Interpretivism: Definitions, Trends, and Emerging Paths
Authors: Scauso Marcos S. 
Published: August 2019

Since the 1980s, scholars disputing the hegemony of positivist methodologies in the
social sciences began to promote interpretive approaches, creating discussions about
methodological pluralism and enabling a slow, and often resisted, proliferation of
theoretical diversity. Within this context, interpretivism acquired a
specific definition, which encompassed meaning-centered research and problematized
positivist ideas of truth correspondence, objectivity, generalization, and linear
processes of research. By critiquing the methodological assumptions that were often
used to regard positivism as a superior form of social science, interpretive
scholars were confronted with questions about their own knowledge production and its
validity. If meanings could be separated from objects, phenomena and identities
could be constructed, and observers could not step out of their situated
participation within these constructions, how could scholars validate their
knowledge?

Despite important agreements about the centrality, characteristics, and
intelligibility of meaning, interpretivists still disagree about the different ways
in which this question can be answered. On one side of the spectrum, some scholars
of poststructuralism, feminism, green theory, queer theory, and postcolonialism aim
to renounce methodological foundations of objectification and validation. This opens
the possibility of empirically researching epistemic assumptions, which scholars
interpret either as components of dominant discourses or as alternatives that create
possibilities of thinking about more multiplicity, difference, and diversity. On the
other side, a number of constructivist, feminist, postcolonial, and critical
scholars attach meanings to social structures and view their interpretations as
reflecting parts of intersubjectivities, lifeworlds, superstructures, cultures, and
so on. Since they use their own strategies to validate interpretations, and they
solve this methodological question, the scholars on this side of the spectrum either
tend to pursue empirical research that does not analyze epistemic dimensions, or
they generalize particular experiences of domination. This disagreement influences
not only the kind of empirical research that scholars pursue but also creates some
differences in the definitions of key interpretive notions such as power relations,
reflexivity, and the role of empirical evidence.

Within these agreements and disagreements, interpretivism created an overarching
methodological space that allowed for the proliferation of theoretical approaches.
Since the 1980s, poststructuralist, feminist, constructivist, neo-Marxist,
postcolonial, green, critical, and queer theories have sought to expand the study of
meanings, uncover aspects of domination, listen to previously marginalized voices,
unveil hidden variations, and highlight alternatives. This diversifying process
continues to unfold, contributing to the analysis of these methodological questions
even beyond binary understandings of only two epistemic tendencies. Many authors
also deploy these perspectives to highlight diverse cases, voices, ways of knowing,
struggles, oppressions, imaginaries, temporalities, and so on. For example,
relational approaches contribute in international relations by creating new
transdisciplinary debates and promoting other possibilities of thinking, being,
feeling, and knowing global politics.