ISA-NE Graduate Student Workshop

International Studies Association-Northeast announces a one-day graduate workshop on “Interpretive and Relational Research Methodologies” to be held on 4 October, 2008, in Baltimore, MD.

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 meta-theoretical 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 fourth annual workshop aims to address this lacuna by bringing  together faculty and graduate students in a pedagogical environment.  The workshop will focus on two broad 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; 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 two afternoon sessions 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:

• Amy Skonieczny, San Francisco State University
• Kamal Sadiq, University of California-Irvine
• Renee Marlin-Bennett, Johns Hopkins University
• Rose Shinko, Bucknell University

The workshop will be held in conjunction with the International  Studies Association-Northeast’s annual conference, which will take  place from 3-4 October in Baltimore, MD. 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: ptjack@american.edu. Applications must be received by 15 June 2008.