The Salon She Built

The Salon She Built: How Peregrine Schwartz-Shea Helped Change Political Science Research

As a young girl, Peregrine (Peri) Schwartz-Shea was captivated by the French salons—those legendary gatherings where intellectuals debated ideas with passion and rigor. I was enraptured…Everybody debated and talked about ideas. "I thought to myself, 'That's what I want to do,'" she recalls.

But when Schwartz-Shea entered academia, she discovered that those stimulating intellectual exchanges were frustratingly rare. The demands of academic life often overshadowed the pure joy of intellectual discourse she had imagined. One exception to that was at smaller gatherings during conferences. It was at a Women’s Caucus cocktail party during a Western Political Science Association conference when she met Dvora Yanow, who was a contrast in many ways to herself.

"She's tall, I'm short. She’s dark-haired, I’m blonde. She is Jewish … raised in Boston by a rabbi father," Schwartz-Shea remembers, while she was from "Whitefish Montana, riding horses and skiing." Despite their differences, the two scholars found in each other what Schwartz-Shea had been seeking all along: "With Dvora, I'm always having those conversations! That joy of the life of the mind—even while incredibly challenging and difficult—is what I want for others."

That partnership would eventually help revolutionize how political scientists approach research. Now, as professor emerita at the University of Utah, Schwartz-Shea has established the Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Dissertation Fellowship for Interpretive Research, ensuring that future generations of scholars can experience the intellectual excitement she found and approach research in ways that honor the complexity of human experience.

An Intellectual Crisis

Schwartz-Shea's journey to this point was neither simple nor comfortable. She earned her degree using rational choice theory and experimental methods—an up-and-coming approach in political science and economics in the early 1980s. But her confidence in these methods began to unravel almost immediately, shaped by her experiences as a woman in the discipline.

At one early conference, she found herself the only woman among 40 researchers discussing rational choice theory. "I couldn't talk. It was the weirdest experience," she remembers. Years later, reading Rosabeth Moss Kanter's work on tokenism, she understood what had happened: "It wasn't just me. It was this context in which I was forced to represent my group to everybody."

The theoretical approach itself also troubled her. "There's this history of game theory, rational choice theory, and it was basically a bunch of really smart guys sitting around making up games from their heads about the social world," she explains. "They're projecting their theoretical perspective onto people's experiences...it's artificial." In a recent interview with the U, she more than once would say, “I wish social scientists did more of the social part.”

Yet Schwartz-Shea had been hired at the U specifically to teach quantitative methods. The tension between her growing doubts and her professional responsibilities created a profound crisis. "After getting tenure, I said to myself, I've got everything I want. I have my husband, I have my two children. I have my job. Why am I so miserable?" The answer was clear: she was unhappy doing the experimental and rational choice work that defined her career.

Her pivot toward interpretive research came at a steep professional cost. It took 17 years to move from associate professor to full professor. "I had to 'reinvent myself,'" she notes.

A Different Way of Knowing

What exactly is interpretive research, and why was it worth such sacrifice?

"Interpretivism is research that is done without variables and statistics," Schwartz-Shea explains. Traditional research requires scholars to "sit down and mentally carve up the world, and label things as variables"—a process she found limiting. Interpretive research, by contrast, focuses on how people make meaning through language and lived experience.

She offers a vivid metaphor to illustrate the difference: "If you're a quantitative researcher, and you're looking at noodles, you're counting them. If you're the positivist-qualitative [type], maybe comparative case study—you're saying, Well, let's compare the Chinese noodle and the Italian noodle. And if you're the interpretivist? You're eating the noodles."

This approach is neither purely objective nor subjective, but what Schwartz-Shea calls "inter-subjective." "It's about how people create worlds and understandings with each other, you know from the moment...you are born," she explains. "You are introduced into worlds where people have assumptions, they have ways of communicating, and you absorb those."

The implications are profound. Rather than imposing predetermined categories on human behavior, interpretive researchers ask: How do people themselves understand their worlds? What language do they use? What meanings do they make?

Consider her example about policing: "Let's spend some time with the police officers. How do the police officers understand their worlds? How will this proposed policy that the people over there think is going to make a difference actually work on the ground? How will officers react to it, given their worlds and how they think about their jobs?"

Or consider the dissertation research of her graduate student Jennifer Yim in a juvenile detention facility, examining "how the juveniles in the jail are reacting to the different strategies that staff members are using to try to get through to them and rehabilitate them. What's going on in those very intense interactions?"

These are questions that can't be answered by counting variables or running controlled experiments. They require researchers to engage deeply with people's lived experiences.

Building Methodological Pluralism

Schwartz-Shea is quick to emphasize that she's not arguing for interpretivism as the only valid approach. "Is rational choice approach totally useless? No. Is positivist-qualitative, comparative case study [approach], totally useless? No. Is interpretivist everything? No." What she advocates for is methodological pluralism—recognizing that different research questions call for different approaches.

"One of the struggles in introducing interpretivism into political science is you’ve got to get some courses [on the books so that] people learn about interpretivism, so that everybody isn't always self-educating," she says. Together with Yanow, she co-authored a groundbreaking book on interpretive research methods and created a "methods café" at conferences—channeling the French salon model she so admires—where scholars could learn about interpretive interviewing, discourse analysis, field research and many other interpretive methods.

Their work has opened new possibilities across political science. "You see the richness in all the different directions you could go," Schwartz-Shea notes, "from a very traditional interpretive question, like, what's going on with [Trump supporters] …? How do they think? to questions about, as one example, public administration: Why doesn't this program work? What's going on with the recipients" of those programs? Does the program make sense from their perspective?

Planting Seeds for the Future

The fellowship Schwartz-Shea has endowed provides crucial support for graduate students pursuing interpretive research. Unlike traditional experimental work, interpretive dissertations typically can't secure funding from sources like the National Science Foundation. The fellowship addresses this structural barrier.

"My motive for establishing this fellowship is that I want to plant the seed for the next Jim Curry [formally at the U and now at University of Notre Dame] or Rich Holtzman [Bryant University ] or Mike Rowe [University of Liverpool]," she explains— scholars "who are interested in asking interpretive questions about people's experiences and meaning making."

Now a grandmother, Schwartz-Shea thinks about the future differently. "I worry about the future for my grandchildren,” she says. “There are so many challenges for humanity! We need a methodologically pluralist political science to understand and solve problems. Interpretive social science is distinctive and that difference from other research approaches may help with particular problems."

In the end, Schwartz-Shea has created what she sought as that young girl reading about French salons: a space for deep intellectual conversation and debate. Through the fellowship bearing her name and Yanow's, she's ensuring that future scholars can experience "the life of the mind"—and that political science remains open to diverse ways of understanding our complex social world.

 

By David Pace
based on an interview by April Goddard

Visit our webpage to learn more about the Fellowship or contact Claudio Holzner.

Past recipients of the Schwartz-Shea and Yanow Dissertation Fellowship for Interpretive Research include Jerry Stott (2025-26), Alexander Hall (2024-25) and inaugural recipient Charles M. Turner (2023-24).