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Colette Einfeld and Helen Sullivan, "How to Conduct Interpretive Research: Insights for Students and Researchers" (Edward Elgar, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Nick Cheeseman
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Marshall Poe
Experian hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBN have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
Nick Cheeseman
Hello and welcome to New Books in Interpretive, Political and Social Science. I'm Nick Cheeseman, host of the series and in this, the 26th episode, I'm joined by Helen Sullivan and Colette Einfeld to discuss their edited volume how to conduct Interpretive Insights for Students and Researchers. Out now with Edward elgar, published in 2025. Helen is dean of the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian, where I'm also located. So listeners, if I end up sounding too deferential in this episode, then that may be the reason. And Colette is a postdoctoral research fellow at the ANU and was previously a doctoral supervisee of Helens. So why don't we start there? It's not all that Common for a supervisor and their student or former student to go on to write and edit, work together. How did that happen in this case? What's the special source in your relationship relationship that led to the production of this appetizing book? Colette, why don't we start with you?
- [02:42]
Colette Einfeld
What's the special sauce? I think it's frustration, annoyance, despair, uncertainty. All these things, I guess, were the motivations for the book. So I do talk about this in the introduction, about how when I was doing my PhD and Helen was my supervisor and obviously had great expertise in interpretive work, but I had come from a very positivist background, doing a degree in psychology, and worked in applied research for, you know, almost a decade before I came to my PhD and I became interested in this kind of interpretive thing. And I was given books by Deborah Yanow and Rob Rhodes and Mark Beaver and others. And I was interested in it, but couldn't quite reconcile it with doing a PhD. And I was feeling increasingly, like, uncertain that doing an interpretive PhD was the right thing to do. The workshops that I was going to, the training I was doing in doing a PhD just didn't cover the sort of experiences that I was having as I was grappling with interpretive work. And so I remember sitting down with Helen, I think, probably partway through my PhD, when I kind of embraced this as my methodology. And I was becoming quite enthusiastic about it. I think I sat down with her in a supervisory meeting and was like, right when this is done, we are writing a book about what is it like to actually do interpretive research? Because I am seeing methods books, and I was seeing how to do research guides, and these two aren't meeting in the middle. And so I was also hearing from fellow PhD students that this was the same experience they were having. And I guess for me, that was my motivation in just thinking, okay, I'm going to take this experience and try and share it with others so that they all can also have a resource or have some sort of understanding of support, that they're not isolated alone when they're going through these experiences.
- [04:33]
Helen Sullivan
I mean, that is pretty much how it happened. Colette was very determined that nobody should go through what she'd experienced. And if she could help, you know, smooth the path for future scholars, then that was what she was determined that we should do. I think this is a book that she could probably have written on her own and certainly edited on her own. But I think part of the motivation and also one of the things that we tried to then do in the book is to bring together the perspectives of people who are new and just finding their way with people who've been doing this and finding their way for a lot longer. And so it just seemed appropriate to have that combination of experiences in the editorial team and then to try and reflect that in different ways throughout the book and certainly in the way that we, you know, approached people and found people who were sympathetic to that approach.
- [05:29]
Nick Cheeseman
Helen, if I can pick up on that point about your selection of contributors and that being one criterion that you wanted, people who are like yourself, already well into their careers and experienced researchers and other emerging scholars, could you say a little bit more about what other considerations that you have? Because actually, that's practically the only thing that I felt in reading the introduction to the book that was missing. There wasn't really any discussion as to how this particular group of authors got together under your stewardship.
- [06:03]
Helen Sullivan
You know, I think we were very concerned that we wanted to be able to speak to as broad a constituency as possible of potential interpretivist scholars and, you know, acknowledging that some of the really great and foundational work of people like Deboriano, people should be reading that and drawing on it and learning from it. But I think we also felt that perhaps as a movement, in as much as interpretivism is a movement, it was something that had really situated itself, as is often the way in Europe bits not very much of North America. And while there were some really great stuff, we were also very conscious that there are huge amounts of knowledge, experience, expertise that are in other parts of the world. And so one of the very clear criteria. And it's interesting that you reflect, you know, we didn't talk about this in the introduction, and I'm not quite sure why we didn't, because it was very important to us that we. We began with from Australia. What does the world look like? Well, the world looks rather different, and our region is really important. And so we were really keen to start there, but also to make sure that we were understanding context in all of its significance and diversity. So this wasn't just this kind of, you know, superficial geographic lens. This was really about connecting the context to interpretivism and indeed, to what can be incredibly valuable about interpretive research. And so it was simply a matter of, you know, how do we find people who are doing really interesting things in really interesting places? And we were very fortunate, I think, to be able to assemble people who were doing their or had just done their research in, you know, Thailand, in Indonesia, but also people who had thought and worked for a long time in projects and were very open in their own thinking. Well, maybe, maybe there is more to this thing called interpretivism than how I have understood it. And so for us, it was also also getting scholars who were prepared to reflect on their own practice and think about interpretivism in this rather different world.
- [08:31]
Colette Einfeld
I completely agree. And again, it's an interesting oversight that we didn't include an introduction because maybe it was so self evident at the time we didn't think we needed to reflect on it. I'm not sure. But those two parts that Helen was talking about, which is a math like ensuring we introduced a range of contexts and experiences, not just from Europe, but also the range from experienced scholars who can reflect across multiple projects and be very open in their reflections as well about the things that had gone wrong. That's what we also wanted to hear about, but also people who had just completed their PhD because often experiences we might take for granted after doing multiple research projects are still quite raw and we wanted to capture some of those as well. And I think we had done quite well. Or the authors have. I can think of like Harley and Saro and Tamara have all really reflected on some of those experiences, having just done a PhD.
- [09:22]
Helen Sullivan
Just the other thing, you know, now you've sort of pricked this seam, Nick, is, you know, we somehow. We talked a fair bit about this, didn't we, Colette? How are we going to organize the book? Were we going to do a chronology? Which of course is ridiculous when you're thinking about interpretivism, trying to apply a sort of standard research framework. You do this and then you do this and then you do this. So how are we going to organize what we wanted to talk about? And that that really was a product of us initially thinking, well, we would like contributions on this range of things. And then the authors coming back and saying, well, this is what we would like to do. And that in itself helped shape the structure of the book and also gave us an idea of, you know, where there were then gaps that appeared that we thought, okay, it would be great to have something on this. So it wasn't a pre planned, this is what it's going to look like. So therefore we need. It was very much an organic. These are the things that we think would be helpful.
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Nick Cheeseman
Helen, you've already mentioned Vorianow, and she wrote a foreword to the book in which she makes a number of observations about the chapters. And one that strikes me now as pertinent to the conversation we're having is that interpretive research clearly means different things to different people. Do you think that this is especially relevant observation for the reasons you're just pointing out that you have a group of contributors who are perhaps more diverse in terms of their backgrounds and experiences than those in many other volumes of the sorts that. That marks out the volume. And if so, did you encounter challenges or opportunities in talking about what interpretive research means to your various contributors that you think would be interesting to raise in conversation?
- [11:09]
Helen Sullivan
Now, we were so fortunate that Dvorah agreed to write the forward, and of course, she did something which, you know, makes such a great contribution and really frames the volume for people. But, yeah, that was one of those issues that she picked up on, which I think does speak in part to what we were saying about the rationale for the book, that we understand that, you know, there are particular traditions of interpretivism, and there are, you know, scholars who see the roots of interpretivism in a particular canon of work and so on and so on, and we were respectful of that. But I think what we were also wanting to do was to go to people where they were identifying their work as interpretive or. And this was more usually the case where somebody had said to them, it actually seems like what you're doing is interpretive work. And that for many of our authors, including myself, you know, is. Is often how people find their way into being interpretive scholars, because somebody tells them that that's what they're doing. And I think one of the things that happened then is that, you know, we were very prepared to give people the space to decide for themselves how they were going to describe interpretivism. And, you know, one of the distinctions we draw, of course, is those people who see themselves as critical interpretivists as opposed to people who don't. But there are lots and lots of different ways in the idea of interpretivism still needs to be robust. So we weren't saying, well, you can define whatever you like, but we were saying you don't need to come from this starting point, which might be the starting point that most of us have come from. Is that fair? Kite?
- [12:50]
Colette Einfeld
Yeah, definitely. And I think also from the perspective of a PhD student or somebody coming into interpretivism and not quite sure where they're fitting. I think it's really helpful to see different dimensions or multiple understandings, if you like, of interpretive work so that it isn't just feeling like you have to do it the one kind of right way or not at all. And I think that was also something I was conscious of.
- [13:19]
Helen Sullivan
The only thing that I think if we were doing this again or we were extending this out. I don't know. Sometimes people find their way into interpretivism through, you know, a particular, you know, they read a particular article or some book or whatever. And, you know, this goes to one of the other points that Devorah picks up, which is in Steve Griggs and David Howarth's chapter about slow scholarship. That. And, you know, she bemoans the fact, and I think she's right, that, you know, too often PhD students don't have the time to go away and, you know, really excavate the field. What happens is they, you know, they get given one thing and that, that then becomes the thing. And I think that's the only caveat to coming to interpretivism in different ways is also, you know, you want interpretive scholars to continue to be curious about, well, what are the other ways of thinking about this or what might be the sort of genealogy of where this, you know, where the thing I have now in my hand has come from. I don't know. I'm just sounding really old now, but I think it's something about getting into the guts and the depth of, you know, where this, where these sets of ideas have come from, rather than a very narrow, you know, the PhD is just you need to read just enough to get you a framework that you.
- [14:35]
Nick Cheeseman
Can work with, although you do need to read that much. All right, so there's a sort of an appeal there both for toleration and also for the continuation of curiosity, which we would hope would be characteristics of all political and social science. That said, there are a number of elements of the conduct of interpretive research that you spell out in the book's introduction. One of them goes to the messiness of social life. Another goes to, relatedly, the need for flexibility, and yet another. There are more than these, but these are three that caught my eye, relates to the part that emotions play. And that last one links to your chapter in the book as well, Helen. So I'd like to invite you both to address why these elements are important to you. And if there's anything I've not mentioned thus far that you think needs to be brought into the conversation, please do so.
- [15:37]
Colette Einfeld
So I think one that you didn't pick up on, but I think echoes what Helen has said, is the importance of critical reflexivity in our work. And I think that's both on the work we do, but from what Helen was saying is also on the interpretivism as kind of a whole. And that idea of sort of where it comes from and how we'll get to where we are and how we might want to look in the future as well. And I think that's one pattern that emerged across the chapters, the need for critical reflection. I will let Helen talk about emotion, but I think you can probably hear, in a way, I'm talking about it. It wasn't something I wanted to shy away from in the book about both the motivations for doing this research and also the experience of doing interpretive work is emotional. The experience of doing a PhD is emotional. And. And I firmly believe that it's. It's so important. It was chapter in a book, essentially, not just sort of a thread, finding others who do. I'll talk about that because that was one of the things that I really struggled with in my PhD was finding other PhD students and researchers who were doing interpretive work, who could relate to and who I could talk to about some of the challenges that I was having. And that's from things like, you know, not Noel, what kind of readings I should be doing, how much is too much, how to label myself, how important that was. Going to a conference and having to assert and, you know, kind of say, you are a interpretive researcher, and how that might be received. And not having that support and network was really challenging. So it was one of the things that we said was really important for new interpretive researchers. And that support, or lack of, I think, was quite stark in the chapters as well. And then just the messiness. And I think, particularly as someone who came from, you know, a positivist background and having done that kind of consultancy research work for a very long time, where you have your question and you have your answer, and it's all very neat and bundled. Helen, you know, being so supportive and teaching me to just kind of sit with the messiness, let it mellow. I think she said to me a few times, just, you don't feel like you're constantly needing to move all the time. That was something I struggled with, that I also thought came across the chapters quite clearly.
- [17:45]
Nick Cheeseman
Before we go to Helen, could I just pick up on that last point and ask you, though, what are the implications of that specifically for the conduct of interpretive research, for design, to ensure systematicity? Because the skeptical reader or listener may say, well, we know the social world is messy. Of course it is. The task of political and social science is to simplify, organize, use categories to enable analysis that we know is imperfect, but nevertheless, that makes the social world amenable to the conduct of political and social scientific inquiry. If you're insisting nevertheless, that the social world is indeed messy and that we need to treat it that way, what's the implications for how you proceed and avoid a situation where the results of the research are also messy?
- [18:42]
Colette Einfeld
Okay, so firstly, I would say I would. Coming into the PhD, I would question the assumption that everybody knows that everything is messy in the research that you do, because I don't think you do. I think sometimes coming into a PhD and reading the guidebooks and reading academic papers, that messiness is often just not there. And so I think part of coming to interpretive work is actually recognition of the messiness. But then also, how do you represent it and how do you research it, and how do you get something out of it that is therefore useful for other people and something I think that you can build on? And I think in some ways, I would probably argue that it's okay to come up with research that is a little bit messy at the end, depending on what you mean by messy. Like, do we always need to have these clean outcomes? One of the things we talk about in the book is how the PhD invisibilizes or ignores or encourages you to ignore messiness. And how can we actually incorporate that in some of the things that we're doing? Helen, did you want to jump in there?
- [19:46]
Helen Sullivan
I think that that's right. And we forget, you know, most people come through education and research training that tells them that the important thing is finding a question and then approaching the how you find the answer to the question in this particular way. So we're starting from that, having to untrain people in seeing the world like that and then retrain them. And I think this is what's really important. Nick is. And I think maybe this is what you're getting at. We are not saying that interpretivism, its messiness and the need to be flexible is not the same as saying, well, you don't actually need to be disciplined, you don't actually need to be trained. You don't actually need to have particular skills. Of course you do. You know, and I think when I got a bit stuck on your comment was about systematicity, because I think that, again, you know, that conjures up for people a particular way of doing research. And I think one of the things we tried to reflect in the book and Tamara's chapter on chaotic meshwork is the one that really stands out for me on this, where there absolutely is a rigorous interpretive approach method there. But how that is then represented is in a way that challenges people who are looking Perhaps for something that they would expect to see in terms of a research product, because it requires you to engage with it on its own terms and to recognise that the work has been done to build that representation of the research. And again, I don't think that's something that's necessarily limited to interpretivism, but I do think it is a to space that is perhaps more available to interpretivists, that yes, there's a discipline, yes, there are rules, but there are. There's also this way of once you know the rules, once you have the skills of being able to deploy them, that can result in extraordinarily creative and much more compelling stories of what the question is and why the question means, what it does and what the answer might be. Whatever it is that are in and of themselves instructive.
- [21:57]
Nick Cheeseman
Can I address this topic with one other point before we move on? And that's that in the chapter of the book that you co authored, you write about learning to speak interpretive. It's one task of the conduct of interpretive research that you foreground in this lovely dialogue that you have together. I'm wondering if this work of learning to speak interpretive is one way of managing the messiness. You're both nodding, but as this is an audio only program, some comments also would be welcome.
- [22:31]
Colette Einfeld
For me, I think it was also about when you talk about sort of systematizing, and I agree with everything Helen said, I think there is also an element of being able to show in your PhD that you're like in the in crowd. And part of that is learning the terms and the words to show that you are. You have the knowledge and the expertise to be able to produce a PhD and potentially go on to have an academic career.
- [23:00]
Helen Sullivan
There's a learning to speak interpretive, which is how it is distinctive from if you're trained as a positivist or if you're trained as a public servant, or if you're trained as a consulting the way in which you use language and the way in which you communicate with whoever your constituency is it. There are rules, there are ways in which it happens. And so some of the learning to speak is about acknowledging that, well, both words are incredibly important, but that there are ways of presenting and communicating that are important as interpretivists. And again, one of the challenges for us in the book was how do we maintain that but not make it? Then you know, if you don't know these rules, then you're not part of the club. Because of course, one of the. I think one of the delights of interpretivism is it is, in and of itself, open to development, critique, moving on. And so we needed to find a way of saying, yes, there's a language, but that it's an evolving language. It shouldn't be an exclusive language. You know, the experience that Colette talks about, about being, you know, not feeling like you're part of the club when you start your PhD. I absolutely have that. But you. You can have it in. In, you know, you go and speak with a group of interpretivists who have a very particular idea about what it is, and you recognize that, you know, the dialect you're speaking is actually not the same as they are. It's, again, it's about the points at which we can see the possibilities for positive evolution and using the language of interpretivism as that way of maintaining the dynamic, rather than being something that becomes exclusive and admits you to a club, but keeps other people out. And the reason that I wanted to circle back to emotions, because, of course, that's a chapter where I reveal just a moment where I behaved completely incorrectly as a supervisor and put something in writing that I should have spoken to Colette about directly. And, you know, that was one of those moments where, you know, they're just so heavy with emotion when you are communicating something that's important. And, you know, almost as soon as you've written and sent the wretched thing, that that was the wrong thing to do. We originally wanted the wonderful Anna Doyneva to write this chapter on emotions because, you know, her great work in this area, and she just wasn't available. So I took it on. And again, Deborah picks up on this in the foreword. You know, it is such an important part of. I mean, not just interpretive research, but it's an important part of everyday social encounters that we pay far too little attention to in social science research, I think, particularly in political sciences. But what we were trying to do in that chapter was to show not just the importance of emotion as something that is present in the research, but also is present in how the researcher perceives themselves as a researcher and how they are received by other people who may be in the club or in a different club, and indeed the researcher supervisor relationship, which is also laden with emotion. And I just recently did our university's rights respects relationships training for PhD supervisors, which was great, but one of the things, I suppose not trying to do this, but one of the things that it doesn't really do is to, to my mind, get to grips with the emotional content of these kinds of encounters. And how that is an important part of how you manage that relationship between supervisor and researcher, but also how you understand and appreciate what it means to recognize and consider emotions in interpretive work.
- [26:57]
Nick Cheeseman
Listeners, Colette, Helen and I will be back shortly after a sponsor's message. Listeners, we're back. Myself, Nick Cheeseman, joined by Colette Einfeld and Helen Sullivan, discussing their how to conduct interpretive research. So from listening to you, Helen, most of what you've said thus far relates to one of two ways in which emotions relate to interpretive work that you identify in the chapter, and that's emotions as experienced by the researcher or by the research student. Type one. But there's another type that you also identify that I'm keen to hear more about because I think not only is it less concentrated on, but it's also perhaps less intuitively obvious, and that's emotion as an analytical tool. How, on your account, can emotion be integrated into social scientific and political scientific analysis?
- [28:01]
Helen Sullivan
I think one of the things that we're trying to talk about there is that emotions are knowledge. And so therefore, if you're trying to understand, trying to analyze a situation, an interview, an encounter, whatever it is, then being attuned not just to the emotion of the moment or of the encounter, but also recognizing. And I suppose for me, where the analytical bit comes in is that you are recognizing that those emotions are in and of themselves shaping that encounter, both the emotions, your reaction to those emotions. And one of the things that, for me, it's important to do is to have in your mind an understanding of how to approach how to read emotions, why they are shaping and how they are shaping what's happening, and indeed, your response as a. To what's happening. So for me, emotions as a part of the analysis is pretty fundamental because often we talk about emotions in the extreme sense when somebody is very upset, very angry, very happy. But of course, emotions are present in all encounters. And I'm really interested in how you kind of uncover the difference between the things that are not regarded as emotional, which tend to be very culturally specific, and those things that are declared to be emotional, which are equally culturally shaped and determined. And so for me, the analytical lens is absolutely vital for trying to both understand what you're seeing, but also seeing differently.
- [29:45]
Nick Cheeseman
We're running short on time, so let's move on to discuss a little bit more about the chapters in the book you've both been referencing, specific contributions, and just to give the listeners a sense of it, they cover quite a wide range of topics as well. In addition to the other ways in which they're diverse that you've already mentioned. Aside from your chapters, there are four quite different chapters on fieldwork. There's a chapter on document analysis and interviews, another on policy translation research, one on teaching, another on structure and design, one on thesis examination. And on we go. Look, I know it can be hard and perhaps a little bit unfair to ask parents to choose among their children, but nevertheless, in this instance, I'd like to ask each of you as editors of the book, to identify one or perhaps two chapters that you would particularly like to draw listeners attention to and offer one or two reasons as to why you think it's a great contribution to the book.
- [30:45]
Helen Sullivan
I mean, we've mentioned a couple already, so I'm not going to go back to those. But I think of the ones that I haven't mentioned, the two that really stand out for me. One is Stephen Jeffers chapter, Don't Overcook the Turkey, how to Avoid Overstructuring in Cooperative Research. You know, we'd invited him to write this chapter, and I remember he was really, really struggling with it. And so on a visit to the uk, I sat down with him in his. He was working in a remote office and just talked through, you know, his experience of structuring his own PhD, and he came up with this idea of overcooking the turkey. And it just. That just seemed to be for him, the switch. And then, yeah, he wrote this terrific chapter, which is, you know, both challenging but also quite reassuring, I think, for interpretive students. It just reminds you that, yes, there are rules, but they're not necessarily the same rules, or they're not at all the same rules that apply to doing positivist research, and that applies as much to how you structure what you're doing as it does to the conduct. And so that, I think, is really good. And the other one is Sara Long's chapter on fieldwork experience about indigenous land claims in Cambodia. And that was the closest we got. It was an ethnographic study, but nonetheless, it speaks so much to the politics and how you understand yourself as a researcher in that particular field. And Saroj talks so well about the experience of living with and in connection to different communities and the experiences of that in the context of conducting research. And I think it's just beautiful, beautiful chapter.
- [32:30]
Colette Einfeld
All the chapters just offer something different. And so it's really hard to choose. I mean, there's like quite a few chapters here that I think are really useful for PhD students on perhaps things that we wouldn't Necessarily always understand. So, like, for example, how does an interpretive thesis get marked? The analysis from Stephen Tavares that Helen just mentioned, our chapter on supervision and how kind of how to negotiate supervision, I think can be useful. But for me, I think the chapters on field work from recent PhD students, so again, Saro Harley Aprimadia and Tamara Malharen, because they just write so openly and reflectively and frankly about their experiences, they're so like, stark and recent. And I think I used the term raw before that. It really kind of struck me about these experiences and how emotional and deep and how we kind of wear them in a longer term as well. So I really love those chapters. But also I have to mention Stephen Griggs and David Howard's chapter on field work, because I sort of read their whole chapter, which is about moving in and out of the field and questioning what we know of as the field. Just every page about. Huh? Ah, ah.
- [33:44]
Helen Sullivan
Like. And that kind of.
- [33:45]
Colette Einfeld
Oh, yeah, I never thought about that before. And any chapter that does that, I'm very happy to read. So I thought that was a. Also a fantastic chapter.
- [33:53]
Nick Cheeseman
Great, thanks for that. You were reflecting on how the fieldwork experiences are drawn out by those authors, Colette. But really, I thought one of the merits of all of the chapters was that they're addressing directly concrete experiences of one sort or another in one setting or another. And to go back to where we began the discussion, I wondered if that was part of the brief that you gave to the authors, or was that just something that came out of their contributions as they work through them?
- [34:26]
Colette Einfeld
I think the brief was to that we were interested in their stories and experiences. And I think in doing that, perhaps rather than framing it from a very sort of technical perspective, they naturally drew on their recent experiences. I don't know, Helen. I don't think we had anything in there saying, please use concrete examples. It was just naturally what came out and how to best express, I think, the points they were trying to make.
- [34:50]
Helen Sullivan
I think that's absolutely right. I think if we'd sort of been too rigid about it, people probably would have reacted in a slightly different way. Whereas, I don't know. The other thing is, I don't know whether because it was post Covid we were doing this and, you know, there are lots of preferences to Covid in there. I don't know whether people were just more ready to how on earth they managed to do research or to finish research or to start researching in and the difficulties that presented. So I don't know whether it was just because we had that moment of extremists that people were more prepared to talk about the concrete, as you put it. But yeah, we were very granular that they did.
- [35:29]
Colette Einfeld
I think we talk a little bit, just very quickly about catharsis with a book, and it did feel a little bit like that. I think there are a lot of stories that people want to tell. We've captured a few, but I think there is a need to just sort of share these things and tell these stories and these emotions and these experiences.
- [35:44]
Nick Cheeseman
As well, and these remarks about emotions and the post Covid situation, I think go into some of the contents of the conclusion of the book as well, where you acknowledge the anxiety about the future of the academy, underfunding ideological incursions, all the problems that the pandemic introduced, certainly for our academy in Australia, so reliant as it is, Song international students and the funding that they provide for us to do the work that we do, for which we're enormously grateful. And you say that, nevertheless, there are grounds for hope. So what are those from an interpretivist perspective? What does interpretivist research offer or what? On reflection, having finished the work, writing and editing this book with these wonderful contributors, what specific hopes do you have?
- [36:44]
Helen Sullivan
Well, for me, I think there's just the sense of the breadth and depth now of the community that's working, in spite of all of the things that you referenced and the ongoing attacks on humanities and social sciences pretty much everywhere in the world. There is now, I think, a sufficient both corpus of knowledge that's recorded, but also just a mass of people who have learned about, learned from, learned through these experiences, that now the academy, while being, you know, much more challenged perhaps than it has been for a while, has now been infiltrated by so many of these people who are trained in this way and understand the world in this way. And also there are, when you can get them to sit still, you know, I'm a public policy scholar, you know, you can communicate the value of interpretive work to public policymakers. And while it will never have the kind of immediacy of the killer statistic, there are ways in which we can keep reminding people that there are other ways of seeing the world, there are other ways of understanding what's going on and that they can be valuable. And so, yeah, it's odd. In this moment of real difficulty, it does seem to me that we've got reasons to be cheerful.
- [38:05]
Colette Einfeld
Carlette Helen could obviously speak very well from the academy perspective. I think all I would add very briefly is Just outside of the academy, Helen talked about speaking to public policy. I think even more so if I went back now to consultancy or applied research, I would definitely be thinking about research differently, asking different questions. I think the research I did would be much more richer and more messy and more embracing of that messiness, which is the reality where people are working people, because, you know, companies are working in messiness as well. And I think that is definitely something that kind of enhances the research that we can do.
- [38:43]
Nick Cheeseman
In the conclusion, there's a passing reference to AI or as I've learned to say from listening to Emily Bender and Alex Hannah, synthetic text extruding machinery. It's a mouthful.
- [38:54]
Helen Sullivan
Wow.
- [38:55]
Nick Cheeseman
And I'm wondering if you were putting the final touches on the book today, if you'd have more to say about it and if so, what you would say.
- [39:04]
Helen Sullivan
I don't think I do. I don't. I think, you know, I'm one of those people that is grappling really with what it all can mean, will mean. Part of me is terrified as a teacher. A lot of me is terrified as a researcher. And I'm sort of equally uncomfortable with the way that sometimes people talk about the way these tools can help us. But then at the same time, I'm reminded of, you know, the printing press and all those. The calculator, the Internet. Indeed. So I just don't know.
- [39:36]
Colette Einfeld
I agree. Still trying to grapple with that. I don't think it's gone particularly interestingly. I don't think it feels particularly different than it did when we wrote it a few years ago. So I think it's still kind of grappling with what it means and how it might change things.
- [39:49]
Nick Cheeseman
So I began by asking you a little bit about your co editorship of the book. And I'd like to approach the conclusion of the discussion now by asking you each, what did you learn from one another working together as editors?
- [40:04]
Colette Einfeld
I have learned the depth of Helen's expertise is unfathomable. Every time I came up with something, she'd be like, oh, what about this? What about this? So that's surprising, but not surprising. Also the depths of her support. And I think not many supervisors would be so supportive and enthusiastic and actually see it through to just sort of have a PhD student saying, oh, we're going to write this, and they'll be, oh, okay, and I'll help you with that. And it's been amazing. So the support for both myself as a student, her other students, but also the interpretive community, the passion for the interpretive community always shines through when I talk to her. So I knew that, but I think it was absolutely kind of came out really strongly when we were working together on the book.
- [40:48]
Helen Sullivan
Oh, thank you. What did I learn? Well, I had reinforced something that I had already known about Colette because Colette is very keen for me to write and so had taken on the role of being the editor of the last book that I produced and took great joy and was extremely accomplished with the red pen. So I already knew that she was a remarkable editor, but that, you know, was reinforced and just the joy of having somebody ask the questions that maybe because, you know, you've been doing it a while, you've just taken for granted. So that, you know, the. Why the. Well, I've read this and, you know, why don't we, you know, having somebody bring that level of intellect and engagement to the conversation, to the. To the book was. Was really terrific because, again, that's the way in which we move on as interpretivists is when. Even when new scholars come in and say, well, this doesn't really make much sense to me. What about, you know, whatever it is. I learned a lot, but as I say, I've always learned a lot from Khaled.
- [41:56]
Colette Einfeld
This is so nice. Confidence again.
- [41:59]
Nick Cheeseman
Yes. When the next book comes out, which was actually going to be my other question, whether you have any further joint publication plan.
- [42:08]
Helen Sullivan
We don't yet.
- [42:10]
Colette Einfeld
I don't know. I'd be interested to see the reception for this, but I think there's something that can be done to build on this, because I said there's so many researchers who are so enthusiastic about telling their stories and sharing their knowledge and doing it in perhaps a slightly unconventional way. But, yeah, we'll wait and see.
- [42:29]
Nick Cheeseman
Helen, before we came on, you were saying that you had some time off to read and watch films over the new year period. Are there any books that you would like to recommend to listeners before we conclude?
- [42:41]
Helen Sullivan
Yes. Over Christmas, I read a book called Desolation by Hassan Asghari, who is. Actually works at the New Adelaide University, but is an author, and I came across him. He appeared at the Canberra Writers Festival and talked about his book, and I bought it then, but didn't get a chance to read it until Christmas. And it was brilliant. It was a great exposition of what is true, what isn't true, the role of perspective. I mean, in many ways it's a kind of interpretive text, but it's a fabulous, fabulous novel from such an accomplished novelist. So I would heartily recommend it.
- [43:24]
Nick Cheeseman
Fantastic. Well, we'll make sure we get a link to that book onto the notes for this episode as well. And I'd like to thank you, colleague and Helen Sullivan for coming on to new books in interpretive, political and social science to discuss how to conduct interpretive research.
- [43:40]
Helen Sullivan
Thanks, Nick.
- [43:42]
Colette Einfeld
Thank you.
- [43:43]
Nick Cheeseman
And listeners, if you liked having two interviewees rather than just one, then you can listen to some other double acts in the series to date. They include Jack Corbett and John Boswell on their art and craft of comparison, Erica Simmons and Nicholas Ross, Spencer Smith on their edited volume Rethinking Comparison, Mark Bever and Jason Blakely on interpretive Social Science, and Peregrine Schwarze and Dvoriano way back in episode one on interpretive research design. And you can find all of these episodes and others on the series webpage, which is on the New Books Network website or wherever you get your podcasts.