Why This Project Is Scholarship:
​Interpretivism, Hypertext, and the Rhizome

*last updated on February 27, 2026

When I say that this project is grounded in scholarship, I am not claiming that it proceeds like a laboratory study, nor that it aims to settle disputes by measurement. I am naming a different scholarly lineage: interpretive inquiry, where the work is to make sense of how people live inside concepts, metaphors, institutions, habits, languages, and stories—and how those meaning-structures shape what becomes possible, permitted, and thinkable. In this kind of scholarship, rigor is not primarily statistical. It is conceptual clarity, careful interpretation, transparent framing, responsiveness to counterexamples, and an honest accounting of what the method can and cannot do. Interpretive research starts from the premise that social reality is not a single, neutral object “out there,” waiting to be measured; it is also constructed, contested, and experienced from situated points of view, which makes meaning central rather than ornamental. Interpretive research is often defined by its focus on understanding meanings, perspectives, and sensemaking rather than testing universal laws.

This matters for a project about power because power is not only a concept people define in books; it is also a topic people navigate. It appears in explicit forms—laws, hierarchies, punishments, offices, credentials—but also in quieter forms that often go unnamed: the right tone, the “appropriate” emotion, the moment someone is interrupted, the fear of asking, the habit of self-censorship, the sudden confidence that comes with belonging, the small permissions granted or withheld. If I am interested only in the official definition of power, I miss the lived ecosystem around it—the many things people are doing when they think they are talking about something else. Interpretivism gives me a legitimate scholarly rationale for treating those indirect, ordinary, sometimes contradictory traces as evidence: not evidence that can be reduced to a single variable, but evidence that can be interpreted, compared, and mapped for patterns of meaning-making.

The second piece of the scholarly background is the rhizomatic approach developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In A Thousand Plateaus, they contrast “arborescent” models—tree-like, hierarchical, root-and-branch systems that tend to privilege origins, linear development, and stable taxonomy—with the figure of the rhizome: a botanical metaphor drawn from rhizomes—horizontal underground stems that can send out roots and shoots from nodes—where any point can connect to any other, and where the system expands by proliferation rather than by a single trunk. In the opening “Rhizome” chapter, they describe principles such as connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity, asignifying rupture, and what they call "cartography and decalcomania"—the idea that inquiry should build a map that can be entered at multiple points, rather than reproduce a supposedly original structure.

For my project, the rhizome is not decoration and not merely a website design choice. It is an argument about how inquiry should proceed when the topic itself is distributed, layered, and paradoxical. Power is not one thing that lives in one place. It shows up as ability and as influence; as permission and as prohibition; as coercion and as care; as structure and as improvisation; as macro-institutions and as micro-interactions. It is shaped by law and economics, but also by language, attention, memory, shame, hope, habit, fear, and desire. If I force this topic into a single linear exposition—one that must begin at an origin, proceed through neat categories, and arrive at a conclusion—I will end up making the topic look simpler than it is, largely because my format will have demanded simplification.

A rhizomatic paradigm offers a different discipline: it permits branching without treating branching as failure. It permits local clarity without pretending that local clarity equals total clarity. It permits multiple partial accounts to coexist and cross-illuminate. It is especially suited to a project that includes both what we name “power” and what we do not name “power,” because the unspoken portions of a topic often become visible only through side routes: etymology that reveals latent assumptions; everyday phrases that smuggle in hierarchy; metaphors that carry moral evaluations; stories that rehearse submission or resistance; cultural scripts that assign people positions before any explicit command is given. A hypertext format can enact this. Interlinked pages do not just present information; they show how an idea changes as it moves across contexts, registers, and scales.

Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence on mapping rather than tracing also clarifies what kind of scholarly claim I am making. I am not tracing power back to one source, one essence, or one master definition. I am mapping a field of relations: how different meanings cluster, diverge, contradict, and recombine; how some meanings dominate public language while others remain private; how “power” can be both feared and desired, both condemned and romanticized, both denied and performed. A map can remain open to revision, which is important for a living project: the point is not to close the inquiry, but to make the inquiry navigable.

This is also where the interpretive and the rhizomatic converge. Interpretivism justifies attention to lived meanings and situated perspectives; the rhizome gives a structural method for organizing that attention without forcing it into a false hierarchy. Together, they support a mode of scholarship that treats complexity as a property of the topic rather than a flaw in the author’s thinking. They also support a certain ethical stance: if power is layered, then people’s relationships to power are layered too. Individuals can be powerful in one context and powerless in another; they can benefit from one arrangement while suffering under a different one; they can participate in harmful patterns without fully understanding how those patterns recruit them. A non-hierarchical, interlinked form makes room for this kind of complexity without constantly sorting people into moral bins.

Of course, this approach has limitations, and it strengthens the project to name them. Interpretive scholarship does not produce the kind of generalizable prediction that a statistical model might aim for; it produces understanding, not forecasting. It is vulnerable to the researcher’s blind spots and to the seduction of a compelling narrative. The rhizomatic form is vulnerable to diffusion: a reader can feel unmoored, unsure what is central and what is peripheral. There is also the ever-present risk—especially with a topic like power—that interpretive openness becomes a license for vagueness. Those are real risks, and they call for real disciplines: explicit definitions when I am using a term in a particular way; clear distinctions between description and evaluation; careful handling of examples; and a willingness to revise pages when new connections reveal weaknesses in earlier formulations.

But the benefits are not merely stylistic. A rhizomatic, interpretive approach can track something that is otherwise hard to see: how power operates through meaning, and how meaning can itself become a form of power. It can show how people talk about what they can do, what they may do, what they must do, what they are allowed to want, what is “normal,” what is “too much,” what is “not for people like you,” and how those everyday grammars quietly distribute options across a social world. It can also hold space for paradox: that meanings are made by people and yet can control people; that power can be both external constraint and internalized habit; that naming a pattern can be liberating and also reductive. A project built as a network rather than a ladder is well-suited to keep those tensions alive long enough for them to teach something.

So when I say, “This work is rooted in interpretivism and draws from the rhizomatic research paradigm developed by Deleuze and Guattari,” I am not adding academic polish to an otherwise personal project. I am specifying a scholarly method: a commitment to interpretation as a disciplined practice of sensemaking, and a commitment to a form of inquiry that maps multiplicity instead of pretending it can be reduced to one clean line.