CIAO DATE: 03/02

'So how do you do culture?': A workshop to discuss methodological approaches to studying culture in International Relations

Summary

Increasingly, scholars of International Relations are acknowledging that attention to the various dimensions of culture can expand our understanding of world politics. This workshop was premised on the assumption that culture is a significant factor in international relations. Its objective was not to ask whether culture matters in IR; it assumes that it does. Instead, it asked "how do we study the influence of culture? What methodological approaches are available to us?" Part of the difficulty in addressing these questions lies in the epistemological and methodological divide that animates many IR debates. While discussions inevitably touched on these issues, the emphasis was on productive discussions of method. Rather than reprising debates over the relative merits of quantitative versus qualitative methods, or rationalist versus social construction approaches, the workshop sought to draw on all of these traditions, in an effort to assemble a problem-driven methodological toolkit that could make confident assertions and arguments about an increasingly important area of inquiry. The goals of the workshop were to:

• facilitate dialogue across and between prevailing approaches (including an exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches to understand what questions they can and cannot answer);
• enhance awareness of how IR might usefully draw on insights and developments in other disciplines;
• suggest future avenues of inquiry in an effort to develop new or improved ways to study culture in IR.

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