IMC Seminar Series
Contacts
The Interpretation, Method and Critique (IMC) Seminar Series promotes and celebrates work in interpretive and critical methodologies and methods in the social sciences. It is interdisciplinary and welcoming of all research that places intersubjective meaning-making at the centre of social scientific inquiry, or that identifies with one or more traditions in critical theory and praxis.
The Seminar Series is among the activities of the IMC network, a joint initiative of the ANU’s School of Politics and International Relations, and the Department of Political and Social Change. The network also organises conferences and workshops, classes for undergraduate and graduate research students, podcasts, and more. Visit the IMC webpage for details.
IMC Seminars are on Fridays, 12 - 1pm, Australian Eastern Time (Standard/Daylight) unless otherwise indicated. Not all seminars are recorded. A list of recorded seminars and links is here.
Want to stay informed? Join and contribute to the IMC mailing list.
Interested to present a talk? Keen to know more about the IMC? Write to the convenors:
April Biccum - april.biccum@anu.edu.au
Nick Cheesman - nick.cheesman@anu.edu.au
Upcoming events
Interpretive Political Science as a Tool for Understanding Policy Making in Practice - Sarah Ball
12–1pm 19 Apr 2024
Policy-making is an ongoing process of negotiation and mediation of meaning but this side of policy often goes unnoticed, made up of ‘hundreds of practical...Making al-Qa’ida legible: Interpretive methods, secrets, and mess - Sarah Phillips
12–1pm 3 May 2024
This seminar will explore two broad, but ultimately unreconcilable, understandings of what al-Qa’ida in Yemen ‘really is’: one legible, organisationally...How to Do Interpretive Research: Insights for PhD Students and Early Career Researchers in the Social Sciences - Colette Einfeld & Helen Sullivan
12–1pm 10 May 2024
Interpretive research unfolds differently to conventional dissertations and research projects that many ‘how to books’ are aimed at. This presentation draws on...Interpreting Australia's International Relations: Settler Colonialism, Empire, and Foreign Policy - Federica Caso
12–1pm 24 May 2024
The framework of settler colonialism is becoming increasingly established in the critical literature on Australia, but the scholarship on foreign policy and...Past events
Interpretive International Relations: Narrative and Explanation (Ian Hall, Griffith University)
24 Nov 2023
Interpretivists hold that the social world is a world of meaning. They maintain that social behaviour is best explained in terms of the meanings that actions...Piracy, Punishment, and Structural Hermeneutics (Matt Norton, University of Oregon)
27 Oct 2023
Hermeneutics is one of the wellsprings of interpretive methods in contemporary social science. The space between biblical interpretation and the interpretation...Statehood à la Carte in the Caribbean and the Pacific: Secession, Regionalism, and Postcolonial Politics (Jack Corbett, Monash University)
1 Sep 2023
This talk considers the role of comparison in interpretive research by applying Boswell et al’s (2019) approach to how leaders in the Caribbean and Pacific...Beyond the Lines: An Ethnohistorical Approach to Studying Violence and Collective Meaning in Social Networks (Sarah Parkinson, John Hopkins University)
28 Jul 2023
Beyond the Lines explores the social underpinnings of rebel adaptation and resilience. How do rebel groups cope with crises such as repression, displacement,...Book Discussion — Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia (Anastasia Shesterinina)
26 May 2023
Drawing on nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with participants and nonparticipants in the war in Abkhazia collected over eight months of immersive...CANCELLED - Is Queer an Interpretive Method? (Cai Wilkinson)
12 May 2023
This seminar has been cancelled. Cai Wilkinson is an Associate Professor in International Relations, Deakin University. Cai's research focuses on societal...A Decolonial Feminist Politics of Fieldwork: Centering Community, Reflexivity, and Loving Accountability (Laura J. Shepherd and Colleagues)
28 Apr 2023
International Studies scholarship has benefitted from insights from Anthropology, Peace and Conflict Studies, Geography, and other disciplines to craft a...Genealogy as Method: Historicising Political Subjectivities and the Political Unconscious (Adele Webb)
24 Mar 2023
Within the political science scholarship on democracy, there is a modest but growing concern about the need to make more complex our understandings of citizens...What is interpretivist interviewing? (Frederic Schaffer)
10 Mar 2023
This talk explores the promise of interpretivist interviewing for political science. That promise is to elucidate, up-close and self-reflectively, how people...The Interpretive Aspect of all Social Science Methods (John Dryzek)
2 Dec 2022
Philosopher of science Karl Popper (who believed in objective causal explanation) argued in The Logic of Scientific Discovery that observations in science are...
