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Multi-Epistemological Research: An Integrative Approach

Sun, September 1, 8:00 to 9:30am, Marriott, Jefferson

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

As broad as multi-method research has become in the last twenty years—encompassing several books and dozens of articles—little systematic attention has been paid to scholarship that employs multiple epistemologies. By this, we mean research that explicitly takes positive-explanatory approaches as well as interpretive, representational or discursive ones to different parts of a given project. This panel engages multi-epistemological research across a broad range of topics and geographical coverage, highlighting the benefits of such an approach but also seeking to highlight common strategies in synthesizing how scholars organize knowledge in multiple ways. In particular, the individual presenters will summarize the substantive contributions of their research and will focus on the nexus of the explanatory and interpretive components of them. Together, these papers demonstrate the mutually beneficial role of multiple epistemological approaches in a single research project: how analysis of meaning-making bolsters explanatory goals, and how explanatory frameworks help us to understand why some frames take salient roles in specific settings.
Victoria Gorham asks why nation-building efforts succeed in some post-colonial countries and fail in others. Building on comparative historical analysis of Tanzania and Kenya since the late colonial era, she argues that the dynamics of pre-independence violence shaped the strategies that elites employed to build governing coalitions, and those in turn shaped whether nation-building took inclusive or exclusive forms. Drawing on ethnographic research in national museums in both countries, Gorham illustrates how these variant narratives have been constructed in official sites as a result of those early decisions.
Sarah Parkinson and Valerie de Koeijer explore how journalists, scholars, and humanitarian workers in Kurdistan and Lebanon navigate the challenges of their roles in conflict and crisis zones. Because their official roles often evolve as a function of crisis dynamics, these individuals have to develop strategies to protect themselves and vulnerable members of the communities. Parkinson and do Koeijer argue that they innovate informal roles as a result: these ‘emergent communities of practice’ illustrate the role that international workers play in shaping the politics of conflict zones.
Lahoma Thomas asks why ordinarily law-abiding residents in inner-city Kingston, Jamaica sometimes mobilize in support of criminal organizations, and in particular why women so often do. She adopts an Interpretivist Black Feminist Approach to explain these phenomena and to explore criminal governance and organization-resident relations. Thomas argues that respect serves as the key mechanism through which criminal organizations build legitimacy and authority in these neighborhoods. The women who support them, in return, build on that support to express their own political agency.
Anna Weissman takes up the question of why, in European states that have otherwise expansively supported LGBTQ rights and marriage equality, support for their reproductive rights remains so low. Arguing that reproduction is bio-social and integral to the process of national identity construction, Weissman illustrates how legal and public debates over LGBTQ reproductive rights in otherwise widely different settings in France, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Poland have converged. She employs comparative historical analysis of nation building, and discourse analysis of reproductive rights debates, to elucidate how respective nations exclude non-normative couples from legitimate reproducers.
Benjamin Smith asks why some post-defeat secessionist regions retain identity salience long after their wars for independence whereas others are subsequently integrated. Situating the American South alongside Scotland and the Spanish Basque country, on one hand, and Basque France and Epirus, Greece, on the other, he argues that political devolution endows some post-defeat regions with the resources to reconstruct their identity narratives and to discard negative aspects that might deter group members from self-identifying. Smith employs this historical-causal comparison in addition to textual analysis of Southern school curricula and ethnographic research at Confederate memorials around the South and participant observation at lynching truth and reconciliation events in northern Florida to illustrate the evolution and expression of (white) Southern identity.

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