How to Talk with the Academic Community about Contested Knowledge: A Confrontational-Reflexive Interview Model

Interviewing academics about contested knowledge presents significant methodological challenges, as the interview situation often activates “official” professional repertoires that conceal ambivalence and the active construction of epistemic boundaries. To address these limitations, the authors propose and evaluate the confrontational-reflexive interview model (CRIM), a research design aimed at systematically eliciting reflexivity and analyzing boundary-work in situ . The model treats the interview not as a neutral information extraction tool but as a structured sequence of meaning-making occasions. Stage 1 establishes a baseline narrative in expert interviews and focus groups, which is subsequently disrupted by a standardized “confrontation stimulus”—a scholarly text explicitly challenging the dominant disciplinary consensus—forcing participants to negotiate their position against a credible internal critique. Stage 2, conducted approximately one month later via asynchronous written correspondence, introduces temporal distance to test the stability and revisability of these accounts outside the immediate pressure of the face-to-face interaction. Drawing on a study of political scientists’ discourse on conspiracy theories, the authors demonstrate that although standard interviewer probes often fail to unsettle “official” narratives, the combination of a third-party textual confrontation and delayed reflection successfully reveals the specific conditions under which experts reproduce, repair, or redraw the boundaries of legitimate knowledge. The authors argue that CRIM contributes to sociological methodology by offering a replicable framework for observing expertise as a contingent, interactional performance.