Decolonial Interpretivist Research (DIR) Lab

Turn Questions About Power Into Research

DIR Lab Logo
The DIR Lab creates a space to learn, produce, and analyze decolonial ways of knowing, enabling students and faculty to deconstruct, critique, denounce, and also move beyond colonial legacies.

What is Interpretive Research?

Scholars disputing the hegemony of positivist methodologies in the social sciences began to promote interpretive approaches in the 1980’s. To achieve this goal, they fostered discussions about methodological pluralism, and they enabled a slow, and often resisted, proliferation of methodological diversity. Within this context, “interpretivism” acquired a specific definition, which encompassed meaning-centered research. As Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schartz-Shea assert, researchers in all sciences interpret their data, but the approach called “interpretivism” has acquired a more specific meaning since its re-emergence in the 1980s (2014, p. xiii). According to most interpretive scholars, meanings and discourses construct our worlds and realities (George & Campbell, 1990; Milliken, 1999; Onuf, 1989). We study how meaningful practices create, sustain, reproduce, and also resist colonial legacies.

How we shape things

How to construct the world in context?

This encompasses more than questions about how we “understand” things. Instead, interpretivism analyzes how we “shape” things into being. How do our practices construct, justify, sustain, undermine, view, critique, violently impose, etc., meanings that shape our worlds? How do we construct laws, governments, wars, violence, candidates, walls across borders, death, etc.?

Question the world

What assumptions are taken for granted?

For example: How do some approaches assume or claim to be above other ways of knowing? How do we claim that the order of constitutional law is above all other ways of life? How do we claim that some identities are above other ways of being? How do we claim that some political projects are better than other ideas of a better future? In other words, how do discourses include different kinds of epistemic politics?

What is power?

How do ideas sustain colonial legacies?

This question pushes interpretivism towards the realm of decolonial theory and research (Koro et al. 2023; Darder 2019; Richards 2014; Smith 1999). By deploying an intersectional, pluriversal, and decolonial approach, interpretivism can become more helpful in the understanding of ongoing injustices

Resist and Reimagine

How do movements build other worlds?

Finally, how do intellectuals and political movements of different sorts seek to resist or to move beyond these forms of injustice? This question aims to understand the different ways in which other worlds are sustained or created by subaltern voices and practices.

Current Research

Some of the areas of research currently conducted:

The DIR Lab analyzes the colonial legacies that are included in the US foreign policy towards Latin America.
- This concentration allows for some members of the DIR Lab to focus on a specific historical moment, country, case, and/or dimension of the relationship between the USA and Latin America. Students promote and disseminate their research through conference presentations and publications.
The DIR Lab also focuses on the different ways in which Latin American movements resist or move beyond colonial legacies.
- Some of the members of the DIR Lab concentrate on the study of movements of resistance which aim to construct or sustain different worlds. Among others, anti-colonial, decolonial, Indigenous, ecological, feminist, and queer movements have sought in Latin America to fight against colonial violences and biases. How do these movements aim to sustain their own ways of knowing, being, feeling, and enacting? How do they seek to promote possibilities of co-existence such as the ideas of relationality and pluriversality?
Other regional or global concentrations are welcome as well. We encourage students and faculty who study colonial legacies and movements of resistance beyond Latin America to join us in the discussions of these phenomena. The DIR Lab aims to create a fruitful opportunity of inter-regional and global conversation about decolonialities.

Where the Research Can Take You

With the support of the DIR Lab, students have been recognized by RSCA, the Office of Undergraduate Research, the McNair fellowship, several acceptances for professional conference presentations such as ISA-West, acceptances for credential programs, thesis awards, publication in the Political Science Department Journal, and acceptances for PhD programs.

Students get to develop their research and expertise with additional support and guidance. In some cases, this leads to invitations for publication and co-authorship in professional journals and edited volumes.

Current Membership

Principal Investigator

Marcos S Scauso, Ph.D. (Fall 2023 – present) - Political Science

Undergraduate student members

Juliette A. Garcia (Fall 2023 – present) - Political Science
Artemis P. O’reilly-Hahn (Spring 2025 – present) - Political Science
Ann-Katrin Bock (Spring 2025 – present) - Political Science
Brianna Shirley Angulo (Spring 2026 – present) - Political Science
Eden Wade (Spring 2026 – present) - Political Science
Ben Hansen (Fall 2026 – present) - Political Science

Email Dr. Scauso