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 and audience research?
• How these compare with other kinds of devices for eliciting the social such as novels, music and songs, dance, poetry, sports, sculpture and the heritage industries?
• How these devices have been bound up with and implicated in the formation of modern organizations, nations, national imaginaries, and understandings of technologies, material life and animality?
• And under what circumstances might devices enact or reproduce ‘baroque’ understandings of the social?  

We have been running workshops on devices, and on the baroque as method. We're working towards special journal issues and have drafted a major Working Paper

Our specific research foci include the following:

• Witness seminars of critical events: we are exploring reunions as devices through which actors relive, discuss and analyse their different perspectives on critical events and thereby intervene in understanding and memory.
• Early warning systems and conflict mapping: we are exploring devices such as early warning systems and conflict mapping that anticipate when and where conflict is likely to occur and identify certain regions as ‘conflict prone’.
• Enumerations and metrics: doing populations: this is exploring how different enumeration devices are not simply alternative perspectives on a given population that is already there, but simultaneously represent and enact different populations.
• Histories of survey analysis: case studies of the BBC: here are exploring the development of survey methods, focusing on the BBC as a pioneer of audience research from the 1930s, and its role in elaborating survey technologies.
• The one for the many: assembling composites: this involves analysis of how various performance measures of social phenomena such as poverty, deprivation, development, health and neighbourhoods assemble myriad data to assess, evaluate and intervene in governing and administration.
• Occupational and class classifications: here we are exploring the construction of measures of class and other kinds of social classifications during the 20^th century, especially since 1945 with a focus on information from censuses and other sources of ‘vital’ registration data to construct social categories and measure social change.
• The limits of the social: here our interest is in how contemporary devices simultaneously construct and enact social, natural and animal realities.
• The baroque: this may be understood as a set of procedures or sensibilities that refuses literal representation and seeks to know, appreciate, trouble, and/or redeem the world allegorically through the fractured and endlessly recombined play of joining and separation. Associated with the writing of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, our particular interest is in what ‘the baroque’ might mean in methodological practice, for empirical research and case studies in the social sciences and the humanities. For details of our workshop click here.