Post-positivist policy analysis has fairly highlighted that policy-making is not simply shaped by material interests and calculations but is a struggle within the meaning itself. Range of research agendas have been established in order to understand the intellectual and ideational dimensions of policy processes: notions such as "policy paradigms", "policy narratives", "cognitive and normative frames", "référentiels", etc. have proved useful in this respect. However, these approaches have remained curiously vague about how they proceed in their "interpretive" agenda properly speaking. In the 1990's, Emery Roe and other policy analysts made the point that notions such as "intertextuality" or "meta-narratives" could enlighten how policy actors make sense of the world. In spite of its great promise, this research agenda has been rather left behind. Therefore, in this seminar I propose to explore to what extent contemporary language sciences can provide methodological tools for policy analysis. Given the role that narratives play in policy-making, I propose to focus, in this lecture, on the analytical tools of narratology.

Nota biográfica: Mathias Delori (Lyon, 1978) is a political scientist and historian. He is currently CNRS research fellow at the Centre Emile Durkheim, Bordeaux, France.
His main research interests straddle the fields of Policy Analysis, International Relations, History of collective memory, and Epistemology of social sciences.