Remixing Methods: Methodological Considerations for a Critical Study of IR Myths

Myths can be studied from a variety of methodological perspectives. However, the previous paragraphs have suggested that certain forms of methodological inquiry seem particularly apt for exploring the role myths play in and for iR knowledge production and theory development.

This points to the ways in which we as iR researchers tend to approach methodological questions. As a matter of fact, conventional iR has been driven by an instrumentalist perspective on methods and methodology that degrades methods to merely a ‘toolbox’ that is used in order to come to empirical knowledge (cf. King et al. 1994 as the classical example for IR case design). This view—which has gained new support under the auspices of neo-positivism (cf. Jackson 2010)—has widely been criticised from post-positivist perspectives on methodology for neglecting the relationship between ‘the researcher’ and ‘the field’. Furthermore, an instrumental perspective on methods does not problematise the strategies and scientific interests that fuel knowledge production. it also eventually disregards the value of plural and paradox empirical perspectives that might pop up while doing field work but might at the same time juxtapose a previously fixed research design (see Lie 2013, 205-10 for a reflection of the epistemological challenges of ethnography as a method for IR; cf. also Vrasti 2008). Also, using methods as ‘tools’ does not allow much space for reflecting on their empirical application, or on the way the subjects of empirical research correspond to a particular method—for example, how they deal with a survey, how they (re-)act during an interview situation, or how they, as part of a transdisciplinary dissemination, might comment on the envisaged research results. Moreover, postcolonial perspectives on methodology tend to be particularly doubtful with regard to the powers of social science methodology in contributing to a Eurocentric reconstruction of the South, and in a broader sense to the abyss of classifying, categorising, ‘othering’, or silencing the subjects of research (Appadurai 2006; Smith 2012).

Therefore, an important precondition for the study of myths in IR might lie in two points Claudia Aradau and Jef Huysmans have raised. First, they present their understanding of methods as performative and not simply representational:

[Methods] are not simply techniques of extracting information from reality and aligning it with—or against—bodies of knowledge. Methods are instead within worlds and partake in their shaping. As performative, methods are practices through which “truthful” worlds are enacted, both in the sense of being acted upon and coming into being (Aradau and Huysmans 2014, 598).

Second, they suggest understanding methods, and the very decisions for a particular method, as a political and not a value-free decision. This underlines the need for careful and critical reflections on how certain methods correspond to a research design and how they might silence some voices or boost others. Their conclusion is to regard methods as performative practices, namely as productive ‘devices’ that create certain empirical artefacts, for example, by producing interview data, mapping, and visualising certain relations through network analysis, or altering and rendering visual representations through picture analysis (Aradau and Huysmans 2014, 604-606).

For our study of myths, this conceptualisation of methods implies that the mythographer should make his/her methodological choices carefully, for instance, with respect to the way any given method engages in certain reconstructions of the respective empirical focus, and thereby ‘enact[s] worlds and make[s] particular orderings more visible than others’ (Aradau and Huysmans 2014, 612). In closer detail, this means considering beforehand which kind of ‘worlding’ might happen when choosing a particular methodological approach, which aspects might be brought to the front, and which further aspects might be veiled or even silenced. This also calls for a productive combination of methods so as to allow for multi- perspectivity.

In so doing, we also need to think of triangulation as a means of allowing both methodological pluralism and validation of empirical results. Especially when we as mythographers are on a mission of exploring ‘how myths mean’, ‘how myths unfold, multiply, change or fade’, or ‘how the genealogy of IR myths is shaped, reproduced and rewritten’, we need to take into account what a particular method could reveal.

This calls for engaging with various qualitative approaches which can serve as methodological trajectories to shed light on particular modes of mythography. Methods-wise, that is, in their practical sense, the approaches in question all focus on forms of interaction with data that overcome entirely positivist research designs. I will discuss the following approaches, whose potential proves especially valuable for a fuzzy subject such as IR myths: (1) qualitative interviews in a broader sense; (2) discourse analysis; (3) ethnography, and especially organisational/ institutional ethnography; and (4) visual communicative analysis. All of these approaches bear certain qualities and potentials with regard to myths—and, referring to Aradau and Huysmans’s propositions, they all have distinct ways of performance and enactment in common. Engaging their postulates, we would have to clarify how each of them can work as a performative and political practice, and how this could be helpful with regard to the mythographical research agenda. While this chapter cannot introduce each of these approaches and their practical requirements and preconditions in detail, it can at least outline what the particular merits in each case may be.

1. Interviews have proven to be one of the most popular qualitative methods applied in IR, and while semi-structured interviews, expert interviews, or surveys are still very common—and often unquestioned—many other types of social science interview techniques have also been mobilised for the field of IR.⁵ For studying myths, especially narrative, loosely standardised interview types would, due to their openness, seem apt to reveal stories on a certain subject, and to shed light on the metaphors, images, and associations that accompany them.

Types such as narrative interviews, in-depth interviews, or conversational interviews all require a far more reflexive preparation with regard to one’s own role as an interviewer, the introductory questions (and the associative trajectories they open or close), the nature and content of verbal interventions during the course of the interview, and the documentation and transcription practices. Similarly, group discussions seem viable for letting an expert audience explore which myths guide their assumptions on a certain subject, as this very method has specific strengths in encouraging an audience to speak relatively freely (and even forget about the otherwise often dominating role of the interviewer), follow loose lines of talk, and express deeper beliefs and emotions. This allows exploring the ways through which myths become embedded into the inner logics and momentum of epistemic communities or international organisations. Here, ethnography (see point 3 below) proves to be a valuable complement. Exploring the field of IR myths, we could think of cases such as a round of security experts or a group of grassroots activists against climate change in addition to dialogic interviews, which would allow IR theorists to reflect about their habits.

2. Critical discourse analysis has unfolded over the past two decades (Fairclough 1995; Milliken 1999; Wiener 2009, to name just a few seminal works; cf. Neumann 2008 for an IR focus). For research on myths, the characteristic questions of power relations, discursive hegemony, discursive (in-) stability, or discursive contestation put focus on the discursive practices through which myths acquire power within a certain debate, how meaning is actually produced within a discursive field, or how this power might come under contestation. This sheds light on the ways myths are talked into being, or how they pervade discourses and (re-)structure discursive fields. In IR, this could, for example, help to explain how political myths—for instance in the aftermath of 9/11—can dominate discourses, or how rapid discursive changes can be explained with respect to the creation of powerful political myths.

3. Works under the heading of IR's ‘ethnographic turn¹ have recently started borrowing heavily from the disciplines of social anthropology and ethnology, as their field-based methods of participant observation and ethnography open up fresh and unseen ways for exploring IR topics in a much more holistic manner.⁶ However, this does not always happen to the sheer joy of these very disciplines. Wanda Vrasti (2008), for example, has criticised IR’s practices of borrowing and exploiting a method in a way that neglects its critical potential and turns it into an easy-to-apply technique (see also the rejoinders by Rancatore 2010 and Vrasti 2010). In any case, these methods allow a much deeper intersubjective interaction with the research field, an interaction that may even lead to a rephrasing of the research design as a whole. These back-and-forth movements between the researcher, the field, and the research design are characteristic for this kind of knowledge production and may lead to a deeper understanding of their inner relations. They also influence the techniques of ethnographic writing, which differ considerably from other forms of social science text production. In a similar fashion, methodologies deriving from interpretive policy analysis refer to hermeneutic practices for framing research questions or interpreting research results (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow 2012)

In being a performative device, ethnography thereby points to a pluralist knowledge production that collects several different articulations, which are connected to each field. Thus, ethnography is especially apt to give voice to the political subjects or let them interact with the research design. Ethnography can therefore be a highly political method, a fact which is illustrated by close proximity to (participatory) action research. Regarding research on myths—for instance, when analysing the myth of ‘development’—this could point to subjectivation practices (that is, understanding the way a myth becomes inscribed into discourses and practices of the people who are to be ‘developed’) or communicative practices that accompany myth production, but it could also point to the rituals that are centred on it.

Research on myths in IR could also focus on how IR myths develop their own momentum when incorporated into the agendas of international organisations or when they are retold or reinterpreted within political dialogue among epistemic expert communities. Therefore, approaches such as institutional/organisational ethnography seem highly valuable in visualising how such processes function and how they are governed by discourse and narration (Smith 2005; Smith 2006; Ybema et al. 2009).

4. Visual communications analysis (VCA), deriving from media and communication studies, is an approach still positioned at the very fringe of IR. The focus on visual representations—displayed, for example, by news channels, documentaries, movies, photography, or even political cartoons and video games—opens up another empirical field which has been neglected in IR for the most part. Methodologically, visual communications analysis deals with any type of mass media representations. In close proximity to discourse analysis or semiotics, VCA is firstly interested in providing a close description of how certain images are produced, rendered, and altered, and also to which tropes, metaphors, or narratives the content is connected. Based on this, the analysis explores how an image becomes part of a discourse and which interaction with an audience is mutually created (cf. Schneider 2013; Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001). Some of David Campbell’s later works demonstrate the merits of such an approach; for instance, his works on the representation of famine or war scenes (Campbell 2007).⁷ Recent emphasis has been put on strengthening connections between visual communication analysis and IR, especially with respect to critical security studies (Moore and Farrands 2013; Bleiker 2015). In the study of myths, VCA allows exploring the politics of imagery as a field that has not yet been covered methodologically and is shaped by even more complex and contextualised circulation processes—think, for example, of the specific power that visual representations are acquiring in social media. Thus, the way myths mean or are communicated through forms of imagery very well complements other discursive approaches and adds the dimension of aesthetics to the study (cf. also Finlan, Chap. 10).

For a comprehensive study of myths in IR, this brief overview of certain qualitative methods demonstrates the potentials each of these approaches bear, allowing the mythographer to carve out individual research strategies. Moreover, for a richer and more multifaceted perspective, a mixed-method design can add value, for instance, when combining discourse analysis and VCA, or when complementing interviews with ethnography. For a fuzzy subject such as political myths, forms of triangulation can enhance the significance of empirical data. Overall, the mythographical research agenda and its variety of methods have the potential to enrich IR’s methodological debates.

Notes

1. See de Carvalho et al. (2011) for a critical rereading of IR’s ‘great debates’ and the production of truth.

2. Cf. also Bliesemann de Guevara (Chap. 2), Münch (Chap. 3), Cooke (Chap. 4) and Goetze (Chap. 5).

3. For a broad-ranging introduction into the sociology of IR, see Hobden and Hobson (2002).

4. See a series of blog entries at ‘The Disorder of Things’ on critical methods and narrative approaches in IR for some ideas on how auto-ethnographic accounts might enrich and empower a researcher’s identity: http://thedis- orderofthings.com/tag/methodology-and-narrative-forum/

5. Up to now, there exists no handbook specifically designed for the needs of IR interview research. Therefore, either broader social science introductions into interview research (cf. Gubrium et al. 2012; Kvale and Brinkmann 2014, as two examples that discuss epistemological and ethical issues in great length and depth) or guidelines for the whole field of qualitative IR (Lamont 2015; Klotz and Prakash 2008) are worth noting.

6. Hitherto only few IR textbooks have covered the method of ethnography (cf. Gusterson 2008 as a rare exception). For proper methodological training, IR researchers need to engage intensively with the methodological debates of social anthropology. For some examples of how ethnography can be exerted for political science/IR topics, the works of anthropologists Ferguson and Gupta (2002), Mosse (2005) and Li (2007) give highly valuable impressions with regards to global aid governance.

7. See also http://www.imaging-famine.org/ and https://www.david- campbell.org/topics/images-atrocity-conflict-war/.

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Source: Bliesemann de Guevara Berit. Myth and Narrative in International Politics. Palgrave Macmillan,2016. — 329 p.. 2016

Remixing Methods: Methodological Considerations for a Critical Study of IR Myths

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