This course will provide students with an introduction to interpretive methods in the social sciences and humanities. We will learn to ‘read’ texts and images while also becoming familiar with contemporary thinking about interpretation, narrative, ethnography, social construction, Marxian dialectical materialism, and psychoanalytic approaches. Among the methods we shall explore are: semiotics (Barthes), hermeneutics (Geertz), ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein), discourse analysis (Foucault), dialectics (Hegel and Marx), and psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan).