Why Interpretivist Research Training Matters to Restore Trust in Universities

What constitutes political truth or falsehood has never been more intensely debated or consequential than it is today. In our time, populists who claim to represent constituencies across the political spectrum accuse media corporations of colluding with established parties and international organizations to produce fake news. They denigrate experts and the institutions that employ them — universities included. At the same time, billions of users’ online interactions produce vast quantities of data about how we think and why we act or react as we do. Confidence grows that it is at last possible to track human behaviour and analyze beliefs on a global scale, and thereby, make general causal statements about our species. Yet for all that the outcomes of our political contests are, if anything, harder to explain; the political and social sciences of deterministic prediction, less credible; and problems with what we know and how we know it, thornier than ever. How can training for political research in interpretive epistemologies and methodologies help? In what ways can it buttress the authority of our universities, if indeed we are in a post-truth world? This paper addresses these questions by reflecting, in conversation with new publications on teaching interpretive methods by leading interpretive policy analysts (Bartels and Wagenaar 2025; Einfeld and Sullivan eds, 2025), on lessons learned from six years of instruction on interpretive research designs at the Australian National University, alongside seminars and workshops for students from around Australia. Training in interpretive epistemologies and methodologies helps to alert students to how information is historically situated; misinformation, culturally meaningful; and disinformation, narratively structured. It makes for researchers who are more adept at identifying and advising on threats to democracy; alive to the risks of complicity in projects to dominate and manipulate people; and, attuned to the ethical responsibilities that their research carries. It prepares them to think about how to communicate among one another and with the public about their research results in ways that can restore the authority of our universities. But better political research alone, or training for better research, will not rescue universities from the impasse that comes with a general decline of trust in expertise. Building disciplinary epistemic communities of practice that are embedded in interpretive methodologies might get us closer to that goal. For this reason, research training has to go beyond teaching of methods as though they were tools for atomised individuals to use in pursuit of self-interested goals, and toward the teaching of methodology that always and unavoidably involves collaboration. Hence, the paper argues, the authentic political task that we have as instructors concerned with the defence of truth and the authority of the university lies in epistemologically informed mentorship and cohort-building. Our goal cannot be limited to equipping graduates with skills to research politics. It must be to produce collective understandings of what it means to research politically. This is why research training in interpretive methodologies matters.