political activism or protests during the pandemic. The results demonstrate how shared goals and protests within the boundaries set by the Chinese government can contribute to the success of civic and political activism, potentially improving the livelihoods of citizens in China.
