"Interpretive and Relational Research Methodologies”
A One-Day Graduate Student Workshop
Sponsored by the
International Studies Association-Northeast
3 November, 2012; Baltimore, MD, USA

The field of International Studies has always been interdisciplinary, with scholars drawing on a
variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques of data collection and data analysis as they
seek to produce knowledge about global politics. Recent debates about epistemology and
ontology have advanced the methodological openness of the field, albeit mainly at a metatheoretical
level. And while interest in techniques falling outside of well-established
comparative and statistical modes of inference has been sparked, opportunities for scholars to
discuss and flesh out the operational requirements of these alternative routes to knowledge
have been relatively infrequent.

This eighth annual workshop aims to address this lacuna by bringing together faculty and
graduate students in a pedagogical environment. The workshop will focus broadly on research
approaches that differ in various ways from statistical and comparative methodologies:
interpretive methodologies, which highlight the grounding of analysis in actors’ lived
experiences and thus produce knowledge phenomenologically and hermeneutically; holistic
case studies and forms of process-tracing that do not reduce to the measurement of intervening
variables; and relational methodologies, which concentrate on how social networks and
intersubjective discursive processes concatenate to generate outcomes.
In the two morning sessions, four established scholars, whose work utilizes such approaches as
ethnography, discourse analysis, historical criticism, and linguistic analysis, will talk about
precisely how they do their empirical work. These tutorial sessions will be followed by an
extended afternoon session in which graduate student participants will have an opportunity to
receive feedback from the established scholars and from their fellow workshop participants.

This year’s faculty participants include:

Derek Beach, Aarhus University
Shampa Biswas, Whitman College
Ian Bruff, Loughborough University
Nicholas Onuf, Florida International University

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the International Studies Association-
Northeast’s annual conference, which will take place from 2-3 November in Baltimore, MD, USA.
Although all attendees of the conference may come to the workshop sessions, the 6-8 graduate
students officially participating in the workshop will have the opportunity to receive detailed
feedback and specialized instruction in the methodologies under discussion.

Graduate students interested in participating in the workshop should send their c.v. and a letter
describing their current research project to Patrick Thaddeus Jackson by e-mail:
[log in to unmask] Applications must be received by 22 June 2012.