Social life of methods
Workaround: In current version of Panels 3.8, it seems this body field needs to be populated in order for title above to appear. This note is hidden by custom CSS style. Jack Latimer.
Overview
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Bentham's panopticon: a tool of social visibility and ordering
Our Question: What do Methods Do?
What do social research methods actually do? And how are they shaped by the social world? These are the core questions we are exploring in our Social Life of Methods (SLOM) integrative research focus.
These two questions aren’t simply technical. Methods aren’t a neutral toolkit that can simply be picked up or put down. Indeed, they aren’t narrowly methodological. The technicalities are important, but we’re making a bolder claim: we’re saying that research methods are vital players in the social world: that they help to create society. And we want to know how.
This is the focus for SLOM.
There are Many New Methods
Social research methods have proliferated in recent decades. They used to be based in the universities, and in government research agencies. This is where sociologists, demographers and anthropologists traditionally worked.
But lots of new methods now come from the private sector (marketing, or track-and-trace technologies). They’re also created in government (focus groups and security surveillance systems.) In addition, digital data have exploded in importance. Much of this data is freely available on the internet (think of Google). So too are open source software and applications.
Some say that this means that social research methods are being democratised. Perhaps this is right. Perhaps it isn’t. But one thing is sure: research methods and ‘the social’ are both changing. And those methods aren’t ‘innocent’: they are helping to change the social world.
The Social is Being Remade in those New Methods
Professional social science does lots of innovative work on methods. But we’re worried that it’s missing out on this broader trend.
Our worry isn’t professional jealousy. It’s because the social is being remade by new research methods. Indeed, this is happening before our eyes. But social science isn’t tracking this properly. Here’s the core SLOM point. If we want to understand socio-cultural change, then we need to understand changes in research methods too. And we need to be involved in those changes ourselves.
This is why we’re interested in the social life of method. We want to understand how research methods construct the social world, and also how the methods themselves are shaped by the social changes around them. And we want to intervene in that process.
Our General Approach
SLOM is a cross-cutting theme. We use it to link with all the substantive CRESC research themes. This means that we don’t have our own researchers. Instead all the core researchers in CRESC are involved.
We use case studies to explore how social science methods are implicated in the organization, administration and transformation of social and economic life. We reflect theoretically on how ideas from STS, the anthropology of expertise, postcolonialism, Foucauldian genealogy, political economy, and Bourdieusian field analysis can help to illuminate the social life of methods.
As a part of this we critically explore and characterise the diversity of knowledge spaces. We talk of knowledge spaces as practices that simultaneously enact (a) institutions (audiences, knowledge producers, and systems of circulation), (b) representations of the social world, and (c) the possibly variable realities enacted together with those institutions and representations.
Finally, we reflect on how CRESC can contribute to methodological innovation, and especially to links between the qualitative and the quantitative, and seek to enhance CRESC’s capacity to conduct methodologically innovative and rigorous research in our four substantive themes:
- Remaking Capitalism;
- Reframing the Nation;
- Topologies of Social Change; and
- Trajectories of Participation and Inequality
Research Questions
Within this broad approach our research questions include the following:
- Which methods succeed and which fail? What are the powers of different sorts of qualitative and quantitative forms of analysis? How can we explain why some methods become hegemonic in certain domains, and what consequences follow from this? As a part of this, how can we better understand the circulation of methods and findings, and their acceptance/absorption in specific locations? Does this require a better theorizing of location?
- What kind of invisibilities and absences are rendered by social science methods? How, for instance, does this work in the context of visualities?
- Is it useful to explore how agency can be located in certain kinds of social scientific methodological repertoires?
- Is there a ‘bias to coherence’ in a world that might be better understood as filled with alterity, heterogeneity, and non-coherence? And what would non-coherent methods look like?
- What are the units of analysis imagined or assumed in social research methods? If we are moving to a ‘post-humanist’ world, then how is this reflected in method, and how does this map onto political and/or ethical human issues? How are conceptions of the human, the social, the technological and ‘the natural’ being woven together?
- With the proliferation of digital data, are we currently seeing a crisis of standard social science methods based around the sample survey and the interview, and what does this portend for our understanding of socio-cultural change? Does the idea of a descriptive turn offer a useful way of grasping the role of these methods?
- What is the transformative and critical potential of social science research methods? To what extent does this require a re-ordering of knowledge spaces, the reconceptualisation of expertise, of what counts as knowledge, and its institutional locations? Does this, as is sometimes claimed, have implications for ontological multiplicity? And if this is the case, then what are the implications of this for social science research methods?
Theme Convenors: John Law and Evelyn Ruppert
Projects
Below is a list of the projects run by this research theme. Click on the title of the project for more information.
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The Social Life of Methods theme for 2011-12 is The Visual.
In taking the visual as our focus we aim to draw together work across CRESC to ask what role the visual plays in the...
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‘Feminism and its Methods’ is a collaborative project of a number of researchers based at CRESC and beyond. We are interested that academic reflections on feminism and its recent past have tended...
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In this project we ask
- How have social habits, identities, attitudes, opinions and feelings been historically constructed through devices such as the census, surveys, polls, market...
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In ‘the challenge of the digital’ we explore how social science methods and research are being challenged and reconfigured by developments in the collection, storage, networking,...
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If the world is non-coherent, then what are the methods we need to know it, to enact it, and to live well in it? This is a core question in...
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This programme of research relates to key CRESC concerns – the challenging of epochalist accounts of sociocultural change through theoretically informed empirical research; research which not only...
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The paper takes as a departure point for revisiting the critical humanism of Ken Plummer’s Documents of Life, Sarah Whatmore’s careful articulation of ‘the urgent need to...
Publications
Below is a list of the publications produced by this research theme.
Working Paper
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John Law and Marianne Lien (2012), 'Denaturalising Nature', available at Newcomers to the Farm Project Website.
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John Law (2011), 'Assembling the Baroque', CRESC Working Paper 109.
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John Law, Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage (2011), 'The Double Social Life of Methods', CRESC Working Paper 095.
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Till Geiger, Niamh Moore and Mike Savage (2010), 'The Archive In Question', CRESC Working Paper 81.
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Mike Savage, Evelyn Ruppert and John Law (2010), 'Digital Devices: nine theses', CRESC Working Paper 86.
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Evelyn Ruppert (2009), 'Numbers Regimes: From Censuses to Metrics', CRESC Working Paper 68.
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Evelyn Ruppert and Mike Savage (2009), 'New Populations: Scoping Paper on Digital Transactional Data', CRESC Working Paper 74.
Refereed Journal Papers
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John Law (2009), 'Seeing Like a Survey', Cultural Sociology, 3 (2), 239-256.
Book Chapters
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Evelyn Ruppert (2010), 'Making Population: From Censuses to Metrics', 157-173, in Leon Hempel, Susanne Krasmann and Ulrich Bröckling (eds), Sichtbarkeitsregime: Überwachung, Sicherheit Und Privatheit Im 21. Jahrhundert (Visibility Regimes: Monitoring, Security and Privacy in the 21st Century), Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, available at Leviathan Sonderheft 25.
Special Edited Journal Issue
Book
People
Below is a list of CRESC staff working on this research theme.
Affiliated Academic Members
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administrator, Centre Directors
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Research Fellows, webmaster
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Affiliated Academic Members, Research Fellows
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Research Fellows
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Centre Directors
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administrator, Centre Administration, Research Fellows, webmaster
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Events
Below is a list of the events organised by this research theme.
- Stones, Sand, Plants: a Day on Knowing Materials : Fri, Jun 28th 2013
- The Infrastructures of Contemporary Digital Culture : Mon, Jun 24th 2013
- How Methods Move: Photography and the Postcolonial : Thu, Jun 21st 2012
- The Social Life of Methods workshop: 'Depicting change: experiments in photography and social science' : Wed, May 23rd 2012 - Thu, May 24th 2012
- Music, Methods and the Social: A Research Workshop : Thu, May 17th 2012 - Fri, May 18th 2012
- Animation and Automation: Moving methods between film studies and science studies: Event Cancelled : Mon, May 14th 2012
- Enacting Values: Keynote Lecture by Annemarie Mol : Thu, Apr 19th 2012
- How Methods Move in Markets : Fri, Mar 30th 2012
- Dark Matters: Shadow_Technology_Art - 'Visual Theme' Gallery Tour : Fri, Jan 13th 2012
- Framing the City: the CRESC annual conference 2011 : Tue, Sep 6th 2011 - Fri, Sep 9th 2011
- The Baroque as Empirical Sensibility: : Mon, Jun 13th 2011 - Wed, Jun 15th 2011
- Methods@Manchester : Wed, Jun 8th 2011
- CRESC OU Drawing Seminar : Tue, Mar 22nd 2011
- The Device : Thu, Mar 10th 2011 - Fri, Mar 11th 2011
- Social Life of Method Reading Group : Tue, Mar 1st 2011
- CRESC Conference 2010- The Social Life of Methods : Tue, Aug 31st 2010 - Fri, Sep 3rd 2010
- Feminism and Its Methods : Mon, Jul 12th 2010 - Tue, Jul 13th 2010
- CRESC Research Workshop- Mobile Methods: Engagements with Digital Data : Thu, May 20th 2010
News
Below is a list of the news items associated with this research item.
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Thu, 03/01/2013
Congratulations to CRESC Senior Research Fellow, Dr Evelyn Ruppert! Evelyn has been appointed Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and will be taking up her new post on April 1st 2013. Evelyn is a leading researcher in the new and important field of 'big data' and will be founding a research centre related to this at Goldsmiths. Her work in CRESC has been crucial in advancing 'the social life of method' research theme, and we look forward to continuing close collaboration with Evelyn after she moves to Goldsmiths. Of course we will also miss her cheerful, innovative and energetic contribution to CRESC. Congratulations to her again!
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Mon, 28/11/2011
CRESC’s ‘Social life of Methods’ theme has announced three events on ‘How methods move’ in 2012. Distinguished speakers from within and beyond CRESC with reflect critically on their own experience of the mobility of methods.
The first of these events on How Methods Move in Markets will take place on Friday 30th March 2012 from 12:30 - 16:30 at The Open University, Camden, London. Speakers will include Michel Callon (Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris), Adam Leaver (CRESC Manchester), Fabian Muniesa (Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines de Paris) and Karel Williams (CRESC Manchester).
The second on Animation and Automation: Moving Methods Between Film Studies and Science Studies will take place on Monday 14th May 2012 from 15:00 - 17:00 at the University of Manchester. Speakers will include Lucy Suchman (Lancaster University) and Jacqueline Stacey (University of Manchester).
Click here for full details of the event and the seminar series.
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Thu, 24/03/2011
John Law, on what insects might have to do with the social life of method
They asked me to review a book: Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia. (New York, Pantheon, 2010). Raffles is an anthropologist and his book is a wonderful collection of essays on practices in which people and insects overlap. Organised (as its title suggests) as an A-Z, its essays are variously anthropological, historical and anecdotal. So there are chapters on (for instance): locusts in the Sahel; cricket fighting and gambling in Shanghai; the Holocaust (Jews, lice and anti-Semitism); Karl von Frisch’s research on bees and their dances; a dedicated scientific illustrator, Cornelia Hesse-Honneger who has meticulously drawn the deformities of insects that have the misfortune to live near nuclear facilities; and a form of sexual pleasure (for men) which involves crushing insects under (women’s) feet. In short it’s about practices where people and insects in some way come together. The book is beautifully written, marvellously erudite, extensively illustrated, and easy (indeed compelling) to read. It is in every way a tour de force.
So what has it to do with the social life of method? The straightforward response is: nothing. Though he writes like a dream (think of the best kind of popular science book), unless you’re interested in entomology, the history of science, and/or the anthropology of nature and culture then it’s not an obvious bedside book. But then again (or so it struck me), it’s all about the social life of method too. I’m not sure whether Raffles has a core concern here, but if he does perhaps it’s about the many different ways that we can know insects, and about how we can know them well. So his stories are about some of the many varieties of ways of knowing insects. They may (to put it differently) be known by ‘methods’ that are scientific, economic, poetic, environmental, political, psychological, industrial, emotional and/or erotic to name but a subset of the possibilities. Nothing much fixed here. So, for instance, important to Raffles is the issue of wonder. How do different forms of ‘affect’ (to use that currently popular expression) intersect with ‘science’ or forms of ‘rational’ knowledge? Do they exclude one another? And what is it that gets lost if we professionalise our science?
So that’s the first way that insects – or at least this book – have (or has) to do with the social life of method (SLOM). We learn that there are many methods for knowing insects, and we wonder about what they do and how they relate. But then as I think about this I begin to notice that Raffles also pushes the pieces around in a very SLOM-like manner. This is in part because it’s the practices for knowing that he describes, in all their nitty-gritty specificities. But what is that they do, those practices? The answer is that in part they generate knowledges, or representations, and therefore subjectivities too. In part they generate the objects that are known: insects are simply different in different practices. Then again, they imply and reproduce different kinds of expertise and forms of authority (who has rights to know, and why). And finally, they resonate with diverse kinds of institutions that afford space for particular ways of knowing. In short, if I read his book in this way Raffles is telling us that different knowledge practices simultaneously imply different kinds of representations, subjects, objects, expertises, authorities and institutional forms. As he puts these into interaction with one another the result is a delight – but also a lesson in the social life of method.
If you want a longer review you'll find it here, But better still, check out the book itself:
Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, New York: Pantheon, 2010.
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Thu, 03/03/2011
Will the UK's 2011 Census be the last? CRESC's Social Life of Method researcher, Evelyn Ruppert reviews the pros and cons of the digital alternatives in an OU OpenLearn think-piece, and in an article for the Independent.
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Thu, 03/02/2011
In a new blog entry Evelyn Ruppert reports on 'sociomic' methods: the business of compiling and analysing complete social datasets. Is this 'cultronomics' replacing good old fashioned social science? Yes says Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine. We don't need theory any more. But is this right? Check out Evelyn's take on this.
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Fri, 17/12/2010
John Law, CRESC director, gave a plenary at a day conference on December 17th at the Ecole des Mines de Paris. The workshop, Debordements: une journée scientifique en l'honneur de Michel Callon, brought together scholars from France and overseas to celebrate the work of Michel Callon on his retirement.
Law revisited Callon's oeuvre, and in particular his work on scallops and fishermen, and his collective work on Acting in a Common World, in a talk entitled 'Uncommon Worlds: or Notes on Fish and Ponds'.
The details of the meeting are available at http://www.csi.ensmp.fr/.
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Thu, 16/12/2010
Our latest working paper, on 'Digital Devices: nine theses', co-authored by Mike Savage, Evelyn Ruppert and John Law, has now been published, and is available for download.
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Mon, 01/11/2010
CRESC researcher, Niamh Moore, in collaborations with colleagues at a number of other universities, has been successful in gaining funding from the cross-council Connected Communities research programme led by the AHRC, to research community food growing practices.
Two year-long projects will draw on Niamh’s involvement in a south Manchester allotment with local young lesbian and bisexual women (http://www.likt.org.uk/activities/allotment).
One project will focus on histories of community food growing, and the second will focus specifically on the role of community food growing in supporting health and well-being.
Both projects will be novel in involving young women, who have recently had training in peer-research, as co-researchers. They will interview each other, and other allotmenters, take photos of their work and play, document the process of organising and planning the allotment, and trace the history of the site in south Manchester through local records, as well as reflecting on the relationship between working outdoors, growing and then eating food collectively, the making of community, and their sense of health and well-being.
Two other sites involved in this project with Professor Neil Ravenscroft (PI) from University of Brighton, and Dr Ed Welch at University of Durham, are Spitalfields City Farm (http://www.spitalfieldscityfarm.org) and Tablehurst and Plawhatch Community Farm in Sussex (http://www.tablehurstandplawhatch.co.uk)
The second project focusing on health and well-being is in collaboration with Professor Andrew Church (Brighton), Professor Neil Ravenscroft (Brighton), Professor Richard Mitchell (Glasgow) and Dr Anne Ellaway (Glasgow).
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Wed, 28/07/2010
12-13 July 2010, Manchester
The conference was a great success, with demand for places exceeding our plans, with over 55 participants, so it was good to see how much interest the event attracted. We kept with a single strand of papers, with lots of time for discussion, which worked well as a format, and we also included a range of speakers, from well-known international and UK feminist academics, to one who had recently passed her viva; as well as a local feminist youth worker and activist. We were able to bring two international speakers to the event: Ann Cvetkovich from University of Austin, Texas, US and Julie Mcleod, University of Melbourne, Australia, which was incredibly useful for both international reflections of the development of debates about methods in the UK, as well as some context for how these debates were emerging in the different locations of the US and Australia.
The conference was focused around the dual questions of using methods as a way of rethinking feminisms; as well as an exploration of the histories, transformations and travels of feminist methods. Day one was largely focused on histories of feminism and feminist methods, and methods for tracing feminist histories, with papers on a queer ethnography of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in the US, to an ambitious Leverhulme-funded oral history of the UK’s Women’s Liberation movement; and an account of Feminist Webs, a collaborative intergenerational feminist project in the NW (of England), involving youth workers, young women in youth clubs and academics, in co-creating a history of feminist youth work in the North-West. Other papers addressed the practices of feminist collectives, issues of silence and the gaze, feminism and critique, feminist reading practices, developing practices of public sociology, researching intimacies, and the challenges of thinking feminism through ‘women’s empowerment’ in international development; with a closing roundtable discussion which returned to the more over-arching questions we were addressing.
We were fortunate to secure a range of funding from CRESC/SLOM, but also 1k from the School of Social Sciences (Manchester) and a further 1k from the Centre for Research on Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cardiff/Lancaster), which also meant that the event enabled the development and consolidation of a number of networks. We had further support from the Manchester Feminist Theory Network, and Jackie Stacey from MFTN contributed to the final closing plenary at the conference.
We are now in early discussions with the journal Feminist Theory about the possibility of a special issue coming out of the conference.
