Lee Ann Fujii Award
For Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence
This award is to be given every other year to journal articles, book chapters, or books in recognition of Lee Ann Fujii’s contributions to the study of political violence, including methods for doing such research.
Charles Taylor Book Award
Best Book in Political Science Employing or Developing Interpretive Methodologies and Methods
Charles Taylor critiqued aspirations to model the study of politics on the natural sciences. This award will go to a book exploring any aspect of political life that addresses problems and topics in interpretive methodologies or reports the results of empirical research using interpretive methods.
Hayward R. Alker Best Student Paper Award
Best Student Conference Paper Employing or Analyzing Interpretive Methodologies and Methods
Reflecting Hayward Alker’s eclectic approach to political studies, the award will be given to a paper studying any aspect of political life that either engages in interpretive methodological issues or reports the results of empirical research conducted using interpretive research methods.
The Grain of Sand Award
Honoring Creative and Sustained Scholarhip from an Interpretivist Perspective
This lifetime achievement award honors a scholar whose contributions demonstrate creative and sustained engagement with questions of enduring importance from an interpretive perspective.
Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Best Article Award
Best Peer-Reviewed Article Employing Interpretive Methodologies and Methods
This award recognizes a peer-reviewed article published in political science and politics-oriented interdisicpinary journals. The award was created in 2024 and will be given annually at the discretion of the executive committee.
How to Nominate
Nominations for the 2024 awards period are currently closed.
The Group will announce and present 2024 awards at the annual APSA conference during its business meeting or reception.
Deadlines for the 2025 nomination period will be available after the annual meeting.
The Lee Ann Fujii Award
For Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence
The Lee Ann Fujii Award for Innovation in the Interpretive Study of Political Violence is to be given every other year to books, journal articles or book chapters, in recognition of the late Professor Fujii’s contributions to that area of inquiry. Dr. Fujii, who died unexpectedly in March 2018, was Associate Professor of political science at the University of Toronto. Her main field of study was comparative politics, as an Africanist specializing in genocide studies and (post-)conflict settings. Recently, she had expanded her research agenda to include the historical conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and the U.S. south. In the course of her research, she developed a methodological expertise in interviewing, especially as articulated in her recently published Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach (Routledge/T&F 2018), the fifth volume in the Routledge Series in Interpretive Methods.
The award honors her creative contributions to the study of political violence, including methods for doing such research. In her 2009 book Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda (Cornell University Press), as well as in her book Show Time: The Logic and Power of Violent Display (Cornell UP, 2021) and other writings, Dr. Fujii developed fresh ways to investigate, conceptualize, and explain political violence in places as diverse as Rwanda, Bosnia, and the United States.
Among her methodological contributions, three innovations stand out:
her relational approach to the production of lying and truth-telling in interviews (in “Shades of truth and lies: Interpreting testimonies of war and violence,” Journal of Peace Research 47 (2): 231–241, 2010, and in her 2018 Routledge book, Interviewing in Social Science Research: A Relational Approach);
the contributions of what she called “meta-data” in assessing the veracity of interview narratives (in “Five stories of accidental ethnography: Turning unplanned moments in the field into data,” Qualitative Research 15 (4): 525–539, 2015); and
her dramaturgical approach to analyzing political violence and its display (in “The puzzle of extra-lethal violence,” Perspectives on Politics 11 (2): 410-426, 2013, and her 2021 book).
This award recognizes published works that most innovatively study political violence from an interpretive perspective, memorializing Dr. Fujii’s approach to political research and her overall contributions to interpretive research methods. In keeping with her own efforts both to expose more hidden and systemic types of harm (racial and gender discrimination, in particular) and to understand what drives people to kill, the nominated work may take any type of political violence, broadly construed, as its concern. The violence might be direct and physical; it might be entrenched and structural, inflicting various forms of harm based on race, gender, class, economic, and other inequalities; it might be cultural and symbolic, serving to justify, normalize or naturalize harm or injustice. This award understands political violence to include not only violence between states (the traditional understanding of war and its aftermath) and between factions within a state, such as in civil wars, but also the ongoing “wars” against terrorism, possibly also against drug abuse, and also, significantly, domestic and sexual violence. Research on inter-state and civil wars has shown how such violence can be, and often is, intertwined with sexual violence. The use of rape to terrorize a population, for example, was particularly strong in the Yugoslavian wars, one of Professor Fujii’s areas of research. And then there is the sort of political violence committed by the guards at Abu Ghraib, a topic other political scientists have taken up.
The award recognizes works that not only report on findings, but which engage the methodological entailments and/or methods challenges of studies of political violence, broadly construed. Consideration will be given to interviewing, as in Dr. Fujii’s research, but also to other methods. The award committee will consider not only books and journal articles, but also chapter-length publications. In addition to considering chapters from edited books, eligibility will also extend to chapters from monographs that do not focus on political violence as a whole, but which include an outstanding and innovative methodological chapter (including, e.g., methodological appendices) that could lend itself to the study of violence.
The Charles Taylor Book Award
Best Book in Political Science Employing or Developing Interpretive Methodologies & Methods
This Award commemorates Charles Taylor’s contributions to interpretive thought in the political and social sciences. In “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” (1971), Taylor critiqued aspirations to model the study of politics on the natural sciences, and explained how “interpretation is essential to explanation” in the human sciences. This essay, along with Taylor’s Philosophical Papers, and many other articles, book chapters, and volumes, have inspired scholars employing and developing interpretive methodologies and methods in the study of politics.
The Award will go to a book exploring any aspect of political life that addresses problems and topics in interpretive methodologies, or reports the results of empirical research using interpretive methods. Thus, the book might engage with the philosophy of interpretive political and social science, reflect upon methodological issues arising from interpretive research, and/or take the form of an empirical study that pursues interpretive research.
Eligible books will distinguish themselves as contributions to interpretivist thought in one or more of the following ways. First, they will treat knowledge, including scientific knowledge, as historically situated and enmeshed in relationships of power. Second, they will approach the world as socially made, so that the categories, presuppositions, and classifications that refer to particular phenomena are understood to be manufactured rather than natural. Third and relatedly, they will eschew the individualist orientation that characterizes rational choice and behaviorist research, instead addressing how ideas, beliefs, values, and preferences are always embedded in a social world, which is constituted through humans’ linguistic, affective, institutional, and practical relations with others.
Nominations are welcome from anyone. Authors may nominate their own work, as may readers and publishers. The nominated work may be either a single- or multi-authored book or an edited volume. To be eligible, books must have been published during the two-calendar-year period prior to the year of the APSA meeting, as determined by the printed book’s copyright date. A book that was nominated for the Charles Taylor Award during a year cannot be nominated again for the subsequent year’s Award. The award committee is under no obligation to make an award if submissions do not merit such recognition.
The Hayward R. Alker Best Student Paper Award
Best Student Conference Paper Employing or Analyzing Interpretive Methodologies & Methods
This award is named to honor the memory of Hayward R. Alker, former President of the International Studies Association and John A. McCone Chair in International Security at the School of International Relations, University of Southern California. Alker passed away on August 24, 2007. From his humanistic critique of mainstream political science, to the role he played in the development and promotion of interdisciplinary, historically grounded, linguistically and hermeneutically-informed approaches to political science, Hayward Alker was a tireless champion of interpretive methodologies. His commitment to nurturing and encouraging graduate students and young scholars makes this award a doubly appropriate way to honor his contributions.
Papers must come from PhD students in political science, and must have been presented at a political science association conference (e.g. American Political Science Association, Western Political Science Association, Midwest Political Science Association, other regional or state meetings, as well as other associations such as European Consortium for Political Research, International Political Science Association, or International Studies Association and its regional meetings) in the academic year preceding the award. Authors must be enrolled as PhD students at the time of the paper’s conference presentation.
The award is given to papers presented during the academic year preceding the year of the submission deadline. Nominated papers should be identical to the version presented at the conference; subsequent revisions are not eligible.
Reflecting Hayward Alker’s eclectic approach to political studies, the award will be given to a paper studying any aspect of political life that either (1) engages interpretive methodological issues or (2) reports the results of empirical research conducted using interpretive research methods. Authors may self-nominate. We also encourage chairs of panels as well as discussants to nominate outstanding papers from their conference sessions.
The Grain of Sand Award
Honoring Creative & Sustained Scholarship from an Interpretive Perspective
“…To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour….
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro the Eye…
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day…”
~excerpt from “Auguries of Innocence,”
by William Blake
“We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt. Our glance, our touch mean nothing to it.
It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.”
~excerpt from “View with a Grain of Sand,”
by Wislawa Szymborska
Drawing inspiration from the opening lines of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence” and Wislawa Szymborska’s “View with a Grain of Sand,” the Grain of Sand Award honors a scholar whose contributions demonstrate creative and sustained engagement with questions of enduring political importance from an interpretive perspective. Echoing Szymborska’s “We call it a grain of sand,” the award underscores the centrality of meaning-making in both the constitution and study of the political; recalling Blake’s “To see a world in a grain of sand,” the award recognizes scholars who expand the capacity of interpretive scholarship to embody and inspire imaginative theorizing, while cultivating new lines of sight by enriching our literary and experiential resources and nourishing the playfulness of mind so necessary to the vitality of social science.
The award will be announced and presented at the annual APSA conference during the business meeting or reception of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Conference-related Group (IMM).
With the exception of the first two years, each year’s award committee will be determined at that meeting or shortly thereafter and will work together with the IMM CG’s outgoing program chair(s). The award committee will, however, be under no obligation to make an award every year.
Nominations should include a copy of the nominee’s curriculum vitae and a minimum of two supporting letters summarizing the nominee’s contributions and explain the merit for this award. Please e-mail nomination materials (individually or as a unit) to the outgoing Committee chair (see the People page) no later than March 1 of each year.
Members of the award committee are the IMM Executive Committee, serving as a committee of the whole.
For information on contributing to the funding of this award, please contact the current IMM Executive Committee Chair.
The Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow Best Article Award
Best Peer-Reviewed Article Employing Interpretive Methodologies & Methods
The Peregrine Schwartz-Shea and Dvora Yanow Best Article Award recognizes a peer-reviewed article published in political science and politics-oriented interdisciplinary journals. The award was created in 2024 and will be given annually at the discretion of the executive committee. The first awardees will be named at the 2025 American Political Science Association business meeting.