The Methods Café is an innovation of Professors Dvora Yanow and Peri Schwartz-Shea, intending to bring together people with methods questions in an informal setting with light refreshments. In this 20th year of the Methods Café, and after long hiatus, we are reconvening the Methods Café at the International Political Science Association in Seoul.
Starting a project? Thinking about methods design? Questions about managing fieldwork? Ethics questions? Need guidance to respond to journals? Strategies to convince your committee? The Methods Café is for you!
There will be five specialists in interpretive methods available at the Methods Café, each with their own table where a placard identifies their topic. Please find brief introductions of the specialists and descriptions and their topics below. Everyone is welcome to visit the Café, arrive at any point in our session, stay as long as you like, and move from table to table. All questions are good questions.
Bring your coffee or tea and we’ll supply the cookies. Come join the interpretive methods conversation!
The event will take place in room 311AB.
Speakers include:
Participatory Action Research/socially and community-engaged research
Ethel Tungohan, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Most of my research has been undertaken in partnership with migrant grassroots organizations and NGOs. For a few of these projects, my research patterns and I use methods that prioritize community needs as much as academic theorizing. These methods include but are not limited to participatory action research (PAR) and critical ethnography. I would be happy to talk to people about ways to advance socially and community-engaged research in social and political science. Questions that we can discuss can include the following: mechanisms through which research partnerships can be developed with community partners, the importance of having a research protocol that outlines roles and responsibilities, and the mechanics of PAR.
Fieldwork Ethics, Dangerous Fieldwork, and Audiovisual Methods
Michelle Weitzel, International Relations and Political Science at The Graduate Institute, Geneva (IHEID), Switzerland
My research examines how states and other powerful actors use affect to govern, and the political outcomes of these strategies. I have done fieldwork in Israel and Palestine, France, and Morocco, and archival research on Algeria. I approach all my research with an ethnographic sensibility and would be happy to discuss any aspect of fieldwork, from nuts and bolts issues related to IRBs and beyond, to navigating security under authoritarian regimes, to broader ethical concerns. My focus on affect also centers questions of what might be gained by approaching our research through aesthetics and incorporating sensory data that goes beyond text—themes I would also be happy to discuss.
Interviewing, Managing Interview Data, Positionality and Reflexivity
Robin A. Harper, York College/CUNY Graduate Center, New York, USA
I have been conducting fieldwork in a host of interview-based, ethnography, participant-observation, investigative, etc. research projects in US and international contexts for about two decades. I'm happy to talk to Methods Café participants about issues related to interviewing: developing good questions and becoming a better listener, working within time constraints, practical issues in scheduling and managing data, and contending with how your personal and ascriptive characteristics can shape engagement with your interview partners (‘interviewees’) and inform your research outputs.
Critical Discourse Analysis and Historical Research
Madalena Meyer Resende, NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal
At the Methods Café, I’m interested in discussing how to integrate critical discourse analysis with contextual historical interpretation. I will be exploring how texts both reflect and constitute political and religious imaginaries, while remaining grounded in their institutional, ideological, and historical settings. This involves balancing close textual reading—attuned to rhetorical strategies and discursive patterns—with attention to the socio-political contexts that shape and are shaped by these texts. I’d like to exchange ideas about how to navigate this methodological tension and how others reconcile theoretical assumptions from discourse analysis with the demands of historical research.
Discourse Analysis, Social Media and Large Datasets
Emilia Palonen, University of Helsinki, Finland
Emilia Palonen and her colleagues at Helsinki Hub on Emotions Populism and polarisation have been developing an Anarcho-Computational Discourse Theoretical (AC/DT) methodology to integrate postfoundational discourse theory with computational methods to explore how political meanings are constructed, contested and transformed across platforms such as Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. The group has worked particularly in relation to the research on social media during the pandemic and the short video platforms European Parliamentary elections. They also have been generating an LLM pipeline we generated to support our post-API research. She is happy to discuss methods to address meaning-making in fast digital environments from an instrumentalist and interpretivist perspective, and the combination of computational and qualitative methodologies in large datasets for interpretive approaches politics.
Feel free to reach out if you want to know more about the Methods Café, rharper@york.cuny.edu