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.
Seminars are on Fridays, 12 - 1pm, Australian Eastern Time (Standard/Daylight) unless otherwise indicated.
Some past IMC seminars videos are available online.
Upcoming events
How Cases Speak to One Another: Using Translation to Rethink Generalization in Political Science Research (Nicholas Rush Smith, CUNY)
12–1pm 2 May 2025
Regardless of method, political scientists often seek to develop arguments that can be generalized to a population of cases. But is this the only way to think...Out of Harm’s Way: How Australian Music Venues and DIY Events Make Safe Spaces (Emma Crocker, ANU)
12–1pm 9 May 2025
Australian music venues, bars, and DIY (do-it-yourself) music events post ‘safe space’ policies to walls, Instagram pages, and bathroom doors. These policies...Historical ethnography and the study of elites (Rod Rhodes, Southampton)
5–6pm 23 May 2025
In principle, it is possible to observe British elites in action, but such access is rare. Therefore, Rhodes’s study of court politics is not ethnographic in...Conceptualising a case, casing a concept? Two faces of global citizenship (April Biccum, ANU)
12–1pm 13 Jun 2025
This talk addresses the insights to be gained through a comparison of the use of a politically constitutive concept that delineates unlike but connected ‘cases...Past events
What’s to know about politics? Positivism and tradition in Australian undergraduate program and course descriptions (William Howe, ANU)
7 Mar 2025
How do Australian universities today communicate to potential and new students what constitutes fundamental knowledge in the study of politics? In this talk I...Political Science as a Dependent Variable: The National Science Foundation and the Shaping of a Discipline (Tamir Moustafa, SFU)
27 Sep 2024
In this session, Tamir Moustafa will discuss his current research, which draws on the historical records of the American Political Science Association (APSA)...States of Subsistence: Methodological Reflections from the Bakery (José Ciro Martínez, York)
23 Aug 2024
On any given day in Jordan, more than nine million residents eat approximately ten million loaves of khubz 'arabi—the slightly leavened flatbread known to many...Decolonising minority citizenship: promises of an ethnographic sensibility (Sagnik Dutta, OP Jindal Global University)
2 Aug 2024
Who is a minority? The answer to this seemingly innocuous question is not obvious. Colonial constructions of the minority were shaped by racialised assumptions...How to Do Interpretive Research: Insights for PhD Students and Early Career Researchers in the Social Sciences (Colette Einfeld & Helen Sullivan, ANU)
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...Making al-Qa’ida legible: Interpretive methods, secrets, and mess (Sarah Phillips, Sydney)
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...Interpretive Political Science as a Tool for Understanding Policy Making in Practice (Sarah Ball, Melbourne)
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...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...