ABSTRACT
A serious engagement with the empirical drives the research community in this collection, even as we recognize that it is crucial to develop and refine our theoretical frameworks. Clean research design has been hobbled by our common critical impulse to undermine, or at least identify and then problematize, the authority of knowledge claims. This reflexive desire to identify the limits of our theoretical frame and methodological instruments has led to jargon-heavy projects that can weaken the effective communication of our results. Clarity in methods and research design, political importance, and theoretical complexity are not inherently opposed, as the collaborators in this book demonstrate. Across the different approaches, there is a consensus that the empirical field should drive the methodological choices and the limits of the empirical field and its conditions of intelligibility must be identified.
