Swimming with theory

Late in the morning, sometime around half past ten, I found myself in the chlorinated half-light of Valhallabadet. There is something about swimming that invites thinking without forcing it, the way thoughts surface and dissolve between lengths. What kept returning was not the heat of yesterday’s grading conference but a quieter unease about what we are actually asking of our students when we talk about “good methodology” and “proper theory”. Or perhaps more precisely: whose idea of proper we are defending, and at what cost?

Two exceptionally strong students have written a thesis that is intellectually ambitious and clearly their own. It takes risks. It does not follow a cookbook logic where theory is first “operationalised” and then “tested” in a neatly sealed methodological container. Instead, theory functions as a lens, a way of seeing and arguing about the world. 

What struck me most in the discussion was how quickly quality became conflated with compliance. The absence of a familiar methodological template was treated not as a choice to be discussed, but as a deficiency to be corrected. Method, in this view, becomes less a tool than a gatekeeper: something you “have”, demonstrate that you “use”, and then reproduce consistently, regardless of whether it actually helps you answer the question you have posed.

In an exchange with a colleague afterwards – one that I found both clarifying and reassuring – the point was made very clearly that this is not what our own assessment criteria say, nor what serious academic work has ever been about. Method matters, of course. But it is only one part of a much larger intellectual whole: the formulation of a relevant problem, independence vis-à-vis existing research, an understanding of theoretical assumptions and limitations, argumentative coherence, and an ability to situate one’s contribution within a broader scholarly conversation. Reducing all of this to a box-ticking exercise about “having a method” is not rigour, it is dogma.

There is also something historically naïve about the demand that theory must always be “tested” in a narrow, positivist sense to count as legitimate. Large parts of political science, international relations, and social theory simply do not work that way – and never have. Theories often function as paradigms, as interpretive frameworks that help us make sense of complex realities. They can be more or less convincing, more or less fruitful, but they are not laboratory hypotheses waiting to be falsified by a single case. Expecting students to pretend otherwise is pedagogical confusion.

At the grading conference, tempers flared. That happens when deeply held ideas about what counts as knowledge are challenged. Whatever the outcome, I hope it opens up a broader conversation – not about this particular thesis, but about the kind of intellectual environment we are cultivating.

As I finished my swim and climbed out of the pool, I felt calmer than when I went in. Still unresolved, but clearer about what is at stake. Universities should be places where students learn not only to follow methods, but to understand them, question them, and, when appropriate, move beyond them. If we lose that, we risk producing very correct theses – and very cautious thinkers.