This is a joint initiative of the School of Politics and International Relations and the Department of Political and Social Change in the Coral Bell School of the College of Asia and the Pacific.

Affiliated with the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Conference Group (APSA), the Qualitative Research Network, ANU (QRN) and the Centre for Law Arts and Humanities (CLAH).

The aim of this collaborative cross-disciplinary network is to raise the profile of Interpretivist Social Science at the ANU and within the Australian academy, create collaboration opportunities for scholars at the ANU whose approaches to research are interpretivist or critical, broadly conceived and create the capacity for HDR training and engagement with interpretivist methods. The network will encourage interpretivist and critical scholars to engage with one another across disciplinary divides, and disseminate their work to a larger audience of interested interlocutors. It will do this both through its own auspices and in affiliation with the Interpretive Method and Methodology group (APSA), the Qualitative Research Network (ANU) and the Centre for Law Arts and Humanities. It will also work to support, mentor and train HDR students using interpretivist or critical methods, through seminars, workshops, conferences, master classes and informal gatherings, and online interaction.

This network therefore invites:

• cross-disciplinary engagement on the question of interpretation, method and the politics of knowledge production;
• engagement with, reflection upon and interrogation of the long tradition of interpretive methods and hermeneutics across the social sciences and the various epistemological and methodological debates that have occurred in the 20^th Century;
• engagement with, reflection upon and interrogation of how to understand these debates and the tradition of critique in the context of the big data revolution, the impact of communications technologies on all aspects of social and political life and the shift toward populism and ethno-nationalism;
• engagement with, reflection upon and interrogation of the canon of texts on Interpretive Political Science and Social Science that have emerged in recent decades by scholars who deliberately frame their research in this way, and scholars who do interpretive work but don’t adopt its rubric;
• engagement with, reflection upon and interrogation of the canon of texts on Interpretive Political Science and Social Science by scholars who find this framing useful and those who are critical of ‘method’ per se; and,
• engagement, training and support for HDR students who either use or would like to explore the relevance of interpretive and critical social science for their research projects.

Please contact April Biccum and/or Nick Cheesman if you would like to alert the network of any ANU activity that is methodologically interpretivist in orientation; submit proposals for seminars, working papers, master classes; or become a member or affiliate.