Reading-through be-longing: towards a methodology for Political Sciences otherwise

Inspired by critical feminist, decolonial and narrative approaches, this paper invites political sciences scholars to engage in different forms of knowledges (unlearning Western-centrism by centering Asia), methodology (collective) and data collection (centering stories). We offer a pathway to Political Sciences otherwise, i.e., ‘as if people matter’ and propose reading-through as a methodology for open-ended sensemaking at the service of pluriversal co-existence, prioritizing life in/and dignity over mastery or singular truths and fact-finding. Reading-through encompasses diverse practices of meeting, co-reading, and co-writing, including the exchange of thoughts on fictional/scientific stories in a ‘live’ epistolary process paper. To articulate the substantive purchase of reading-through, we engage a selection of novels – Szabo’s The Door, Faye’s Small Country, Thúy’s Ru and, especially Lee’s Pachinko, a woman-centered multigenerational story on the Korean and wider (north)East Asian colonial/diasporic experience in the 20th century – and revisit the political sciences theme of belonging as be-longing otherwise. Rather than offering a definitive blueprint for Political Sciences otherwise, this paper seeks a deeper understanding of how method and methodology are an integral, co-constitutive part of our capacity to fundamentally rethink learned disciplinary conventions towards scholarship ‘as if people matter’.