Description
The ‘turn to the micro, local, or situated’ has effectively challenged how IR theorizing reinforces the ontological closure of the International, and pioneered novel methods for accessing the situated perspectives and practices through which global ‘macro’- structures are enacted and contested. However, the often one-dimensional epistemological privileging of local knowledge(s) has failed to integrate them into, and can even reinforce their exclusion from the social processes that produce ‘global’ social realities.I build on these critical observations to problematize how the epistemological register that dominates the turn to the micro obscures the complex interactions between scientific inquiry, social agency and structure in the social construction of reality. I draw on insights from performativity theory to criticize how this register reduces agency to a function of knowledge or perspectivity. I then link this argument to Boltanski’s analysis of the conditions under which situated critiques accomplish social resonance to demonstrate why ‘local knowledge’ depends on scientific abstraction and ontological reflection to attain effective translation towards social agency. I conclude my argument by clarifying what this ‘meta-pragmatic function’ of social research entails for how we understand our role as researchers with regard to local knowledges as the starting point for a joint process of inquiry.
