Preserving or Extending the “Local’s Point of View”? Situated Knowledge, Social Inquiry, and the “Problem of Agency”

Experience-near and reflexive research practice has become the new gold standard for constructionist scholarship in IR and IPS. A key promise of this dual ‘local’ and ‘reflexive turn’ is that privileging subaltern perspectives, everyday experience, and situated knowledges will help fracture traditional and foreground alternative ontologies of the International, thereby helping subaltern actors build effective forms of political agency. Although this strategy has produced a surge of methodological innovation and greatly increased the plurality of voices and standpoints represented within IR and IPS discourse, a growing number of scholars have raised doubts about the narrative that scientific inquiry can function as a performative catalyst of political agency for the situated knowledges it foregrounds. This article challenges the presumption that foregrounding reflexive and experience-near knowledges is sufficient to empowering marginalized and subaltern actors. I argue that this logic fundamentally mis-construes the “problem of (constructing) agency” these actors face because of the dominance of a “constitutive idiom” that (mis-)understands the production of scientific knowledge and social order as mutually reflective or co-constitutive. Building on feminist, post-colonial, and pragmatist insights, I show that experience-near, situated knowledges and techniques and instruments of theorizing are neither opposed nor mutually exclusive but complementary to the construction of reflexive and transformative forms of social agency.