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A Manifesto for Live Methods: Provocations and Capacities
Abstract
In this manifesto for live methods the key arguments of the volume are summarized in eleven propositions. We offer eleven provocations to highlight potential new capacities for how we do sociology. The argument for a more artful and crafty approach to sociological research embraces new technological opportunities while expanding the attentiveness of researchers. We identify a set of practices available to us as sociologists from the heterodox histories of the tradition as well as from current collaborations and cross-disciplinary exchanges. The question of value is not set apart from the eleven points we raise in the manifesto. Additionally, we are concerned with how the culture of audit and assessment within universities is impacting on sociological research. Despite the institutional threats to sociology we emphasize the discipline is well placed in our current moment to develop creative, public and novel modes of doing imaginative and critical sociological research.
... Drawing on the bridge-building approach to art and science collaborations, we propose framing this gerontological research as ‗live gerontology'. Borrowing and building on the idea of ‗live methods' from sociology (Back & Puwar, 2012), we argue gerontology can benefit from this perspective to better solidify such collaborations and their processes. Employing ‗live methods' means developing or utilizing creative methods to innovate methodologically and to conceptualize and present gerontological craft in dynamic ways. ...
... This perspective recognizes gerontological research as inherently multidisciplinary, providing a wider framework to continually reconsider how we keep our craft alive, relevant, and critical through creative collaborations and methods. Taking inspiration from Back and Puwar's (2012) A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 6 1. A live gerontology connects the whole without essentializing Live gerontology draws on a multitude of genres to artfully connect the wholei.e., to intertwine micro, meso, and macro levelscontextualizing aging processes and experiences within their various sociocultural milieus. ...
... However, as the collaboration with Josephine progressed, we realized its potential to generate new understandings about the intersections of loneliness, aging, and institutionalizationbeyond novel ways of translating research. The ‗liveliness' of words and illustrations can enhance capacity to recognize how the creative -and even the ‗make believe' (e.g., Gurney's fantasy escape)add to scientific analysis and engagement (Back & Puwar, 2012). The openness to generative partnerships, with a writer and then an illustrator, facilitated an artful approach to the outcomes of such collaboration. ...
This article proposes an expansive conceptualization of gerontological research by engaging with a ‘live gerontology’ that combines sciences and arts to better understand and represent aging and its diverse meanings and contexts. Borrowing the sociological concept of ‘live methods’, we argue that gerontology can benefit from a ‘live’ approach – not only methodologically, but also conceptually. To guide pathways between artistic and gerontological fields and frame its practices and outcomes, we suggest four propositions for a live gerontology: 1) using multiple genres to artfully connect the whole – interweaving micro, meso, and macro levels to contextualize aging within various sociocultural milieus; 2) fostering the use of the senses to capture more than just what people say – what they do, display, and feel; 3) enabling a critical inventiveness by relying on art’s playfulness to design/refine instruments; and 4) ensuring a constant reflection on ethics of representation and public responsibility.
To apply and experiment with a live gerontological approach, we describe collaborations with an award-winning writer and an illustrator. The collaborations drew on qualitative data from a study on lived experiences of loneliness in long-term care through ethnography and interviews with residents of two Australian facilities. The writer explored participants’ accounts as creative stories, which were then illustrated. Motivated by an ethics of representation, we aimed to represent findings without othering or further marginalizing participants. The creative materials offered more than appealing representations, shining new light on the intricate nature of aging, loneliness, institutionalization, and gerontology research and practice.
... To do so, we repurpose commercially collected social media data that claim to identify and manage users' identities, such as 'female' or 'male', and marketing interests as 'dog lovers', 'first time buyers' or 'feminists'. Commercially collected data do not tell a holistic story alone -we understand these data to be 'lively', called to being through imagination and interpretation (Back & Puwar, 2012). Thus, our method looks to capture individuals' experiences of these data, reflecting on how these data produce social meaning and, ultimately, how these data shape participation in social life. ...
... Of course, researchers can tailor the introductory materials to their own interests. We have built the 'live' and 'crafty' nature of our research (Back & Puwar, 2012) into the introductory materials. For example, we communicate the overwhelming, confusing and intrusive nature of cookie notices by showing screen grabbed examples from journalistic and other wellknown sites. ...
... Text is used to verbally emphasise particular points and themes, and to anchor particular intentions and meaning in their artwork. In this vein, algorithmic self drawing is a 'live methodology' as participants creatively add notes, captions, dialogue and annotations (Back & Puwar, 2012). One workshop participant, Lucy, drew her algorithmic self asking 'which apple should I eat today, Gucci or Prada?' ...
In this article, we outline an original, creative method for capturing the multifaceted ways in which digital technologies shape social life. We outline a framework for engaging participants in creative writing and drawing techniques to support ‘meeting and greeting’ their ‘algorithmic selves’. Algorithmic selves offer datafied reflections of individuals’ social media use, represented through platform approximated advertising categories. These categories include identities, such as ‘female’ or ‘male’, and marketing interests as ‘dog lovers’, ‘first time buyers’ or ‘feminists’. Our method builds on Les Back’s calls for ‘a more artful form of sociology’ that is able to think with technology. By using algorithmic selves to mobilise creative enquiry in this way, we argue that researchers can better discern how technology users make sense of their data, the ways in which identity can be co-constructed by social media platforms, and how our interactions with technology ultimately shape social lives in meaningful and highly affective ways. Our method offers a craft-based framework for understanding imaginations, associations and connections with data profiling, and making these understandings available for participant reflection and researcher analysis. This method can also support research participants in taking creative ownership and building agency around their interactions with social media platforms.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
Contemporary philanthropy relies on a gift/counter-gift process: a person making a donation receives benefits for it, mostly financial (tax deductions) or symbolic (recognition). Donor recognition is an important part of philanthropy and comes in many forms. One of them is donor plaques—on walls, signs, or objects/buildings—associated with naming, i.e., the material traces of recognition that have the name of the donor on them. The analysis of donor plaques deepens our understanding of the way the act of giving leaves traces. What are these traces of philanthropy? How long do donor plaques stay on the walls of institutions? How are they negotiated? How do they change the urban landscape at a bigger scale? This chapter aims at understanding the specificity and the symbolic role of donor plaques as traces left voluntarily by philanthropic donors. Focusing on an understudied topic (philanthropic traces) and based on two qualitative research conducted in philanthropic settings, it questions the relationship elite donors have with time and space through the analysis of a concrete object (the plaque). It also examines the meaning of these traces (and the values they convey), as well as the power relations (and resistances) they create.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
The growing masses of digital traces generated by the datafication process make the algorithms that manage them increasingly central to contemporary society.
There is widespread agreement in considering traces and algorithms as complex objects that intertwine social and material practices with their own cultural, historical, and institutional nature (Halford et al., 2010).
Accordingly, given this strong intertwining between the social world and the digital world that is formed by material and technological objects, it becomes possible to consider the algorithms and traces as socio-digital objects. For this reason, this article aims to identify the features that allow us to frame them as socio-digital objects starting from concepts borrowed from the actor-network theory (Latour and Woolgar 1879). In particular, we will first discuss opacity, authority and autonomy concepts and then see how those features emerge in digital geographical traces.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
Visits to museums in the twenty-first century do not merely involve coming in contact with art but also living an interactive and relational experience that has changed the organization of museums, not only the exhibition rooms but also other museum spaces: boutiques, cafés, restaurants, and public areas. This new type of visit implies the role of an original agent: the frontalier visitor who, by inhabiting spaces adjacent to exhibition rooms, expands and reinforces the museum’s boundaries and the museum experience itself. This work is focused on visitors’ footprints as material and virtual marks and aims at showing the results of a field analysis carried out from 2017 to 2019 addressing the architecture of modern art museums. Fourteen museums have been analyzed, and four of them have been selected as the main objects of analysis: Malba, Moma, Tate Modern, and Centre Pompidou. We have studied their façades, esplanades, and entrance halls as spaces advancing what the public will experience inside the buildings. This analysis considers these adjacent spaces essential for the pass-through from the material experience to the virtual experience and from material footprints to virtual ones.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
In this chapter, I reflect on the relationship between shame and digital traces in cases of image-based sexual abuse (IBSA) (I am thankful to Giovanni Zampieri, Dario Lucchesi and Massimo Cerulo for their invaluable help in writing and revising this chapter.). I will introduce the concept of shameful trace to describe records of diverse nature that can be used by a group of people participating in an effort to stigmatise an appearance, a conduct, an attitude or any other cause of social disapproval. Such a record is an object of shame only in a latent form. For it to become a shameful trace, it is necessary that it be shared and focussed on particular situations of moral condemnation.
This is neither a purely theoretical nor a purely empirical article. Rather, I first consider a case study of moral violence against a young Italian woman, Tiziana Cantone, who committed suicide in 2016 after the widespread non-consensual dissemination of intimate images. Further, I propose a theoretical understanding of the diffusion of shameful traces as a process of concerted social action including five elements: first, the ontology of the trace; second, the actors involved in its production and diffusion; third, the temporal and spatial coordinates of the shame diffusion and the technical or social means employed in it; and finally (fourth and fifth), the cultural and normative frameworks. Finally, I investigate how social bonds and sociotechnical and normative regulations favour the diffusion of shame in cases of IBSA.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
This chapter explores the traces that we voluntarily leave behind on social media platforms, dictated by the selection of what we want to show and what we want to hide and how this affects the perception of ourselves.
Nowadays, digital platforms have a huge impact on our lives, in re-shaping both our habits and our personal attitudes. Particularly on social media, both tangible and intangible aspects of our lives can be datafied , which in turn affect and shape our feelings and experiences.
In order to explore this dynamic, I interviewed a selected target group of young media professionals who are used to promoting themselves and their work on social media, through the so-called practice of self-branding .
From the qualitative analysis of 20 in-depth interviews, this chapter investigates traces derived from implicit self-branding practices , which can take the form of controlling what is not to be shared, measuring the online reactions, and hiding relevant information. All these non-activities are also strategic in building and managing the users’ online branded personas.
Thus, through the management of the visible and invisible traces on social media profiles, users convey a branded and polished version of themselves.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
Why do users generally pay little attention to the serious threats to their privacy inherent in new communication technologies? In attempting to answer this question, I consider two different and complementary approaches to the issue of surveillance: the now classic view of Bauman and the more recent, but already well-known, view of Zuboff. I show how Bauman focuses mainly on subjective factors, represented by the psychic motivations of the user, and assigns little importance to technology, whereas technology as an objective factor plays a fundamental role in Zuboff’s analysis of surveillance capitalism.
Hence, I propose to broaden the theoretical framework in order to better capture the intertwining of subjective and objective factors, particularly by taking into account studies on the new philanthropy. On closer inspection, the fact that the new economy tycoons are also often committed to ostentatiously doing good for the less fortunate could explain users’ overconfidence. Since ordinary people see the alleged generosity of the owners of Microsoft, Amazon, or Facebook widely publicized, it is reasonable for them to assume that these “modern-day heroes” are offering their services free of charge to all and sundry for the common good.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
In the United States, gentrification typically involves whites displacing African American, working-class communities. This work uses a political economy framework to better understand the clues displacement leaves behind. Specifically, this research investigates what happened to a former community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, known as Silver Hill, which was an enclave of mostly African American residents founded in the late nineteenth century just west of the city. Through archival research and investigation of the remaining traces of the neighborhood, we develop a theory of spatial erasure that highlights how wealthy white communities that grew up around Silver Hill subsumed and eradicated it. Specifically, racial capitalism played a major role in the abuse and neglect of Silver Hill. The neighborhood became surrounded by wealthy white developments which cut off road access to their homes. Today, a cemetery, two houses, and a litany of historical records offer clues about what was once a thriving African American community. Additionally, descendants of the neighborhood’s residents provide key information about its life and death. We discuss the implications of examining this history, especially as it pertains to the collective remembrance of Silver Hill.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
This chapter deals with the analysis of Julian Assange as a public figure through the use of three perspective angles. In the first part, Assange’ history is briefly outlined, tracing it back to the systems of thought of authors such as Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu, with the aim of highlighting how the Australian journalist’s biography helps to illuminate his (and our) historical time and, vice versa, how historical time helps to depict his biography and his courageous journalistic campaigns more precisely. The second part shows how the apparently subversive aspects of Assange’s activity in fact need to be analysed within the web of social control and the subsequent fight between rulers and outsiders. The criminalisation of Julian Assange is, by this token, a consequence of the reaction enacted by power against militant practice aimed at claiming an alternative use of the web. The third paragraph examines three basic principles of Enlightenment which are apparent in the WikiLeaks approach and explicitly recalled by Assange: the connection between the duty to improve knowledge and the right to communicate, publicity as a test to reveal injustice and the understanding of freedom of the press as an antitotalitarian device.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
Understanding social practices as they co-evolve between researcher-community is fundamental in “design and social innovation” where local knowledge, resources, and agency meet to solve wicked problems (Rittel and Webber, Policy Sciences, 4, 155–169, 1973). In this chapter, we seek to explore the traces that researchers and community members leave behind as indexical forms of representation. Contemporary perspectives urge a critical examination of the interplay between design and broader structural and cultural issues (Björgvinsson et al., CoDesign, 8(2–3), 127–144, 2012). Design methods, however, are often chosen arbitrarily reflecting a “toolbox” mentality that potentially misses culturally embedded nuances (Dourish, Implications for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 541–550), 2006). Cultural probes as part of this “toolbox” are often associated with ethnographic methods, yet were never intended to generate data, whereas ethnography goes beyond data gathering to analyze socio-cultural meaning and practices (Boehner et al., How HCI interprets the probes. In CHI Proceedings Designing for Specific Cultures, 2007). We present two case studies to discuss the use of cultural probes in participatory design as enablers of dialogue in open-ended conversations with communities. We draw on reflexive practices and Manzini’s concept of “diffuse design” and “expert design.” Working in communities can thus become a form of “public ethnography,” an effort to understand and analyze social practices from multiple knowledge perspectives as an ongoing process.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
The concept of trace is useful for a semiotic reflection upon what is left behind. Similar to the concepts of index and footprint, traces are traditionally described as already signs, or more precisely as something recognized as a sign (Violi, Riv Ital Filos Linguaggio, 2016, http://www.rifl.unical.it/index.php/rifl/article/view/365 ; Mazzucchelli, Riv Ital Filos Linguaggio, 2015, http://www.rifl.unical.it/index.php/rifl/article/view/312 ). This act of recognition is fundamentally dependent on a community’s work of interpretation, in order to actualize a potential narration lying in the trace, but what if the promised sense is not grasped? Adopting the notion of intentionality (Greimas and Courtés, Sémiotique: dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Hachette, Paris, 1979) to include partially unconscious traces within the sphere of semiotic investigation, the article considers the possibility to conceive traces as paradoxical signs standing for nothing, i.e., signs of insignificance (Leone, On insignificance. The loss of meaning in the post-material age. Routledge, 2020). Through the analysis of digital traces and trolling, (in)significance is disputed on the basis of a proposed paradigm, within which even such seemingly accidental traces may possess profound significance within a digital network constructed of distributed subjectivity. One conclusion drawn from the example is that strong normative claims about what may qualify as significant often conceal an ideologically charged agenda. For this reason in particular, a detailed account of digital traces should be the highest priority of semiotics today.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
Physical daily contexts are replete with traces of the past. A statue in a park, the name of a street, or an old advertisement can all remind people of specific historical moments or periods. Often, they recall glorious episodes, but traces of less glorious pasts also persist. Among them, the most self-censored ones refer to past immoral actions that tarnish the overly idealized moral standard attributed to the group. As a case in point, material traces of the colonial past became the focus of controversies within formerly colonizing countries during the last decade. European anti-racist movements questioned the colonial heritage of European societies in an unprecedented manner and active social minorities also brought to the fore some traces still in the background of physical environments. Part of public opinion reacted by denouncing the “cancel culture” or the danger of “erasing” history. This chapter outlines a social psychological approach about contemporary perceptions and interpretations of still self-censored material traces of Italian colonialism. Results of a qualitative survey on Italian participants’ representations and attitudes toward a candy with a colonial wrapping will illustrate how Italian participants of different generations question this ephemeral trace and take on the challenge of a cumbersome past.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
This introduction chapter provides context and background to the concept of trace in social sciences, also presenting an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this volume. Information that was not meant to be informative and evidence that did not expect to possess evidential character, traces are construed as evidence only from the vantage point of the observer, inadvertently left behind by those who produced the trace in the first place (indeed, awareness might change footprints and make them fade out). Conceived as clues rather than statements, traces prove to be useful for studying current social facts and individuals who have not yet vanished. This holds to be true especially in our contemporary platform society, due to its datafication processes and the ensuing quantification of features never quantified before; digital footprints determine the selection of the most relevant content or services to offer, creating accordingly personalized feedback. Thus, individual and collective online behavior leading to traces production is shaped by digital environments’ affordances and constraints; at the same time, such socio-technically situated traces retroact over digital systems (by fueling algorithms and predictive models), thus reinforcing, or questioning, the power relations at stake. Conclusively, a brief remark is made on future research possibilities associated with the sociology of traces.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
Individuals and groups leave evidence of their lives when they are engaged in their activities. In this way, they create a rich amount of material that tells us about their behaviours, opinions and values. This material is not created for research purposes and is different from that solicited by researchers. In recent decades, the spread of new communication technologies has amplified the possibility of creating and disseminating this kind of data outside the research context.
In this chapter, what people leave behind (WPLB) online is studied from a strictly methodological point of view. What kind of evidence are researchers dealing with? Is it possible to reconnect it with the traditional methodological framework? We suggest that data left behind by people and groups on the Internet should be divided into three different categories: online found data ( digital traces ), online retrieved data ( web-mediated documents ) and online captured data ( online behaviours ). The phase of contextualization proves essential in understanding the very nature of (online) data.
This work leads to rediscovering the potential of classical methodological tools such as simple observation, documentary analysis and trace analysis. These practices provide methodological value to research projects that analyse WPLB in physical and web-mediated environments.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
From the study of semiotic paradigms in relation to the face, we focus on the traces, understanding how some flourish from the tangible but ignored signs left by humans daily, while others are totally imbricated in the face from/in which they transpire.
We typologize them in three varieties, from their multidimensional configuration, offering case studies of emanation, imbrication, and cancellation. First, between art and forensic tendencies, Dewey-Hagborg uses hair, cigarettes, and chewing gum off the streets to program and build 3D faces through the DNA found in them. Secondly, we examine the artistic work of Jorit who engraves on his face the sign that symbolizes belonging to a tribe he is working with. Name-face isomorphism emerges in the third case: Janez Janša carries out a performative sociopolitical program to test, destabilize, and reorganize cultural complexity.
All offer a syncretic situation analyzable by means of the semiotic approach and bioanthropological resources. The divergent weights of similar elements make us reflect on the relationship between the innermost meanings of our faces and their tracks in a sort of anticlockwise movement but also on the convergence between macro-cultural and techno-political orientations with intimate and located magnitude.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
In the digital era, there is an increasing number of areas where the footprints we leave behind (voluntarily or not) become relevant for the use (legitimate or not) that can be made of them, creating new broad scenarios of analysis in different fields of interest. These developments have affected a wide range of scientific fields, and social sciences have also been called upon to face major challenges from an epistemological, theoretical and methodological standpoint. In this regard, the use of research tools, such as social network analysis and sentiment analysis , poses many questions to the researcher regarding their robustness, also in comparison to traditional research methods and techniques, i.e. the two-step flow communication model . This paper will propose a theoretical and methodological comparison between the Katz-Lazarsdeldian tradition of the notion of personal influence and the one of influencer logic that is central in digital methods . Starting from this evaluation, the question is whether what is happening in the field of the analysis of the big data provided by the spread of the digital footprint is capable of adding some new element to what has already been highlighted by the “two-step communication theory”, or whether it simply represents its explication.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
The right to be forgotten (RTBF) is meant to provide individuals with an actual representation of their personal identity by obtaining the erasure of their past “digital traces” left online. In 2014, the CJEU’s leading case Google Spain accorded the data subject the right to obtain the de-referencing of personal information related to past events from search engines. Consequently, the RTBF has been included in the title of Article 17 GDPR as a synonym of the right to erasure, without however being explicitly explained or regulated. Alongside this process, the ECtHR has constantly highlighted the need for fair balancing between the right to respect for private life and the right to freedom of expression, often denying the applicants the right to obtain removal or anonymization of news reports published in the past because of their permanent public interest. By stressing that Internet archives constitute an important source for education and historical research, it admitted, though, that the obligations of search engines may differ from those of the original publishers of the information. This reasoning, however, does not seem to have influenced a recent decision of the Italian Corte di Cassazione , commented in the final part of this chapter.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
Starting from the commonly used meaning of a “human” footprint, connected to the traces that every action, product or process leaves in the atmosphere as greenhouse gases, the paper explores new perspectives for a changing social theory considering the principles of sustainability. This theoretical hypothesis stands on the necessity of a revision of the sociological principles to observe and analyse the contemporary phenomena connected to economic, political and social transformations due to environmental problems. The focus is on human action and its new role in the changing social space, time and relations. The application of these revised notions to a concrete process, such as the assessment of policies and social participation in Italian National Parks, according to the “positive thinking” model, will add some evidence about the radical transformation of cognitive paths and social dynamics.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
The expanding use of algorithms in society has called for the emergence of “critical algorithm studies” across several fields, ranging from media studies to geography and from sociology to the humanities. In the past 5 years, a consistent literature on the subject has developed. Inspired by these studies, we explored the ways digital traces may be employed for auditing algorithms and find evidence about algorithmic functioning. We focus on the analysis of digital traces through search engines and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). We present four cases of how digital traces may be used for auditing algorithms and testing their quality in terms of data, model, and outcomes. The first example is taken from Noble’s (2018) book Algorithms of Oppression . The other three examples are very recent, two of them related to COVID-19 pandemic and about the most controversial type of algorithms: image recognition. Search as research and the analysis of digital traces and footprints within quasi-experimental research designs are useful methods for testing the quality of data, the codes, and the outcomes of algorithms.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
In this chapter, we focus on how virtual communities (VCs) leave “traces” or “unintentional information” and study how they can affect VCs and their features. In doing so, we use qualitative data from a doctoral research project developed between Italy and Belgium. Firstly, in this introduction, we briefly describe how “traces” are considered. Secondly, we unpack the concepts “VC” and “sense of community.” Thirdly, we explore the context in which VCs take place Theoretically. Fourthly, we explain the methodology used and the case selection procedure. Then, we describe our results, and finally, the chapter ends with a discussion and a conclusion. We consider the notion “traces” in Bloch’s terms (1992: 51) and use the interpretation given by Ricoeur; traces are “documents in archives (which) for the most part come from witnesses in spite of themselves” (2009: 171); “The trace is thus the higher concept under whose aegis Bloch places testimony. It constitutes the operator par excellence of ‘indirect’ knowledge” (170). Information disseminated by social media users, considered as unconscious “tracks,” can be used by others in different ways than the original intent, thus acquiring a different meaning. In this chapter, our first research question polls for the features of information that are left unintentionally by the users of virtual communities (RQ1). Our second research question focuses on the role that such unintentional information has in virtual communities (RQ2) or, in other words, on how users of VCs appropriate and apply these traces in different ways than originally intended.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
This chapter continues the recent debate on the epistemological dimension of traces and tracing. Following our own preliminary work and in confrontation with an explicitly non-Western epistemology—namely, the case of “First Australians”—the chapter proposes the perspective of interpretive tracing. It calls for the systematic reflection of practices and underlying epistemologies of traces as objects of interpretation in a cross-cultural, i.e., cosmopolitan, perspective. It is a perspective that is sensitive to the tacit assumptions of objectivity and linear inferencing that underlie many Western approaches. Further, it is an open perspective that is sensitive to various embedded notions of time and temporality (not just time as a linear approach to the world) in particular. Furthermore, this perspective we advocate can eventually show that trace and tracing entail different social, cultural, and societal notions of social binding.
... Today, due to the widespread use of new communication technologies, many activities are performed in digital environments, and much evidence is left behind online. WPLB online data can offer a relevant contribution to the study of social reality in contemporary societies (among others, see Back & Puwal, 2012;Lupton, 2015). On the one hand, the use of the Internet as a source of information represents a challenge that social researchers need to address to capture the dynamics of social change. ...
This open access book focuses on a particular but significant topic in the social sciences: the concepts of “footprint” and “trace”. It associates these concepts with hotly debated topics such as surveillance capitalism and knowledge society. The editors and authors discuss the concept footprints and traces as unintended by-products of other (differently focused and oriented) actions that remain empirically imprinted in virtual and real spaces. The volume therefore opens new scenarios for social theory and applied social research in asking what the stakes, risks and potential of this approach are. It systematically raises and addresses these questions within a consistent framework, bringing together a heterogeneous group of international social scientists. Given the multifaceted objectives involved in exploring footprints and traces, the volume discusses heuristic aspects and ethical dimensions, scientific analyses and political considerations, empirical perspectives and theoretical foundations. At the same time, it brings together perspectives from cultural analysis and social theory, communication and Internet studies, big-data informed research and computational social science.
This innovative volume is of interest to a broad interdisciplinary readership: sociologists, communication researchers, Internet scholars, anthropologists, cognitive and behavioral scientists, historians, and epistemologists, among others.
... This article extends traditions of creatively exploring the forms and styles of sociological writing (Agger, 2007;Back & Puwar, 2012;Leavy, 2016), experimenting with new ways of writing the embodied emotional and affective rhythms of a violently bordered community in Rio de Janeiro. Its 'disjunctive' form expresses aspects of the bordering of body, city and subjectivity in a community that suffers high levels of gendered and racialised violence, stigma and territorial fragmentation. ...
This article offers a creative disjunctive feminist analysis of affective rhythms within a complexly bordered complex of favelas in Rio de Janeiro. It explores the gendered atmospheric constitution of authority in the favela’s violent border spaces, arguing that authority is partly embodied through a channelling of attention. Attention is conceptualised as involving not just conscious intentions, perceptions and emotions, but also non-conscious rhythms of autonomous affective self-regulation. The article is structured through a tripartite disjunctive form that expresses the bordering of city, body and experience. Drawing on qualitative interview data, quantitative electrodermal activity physiological data and creative writing, the article dwells with the materiality of words and the forms of affects to express material and physiological aspects of emotion and affect in journeys around the internal border-spaces of the city. Adapting the modernist tradition of ‘stream of consciousness’ writing, we style a ‘stream of attention’ form of writing that expresses multiple modes of embodied, conscious and preconscious attention.
... Nowadays, it is not only a question of methodological principle that addresses social researchers, but also the evergrowing relevance of the kind of data used, the information contained therein, the possible multilayers of reality which they lead to, and the undeniable need for integration between these pieces of reality to build ever more complete paths of knowledge. It should also be noted that the crossing of the quantitative-qualitative dichotomy is directly and indirectly supported by perspectives such as those of "live sociology" (Back and Puwar 2012) and of "punk sociology" (Beer 2014). They try to imagine, and direct to at the same time, the development of sociology in the digital world through new, even heterodox forms, compared to consolidated approaches. ...
This book includes thirty-one selected studies that have been published in various ATINER academic journals since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. All of these studies have undergone a double-blind peer review process and have been accepted for publication. These studies cover research related to COVID-19 from a variety of research fields that include Health; Mass Media and Communication; Sociοlogy; Business and Economics; Tourism; Education; and Law.
... There are two further reasons that may have given rise to this revival of content analysis in the digital scenario. First, the crossing of the dichotomy is directly and indirectly supported by new perspectives, such as those of "live sociology" (Back & Puwar, 2012) and of "punk sociology" (Beer, 2014). In practice, this has the advantage of low costs, in terms of both money and time. ...
The explosion of platform social data as digital secondary data, collectable through sophisticated and automatized query systems or algorithms, makes it possible to accumulate huge amounts of dense and miscellaneous data. The challenge for social researchers becomes how to extract meaning and not only trends in a quantitative and in a qualitative manner. Through the application of a digital mixed content analysis design, we present the potentiality of a hybrid digitalized approach to social content applied to a very tricky question: the recognition of risk perception during the first phase of COVID-19 in the Italian Twittersphere. The contribution of our article to mixed methods research consists in the extension of the existing definitions of content analysis as a mixed approach by combining hermeneutic and automated procedures, and by creating a design model with vast application potential, especially when applied to the digital scenario.
... The sensewalk on Istiklal Street is a mobile ethnographic method that is part of the area's liveness and sensuousness. We know the bodily movement and attention to senses would collaborate well while walking (Back and Puwar, 2012). We say people would evaluate spatial qualities as a combination of different senses (Gibson, 1966;Rasmussen, 2001;Pallasmaa, 2005a;Middleton, 2010). ...
The 'sensory' plays a vital role in examining human and world interrelations if often overlooked. This thesis aims to have a new understanding of Istiklal Street, Istanbul, through the area's sensory qualities. The research is ground on a 'phenomenological' approach and intends to move beyond the urban visual experiences by looking into the area's multi-sensory experiences. The practice of 'sensewalking' has been used in research to cope with visually-oriented urban assessments. This investigation, which is structured with a qualitative lens to discover the Street's sensory aspects, would be worthwhile primarily for the fields of architecture, urban sensory design. As we see, the changing socio-cultural structure, economic and political movements, law regulations, innovative transportation and communication activities have resulted in a controversial modification of Istanbul in recent years. On Istiklal Street, Istanbul's culture, entertainment, tourism focus, many buildings were restored, moved, converted, closed, and demolished after the 1990s. All have been significant elements in terms of the qualitative value of this area. Many debates have been put forward by social scientists, urban planners, and architects about Istiklal Street's transformation. Except for the field of academic discussions, the enormous amounts of discourses in social media have shown that the multi-layered socio-cultural and architectural structure of Istiklal Street has been changing dramatically in a controversial way. This thesis supports the idea that while Istiklal Street has changed, the transformation has not been only spatial, socio-cultural, or economic. The research claims that the sensory experiences which have great importance in terms of intangible qualities of this area have begun to lose their distinctive features. Therefore, the research has focused on the individually sensed and assessed sensory qualities on the Street beyond the visual experiences. With the way of 'mapping', collected data of the sensewalking-based fieldworks has been presented. As the primary assessment, the research claims that Istiklal Street's sensory dimensions deserve to be recorded and decoded as expeditiously as possible to observe the sensory reflections of transformations in the area. The research findings showed that Istiklal Street's latest modifications and adjustments had arguably influenced this place's sensory qualities. The result says sensory stimuli of the place are connected, and the sensory elements create a specific sensory ambience. Moreover, the sensory interaction in the place is infected by the physical or spatial changes in the area. This research offers convincing evidence for the argument that the sensory composition of the urban place should not be considered separately from its non-visual characteristics. Istiklal Street's sensory consideration needs to be embedded in further investigations and applications. Increasing awareness about the distinctive sensory qualities and Sensemarks of urban places is worthwhile. The inhabitants' sensory urban experiences provide new insights to comprehend urban places. The research method, ‘sensewalking’, produced an unconventional, novel attitude in the context of qualitative-based urban studies to see the sensory reflections of the physical urban transformations. The research's findings opened creative and productive ways for architecture, urban design, planning, urban ethnography, and intangible heritage studies. Keywords—Istiklal Street, Istanbul, Sense, Sensory Experiences, Sensewalking, Sensory Mapping.
... We gain and lose by shifting to virtual and digital methods to understand production, but certainly there is a lot of scope for new and mixed production research methods. This might include more 'live' methods, which Les Back and Nirmal Puwar (2012) advocate and includes the development of new tools to attend to liveness and to conduct live investigations. It might include more digitally native methods such as scraping digital data and digital traces. ...
... In reconceptualising and redeploying reflexivity, it must not be a "personal attribute, character disposition or acquired skill, but rather, ethically, it is an existential struggle that is at the heart of any practice that would involve generating knowledge about other people" (Rhodes andCarlsen 2018, 1304). Here, I join critical feminist postcolonial researchers (e.g., Back and Puwar 2012;Smith 1999), in reflecting and deliberating on the politics and ethics of craft research practices (Bell and Willmott 2020). I turn to Judith Butler's work (2016, 2020) on vulnerability to explore what it may offer in the way of an ethico-political imperative to examine social suffering, including whose suffering is deemed grievable and who is denied grievability. ...
This chapter reflects on the possibility of vulnerability as praxis in studies of social suffering. Drawing on research examining the community-based palliative care movement in Kerala, I discuss what it might mean to focus on vulnerability as an ethico-political imperative in our research process. Specifically, I explore how from a condition of vulnerability, we may adopt three modes of praxis: 1) vulnerability as susceptibility, which allows openness to silence and challenges epistemic certitude, 2) vulnerability as collective care, which acknowledges the role of time and generosities, and 3) vulnerability as learning to be affected by difference, where one learns from the wounding and the unsettled habitations that arise over the course of fieldwork.
Keywords: Vulnerability, Judith Butler, social suffering, palliative care, qualitative research methods, feminist research methods
In this article I reflect on discussions from the 2022 DASTS conference around the shifting nature of prototyping in design research. Specifically, I reflect on Ruth Neubauer and colleagues’ work on ‘prototyping living spaces’ (2022, and this volume), and Simy Gahoonia and Christopher Gad’s (Forthcoming; 2022) study of the Danish Technical Comprehension experiment. I also reflect on an element of my own design-research that has involved developing speculative prototypes, namely a tandem bicycle that was designed as an ‘interview machine’ for gathering research on the Calais Jungle refugee camp in France (Healy, 2021). I go on to develop what I refer to as a prototyping ecology to underpin the above and to consider the different modes and methods involved in different kinds of prototyping practices, and the ways they stabilise and destabilise the situations they enter into. Finally, I ‘test’ this ecology by revisiting the aforementioned examples to explore the forms of ‘stirring’ that prototypes participate in, how they straddle the ecology, and the ways they produce and encourage research events where I argue for the importance of how one might become attuned to the ways they encourage the unexpected by forming new relations and events through material intervention.
Whilst work on decolonising methodologies has persisted for more than 20 years, engagement remains uneven. Despite rich discussions of indigenous methodologies and decolonial thinking, the challenge of ‘methodological stasis’ remains, as Western knowledges, research practices and methods continue to dominate. This article argues for new critiques and concepts to further decolonial efforts. It first situates a discussion of methodological stasis in considerations of social change, arguing we should attend to the diversity of methodologies when evaluating the extent or direction of change. It then asserts that though depictions of methodological fractionation support critiques of dominant Western knowledges, they fail to provide new strategies for change. The concept of methodologies-in/as-practices is thus presented as a novel starting point, drawing from practice theories, which foregrounds the interlinking of diverse researching practices and researchers inside and outside academia. Exploring how methodologies-in/as-practices connects to and contrasts with decolonial, postcolonial and feminist contributions, the article establishes how this concept supports new trajectories for decolonial thinking and methodological change. It demonstrates how discussions of methodological techniques, philosophies and autobiographies can be critiqued and resituated through engagement with this concept, producing openings for new decolonial links and interventions. Furthermore, engaging with the case of practice theory methodologies for this critique outlines crucial steps towards decolonising the tradition of work the concept draws upon. Methodologies-in/as-practices is thus shown to support the spiralling work of undoing and redoing, unlearning and relearning central to decolonising methodologies.
After the Second World War, many social critics thought technology had taken over all forms of modern thought and activity. To these thinkers, the arms industry, the cold war, nuclear threat, atomic science, overpopulation, lonely crowds, computing, famine, and ecological catastrophe were signs of technological determinism. The critics were utterly worried about the state of democracy in a technological world. The postdigital era faces similar challenges and even more pressing problems with the progress and inventions in digitalization. German-born Robert Jungk and Norbert Müllert addressed these problems from the 1960s onwards and wanted to search for solutions to technological determinism. Their answer was to invent a future workshop method that allowed ordinary people to participate in imagining the future and solve small and large-scale social problems. This chapter describes the future workshop as a viable postdigital research method that allows scholars methodological experimentation and switches from what is to what is not yet, but what could be.KeywordsFuture workshopImaginationPostdigital researchRobert JungkSocial scienceQualitative methodsTechnological determinism
The discussions on the future of work are pulled between technological optimism and the increasing concerns regarding the precarity brought about by the gig economy. Often, these scenarios fail to meaningfully engage and account for the workers’ experiences, whose agency in effectively shaping their working future is denied and obscured behind discourses of autonomy, entrepreneurship and individual responsibility. In the context of the increased use of gamification strategies by platforms to both monitor and incentivise couriers, this article examines the capacity of playful methods to act as effective forms of engagement and mobilisation amongst gig workers. A workshop with this aim was run online in April 2021, at the end of the third Covid lockdown in the UK, using a role-playing card game with food couriers in Manchester. It drew on ethnographic data to explore how to support empathy and solidarity amongst couriers, how to facilitate the creation of a shared pool of knowledge about the job and how to reconfigure other stakeholders’ roles to improve working conditions. We finally offer some ideas to take the game beyond the workshop space suggesting several pathways for the future: a face-to-face game using printed cards, an open-source version of the game and collaborating with trade unions to reach more couriers.
The process of researching a music scene retrospectively, even one which has recently formed, rests on a relatively simple ontological foundation; that the scene is broadly agreed – by both participants and observers – to already exist and to be available as an object for study, whether that proceeds on a musicological, sociological or geographical basis. But what if the scene is merely purported, suspected or intuited to be in the process of formation; to be, in some sense, imminent rather that existent? What methods are appropriate to investigating a music scene under such conditions? What constitutes, if not ‘evidence’, then sufficiently persuasive indications that a scene is emerging? These considerations are explored in this article, in the context of the author's early-stage fieldwork into a putative new underground electronic music scene in Manchester, UK, along with reflexive observations on the researcher's insertion into a potential process of scene-formation.
Audio recording interviews, focus groups, and naturally occurring interactions have been utilised by social researchers for decades. Yet, the use of audio recordings as a tool to elicit participant responses has received less attention in social science research. This is despite heightened interest in non-traditional techniques such as the use of visual methodologies, and arts-based methods. In this article, I describe how I advanced a known method, vignettes, into an audio narrative to explore perceptions of sex work. This article reports on the methodological rationale for the novel use of audio vignettes, and the capacity they have for memory retrieval, eliciting reflections on lived experiences, and for providing richer attitudinal data. By drawing on ‘accessibility theory’, this article argues that audio vignettes are a powerful elicitor of attitudes. Furthermore, I claim that audio methods as I define them, can enhance the social scientists’ toolkit and that, what I term ‘audio sociology’ needs further development.
This research note is a conversation between ChatGPT and a sociologist about the use of ChatGPT in knowledge production. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model, programmed to analyse vast amounts of data, recognise patterns and generate human-like conversational responses based on that analysis. The research note takes an experimental form, following the shape of a dialogue, and was generated in real time, between the author and ChatGPT. The conversation reflects on, and is a reflexive contribution to, the study of artificial intelligence from a sociology of science perspective. It draws on the notion of reflexivity and adopts an ironic, parodic form to critically respond to the emergence of artificial intelligence language models, their affective and technical qualities, and thereby comments on their potential ethical, social and political significance within the humanities.
In this article we tentatively plot the coordinates of a sensory sociology approach for empirically investigating how the popular culture genre of climate fiction operates affectively within environmental activism. We begin by theorising the genre of climate fiction as an affective potentiality capable of stimulating the imagination of hopeful climate futures and energising imaginactivism, that is the activist quest for the attainment of better climate alternatives. In this theorisation we draw on McKenzie Wark’s account of ecological speculative fiction, Elizabeth Grosz’s bioaesthetics and Bernard Stiegler’s ‘neganthropology’. We outline a range of speculative, inventive, utopian, atmospheric, enactive and sensory methodologies for the sociological study of climate fiction as an affective potentiality. By employing these methodologies, we argue, researchers will be better attuned to the affective intensities and atmosphere of anticipation, speculation and collective enactment of dreams of better climate futures that climate fiction is poised to catalyse in social settings of environmental activism.
Adult providers as well as further and adult education colleges are a major part of an economically driven society improving skills for developing careers as well as for new interests and jobs. Further education (FE) colleges deliver courses that not only meet the demands of school leavers but also serve the wider community in terms of delivering higher education courses allied to universities. FE advocates the concept of ‘inclusiveness’, in terms of, for example, disabilities, ethnicity and race. This complies with the Equality Act (2010), which points out that facilitating learning conditions for the vulnerable is essential. Additionally, staff should be appropriately trained to deal with issues such as the wellbeing of learners and day-to-day teaching (e.g. The Wolf Report, 2011; Ofsted, 2014; and the Society of Education and Training, 2017). However, this may be hampered by lack of resources to deal with such issues (Field, 2015). It is suggested there may be repercussions on the wellbeing of teaching staff and this may have negative effects on work-family balance. The Education Support Partnership (2017) advise that the effects of exhaustion/burnout should not be underestimated and this is the focus of this paper. The paper argues that there is sufficient evidence to show that what policy intends to achieve is unachievable given the current climate of FE. One effect is that teachers may feel pressurised. How exhaustion and burnout is dealt with must be a joint effort between policy makers, researchers, teachers and managers.
This chapter explores the use of autoethnography and arts-based methods in collaborative research relationships to deconstruct and disrupt doctoral discourses. As collaborative autoethnographers, we examined the intersection of our lives as doctoral students, mother/s, supervisor, travellers and artists, interrogating our individual experiences within the larger social context. More specifically, we used poetry as analysis and provocation for further writing. These poems are understood as research poems, with the purpose of writing being to do something. We each also wrote a poetic response to an image (ekphrasis), consistent with the practice of creating art in response to art. We invite you to share in selected fragments of our last six months of poetic correspondence to experience our deconstruction of particular doctoral discourses.
In this project we forward insights about the importance of being in ‘the room where it happens’ – creating tactility and togetherness in the research encounter – for research with children and young people in times of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Created in response to the intense uptake of digital methods catalysed by COVID-19, in this project we productively re-imagine moments from our creative visual research with children and young people from before the COVID-19 pandemic. This re-imagining began early in 2020 and has continued to evolve, incorporating our shifting perspectives and ‘thinking with’ the scholarship of leading creative methodologists. The creative output is in the form of a ‘Prezine’ which is our concept and is a portmanteau bringing together ‘Prezi’ a presentation tool, and ‘zine’. The Prezine charts our creative conversation, moving between four connected rhizomes of thinking about creative research with children and young people: ‘the room where it happens’, being in the encounter, spaces for the unexpected, and what we are calling ‘methodological alchemy’. The Prezine documents our experiment in thinking about research futures where we openly and creatively explore the process of making this reflective resource about research ‘becomings’.
Data are increasingly interwoven in various aspects of our social lives. In our everyday and professional lives many kinds of data are produced, as we make online searches via search engines, chat with loved ones and friends via social media, or use a maps app on our smartphone to find our way in an unfamiliar place. To use these digital data for decision-making, and literally anything else, people rely on computational technologies. With these, digital data can be processed, recombined, operated with, used, and sold. Going hand in hand with the pervasiveness of data in our society is the process of datafication.
Researchers across manifold academic disciplines and fields from computer science to sociology, media studies, communication research, humanities, and education research are working on topics concerning this datafied society. In the recent years, this body of academic work has been consolidating under the terms ‘critical data studies’ or just ‘data studies’, drawing on various ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological approaches to studying datafication processes. How, then, in this manifold of perspectives, academic knowledge about datafication processes and our datafied societies is produced? What is ‘critical’ in data studies? How do scholars conducting research on datafication reflect about “what matters we use to think other matters with;” (Haraway, 2016, p. 12) in their studies? With my thesis, I advance our understanding of how what is known about datafication and datafied societies is produced.
I show how empirical datafication research produces re-situated conceptualisations of datafication and discuss the role of critique in data studies. I propose "care-ful data studies" as a pathway for further, generative, care-ful critique, contributing to the literature bridging data studies with feminist traditions of thought.
Sociology is just as much an art form as it is a science. And while sociologists and those in cognate disciplines have long experimented with their writing, the search for new academic forms and practices has acquired new urgency and potentiality. How we write up our research is of paramount importance: our language can be used in experimental and innovative ways to offer nuanced, critical commentary without foreclosing alternative viewpoints, and without excluding others from dialogue. Sociography offers spaces for new sensibilities and sensitivities; unresolved or incomplete argument; multiple, multi-dimensional and multiplying possibilities: for writing differently. As an intervention in writing the social, our collection works to resist the ideological promotion of dry, dispassionate, and seemingly ‘objective’ discourse, one which has traditionally upheld a set of dominant, privileged voices. And in so doing, our collection explores the potential of new ways of writing the social for both a trans- and post-disciplinary academy and a wider reading public; and seeks forms of writing that do justice to the critical curiosity that animates sociology. In sum, the challenge embraced by this collection is to argue for and showcase a praxis that activates sociological knowledge and enlarges the sociological imagination.
This article describes a series of experimental method workshops that invite participants to enact speculative, craftful, multisensory and performative research techniques. The workshops have taken place across different European university venues with graduate students in a variety of disciplines such as digital humanities, sociology, design, media and art. Drawing on these experiences, the article argues that these workshops serve as an avenue for widening the repertoire of pedagogies for interdisciplinary qualitative inquiry through engagement with material, experiential and embodied ways of knowing. The article articulates the need to widen the repertoire of pedagogies for interdisciplinary qualitative inquiry.
This paper focuses on the figure of the flâneur and sets out to explore how the practice of flânerie might offer social researchers a different way of engaging with digital worlds. It is articulated around two main interests: the relationship of the flâneur to digital worlds and the theoretical and methodological implications of envisioning the practice of flânerie as a way of engaging with digital worlds. This paper contends that flânerie could inform and creatively enrich our practices as social researchers in two ways: enabling us to approach differently the exploration of digital worlds and leading us to investigate phenomena that might have remained concealed through more conventional methodologies. Flânerie, we argue, offers the possibility of a more open and explorative approach to digital research. Our paper outlines implications of positioning flânerie as a methodological practice and reflects on potential of flânerie in the exploration of digital worlds.
Background : Prior to undertaking a study looking at the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic upon lived experiences of hospice services in the West Midlands, we sought to identify the range of issues that hospice service users and providers faced between March 2020 and July 2021, and to provide a report that can be accessed and understood by all interested stakeholders.
Methods : We undertook a collaborative multi-stakeholder approach for scoping the range of potential issues and synthesising knowledge. This involved a review of available literature; a focus group with hospice stakeholders; and a collaborative knowledge exchange panel.
Results : The literature on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on hospices remains limited, but it is developing a picture of a service that has had to rapidly adapt the way it provides care and support to its service users, during a period when it faced many fundamental challenges to established ways of providing these services.
Conclusions : The impacts of many of the changes on hospices have not been fully assessed. It is also not known what the effects upon the quality of care and support are for those with life-limiting conditions and those that care for them. We found that the pandemic has presented a new normative and service context in which quality of care and life itself was valued that is, as yet, poorly understood.
This paper is concerned with the power of social science and its methods. We first argue that social inquiry and its methods are productive: they (help to) make social realities and social worlds. They do not simply describe the world as it is, but also enact it. Second, we suggest that, if social investigation makes worlds, then it can, in some measure, think about the worlds it wants to help to make. It gets involved in 'ontological politics'. We then go on to show that its methods - and its politics - are still stuck in, and tend to reproduce, nineteenth-century, nation-state-based politics. How might we move social science from the enactment of nineteenth-century realities? We argue that social-and-physical changes in the world are - and need to be - paralleled by changes in the methods of social inquiry. The social sciences need to re-imagine themselves, their methods, and their 'worlds' if they are to work productively in the twenty-first century where social relations appear increasingly complex, elusive, ephemeral, and unpredictable. There are various possibilities: perhaps, for instance, there is need for 'messy' methods. But in the present paper we explore some implications of complexity theory to see whether and how this might provide productive metaphors and theories for enacting twenty-first-century realities.
This ar ticle argues that in an age of knowing capitalism, sociologists have not adequately thought about the challenges posed to their expertise by the proliferation of `social' transactional data which are now routinely collected, processed and analysed by a wide variety of private and public institutions. Drawing on British examples, we argue that whereas over the past 40 years sociologists championed innovative methodological resources, notably the sample survey and the in-depth interviews, which reasonably allowed them to claim distinctive expertise to access the `social' in powerful ways, such claims are now much less secure. We argue that both the sample survey and the in-depth interview are increasingly dated research methods, which are unlikely to provide a robust base for the jurisdiction of empirical sociologists in coming decades. We conclude by speculating how sociology might respond to this coming crisis through taking up new interests in the `politics of method'.
A new and innovative account of British sociology's intellectual origins that uses previously unknown archival resources to show how the field's forgotten roots in a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century debate about biology can help us understand both its subsequent development and future potential.
In this powerful, compassionate work, one of anthropology's most distinguished ethnographers weaves together rich fieldwork with a compelling critical analysis in a book that will surely make a signal contribution to contemporary thinking about violence and how it affects everyday life. Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major departure from much anthropological inquiry, Das asks how this violence has entered "the recesses of the ordinary" instead of viewing it as an interruption of life to which we simply bear witness. Das engages with anthropological work on collective violence, rumor, sectarian conflict, new kinship, and state and bureaucracy as she embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of the relations among violence, gender, and subjectivity. Weaving anthropological and philosophical reflections on the ordinary into her analysis, Das points toward a new way of interpreting violence in societies and cultures around the globe. The book will be indispensable reading across disciplinary boundaries as we strive to better understand violence, especially as it is perpetrated against women.
In January 1937, Mass-Observation was launched in the letters columns of the New Statesman with an appeal for voluntary observers to take part in ‘an anthropology of our own people’.1 Similar appeals in highercirculation newspapers such as the News Chronicle and the Daily Express attracted responses from across society but, as Tom Jeffery notes, far and away the largest identifiable distinct social grouping in the project’s original membership was from the lower middle class.2 This chapter investigates the dissemination of the ideas of imagism and surrealism by the Mass-Observation founders to its lower-middle-class membership as an example of the interaction between modernist techniques and middlebrow culture, which transformed that culture in the late 1930s and contributed to the wider socio-cultural changes that took place in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Following the work of Kristin Bluemel, this interaction, by which individual modernist consciousness accommodated itself to the modern mass values of the twentieth-century world and thereby both expressed and became part of the realization of those values, may be described as intermodern.3 Therefore, this chapter will also seek to map out the relationship between the critical terms ‘middlebrow’, ‘modernism’ and ‘intermodernism’.
First historical account of the development of social science research methods in Britain
Accessibly and engagingly written
Sheds new light on the huge social changes experienced in Britain over the last 70 years
Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940 examines how, between 1940 and 1970 British society was marked by the imprint of the academic social sciences in profound ways which have an enduring legacy on how we see ourselves. It focuses on how interview methods and sample surveys eclipsed literature and the community study as a means of understanding ordinary life. The book shows that these methods were part of a wider remaking of British national identity in the aftermath of decolonisation in which measures of the rational, managed nation eclipsed literary and romantic ones. It also links the emergence of social science methods to the strengthening of technocratic and scientific identities amongst the educated middle classes, and to the rise in masculine authority which challenged feminine expertise.
This book is the first to draw extensively on archived qualitative social science data from the 1930s to the 1960s, which it uses to offer a unique, personal and challenging account of post war social change in Britain. It also uses this data to conduct a new kind of historical sociology of the social sciences, one that emphasises the discontinuities in knowledge forms and which stresses how disciplines and institutions competed with each other for reputation. Its emphasis on how social scientific forms of knowing eclipsed those from the arts and humanities during this period offers a radical re-thinking of the role of expertise today which will provoke social scientists, scholars in the humanities, and the general reader alike.
public role of writers;intellectuals;the nation;political agenda;non-political writers
Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor, we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology's particular investment in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states.
This book, which accompanies a major exhibition at the Centre for New Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany, invoked three disparate realms in which images have assumed the role of cultural weapons. Monotheistic religions, scientific theories and contemporary arts have struggled with the contradictory urge to produce and also destroy images and emblems. Moving beyond the image wars "Iconoclash" shows that image destruction has always coexisted with a cascade of image production, visible in traditional Christian images as well as in scientific laboratories and the various experiments of contemporary art, music, cinema and architecture. While iconoclasts have struggled against icon worshippers, another history of "iconophily" has always been at work. Investigating this alternative to the Western obsession with image worship and destruction allows useful comparisons with other cultures, in which images play a very different role. "Iconoclash" offers a variety of experiments on how to "suspend" the iconoclastic gesture and to renew the movements of images against any freeze-framing. The book includes major works by Art & Language, Will Baumeister, Christian Boltanski, Daniel Buren, Lucas Cranach, Max Dean, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Durer, Lucio Fontana, Francisco Goya, Hans Haacke, Richard Hamilton, Young Hay, Arata Isozaki, Asger Jorn, Martin Kippenberger, Imi Knoebel, Komar & Melamid, Joseph Kosuth, Gordon Matta-Clark, Tracey Moffa, Nam June Paik, Sigmar Polke, Stephen Prina, Man Ray, Sophie Ristelhueber, Hiroshi Sugimoto and many others.
This article excavates a discussion on the mediations that informed the making of the film Aaj Kaal by Asian elders, in a project directed by Avtar Brah and coordinated by Jasbir Panesar with the film trainer Vipin Kumar. It brings this largely unknown and inventive film to the foreground of current developments in participative media research practices. The discussion explores the coming together of the ethnographic imagination and performative pedagogies during the course of an adult education community project centred on South Asian elders making a film. Collaborative dialogic encounters illuminate post-war British front rooms, the seaside and public spheres from what is usually an unlikely vantage point of view in public accounts.
This paper examines the relationship between metrics, markets and affect in the contemporary UK academy. It argues that the emergence of a particular structure of feeling amongst academics in the last few years has been closely associated with the growth and development of ‘quantified control’. It examines the functioning of a range of metrics: citations; workload models; transparent costing data; research assessments; teaching quality assessments; and commercial university league tables. It argues that these metrics, and others, although still embedded within an audit culture, increasingly function autonomously as a data assemblage able not just to mimic markets but, increasingly, to enact them. It concludes by posing some questions about the possible implications of this for the future of academic practice.
This article argues that the descriptive turn evident in contemporary capitalism challenges orthodox sociological emphases on the central importance of causality and the denigration of descriptive methods. The article reviews the different evocations of descriptive sociology pronounced by three very different contemporary sociologists: Andrew Abbott, John Goldthorpe, and Bruno Latour, and lays out their different approaches to the role of the `sociological descriptive'. It is argued that their apparent differences need to be placed in a broader re-orientation of sociology away from its historical interface with the humanities and towards the natural sciences. How this reorientation involves a new role for visual methods which have traditionally been decried in orthodox sociology is examined, and the article concludes with suggestions for how sociology might best orient itself to the descriptive turn.
This special issue poses the question: what is the empirical? More specifically, it
raises this question for the discipline of Sociology. This question, we believe, is
a vital one to pose in our current juncture which witnesses two seemingly paradoxical
movements in regard to the place, status and significance of the empirical
within Sociology. On the one hand, the discipline faces what has been termed a
‘coming crisis’ of empirical Sociology (Savage and Burrows, 2007), an impending
crisis created by the expansion of the production of data relating to the social
world by researchers (and technologies) outside the university. This expansion
puts in question the sociologist’s claim to have a monopoly of expertise in the
techniques of the generation of social data and the analysis of social life.
For D.H.
If i had an agent, i am sure he would advise me to sue James Cameron over his latest blockbuster since Avatar should really be called Pandora’s Hope!1 Yes, Pandora is the name of the mythical humanoid figure whose box holds all the ills of humanity, but it is also the name of the heavenly body that humans from planet Earth (all members of the typically American military-industrial complex) are exploiting to death without any worry for the fate of its local inhabitants, the Navis, and their ecosystem, a superorganism and goddess called Eywa. I am under the impression that this film is the first popular description of what happens when modernist humans meet Gaia. And it’s not pretty.
The Revenge of Gaia, to draw on the title of a book by James Lovelock, results in a terrifying replay of Dunkirk 1940 or Saigon 1973: a retreat and a defeat.2 This time, the Cowboys lose to the Indians: they have to flee from their frontier and withdraw back home abandoning all their riches behind them. In trying to pry open the mysterious planet Pandora in search of a mineral—known as unobtanium, no less!—the Earthlings, just as in the classical myth, let loose all the ills of humanity: not only do they ravage the planet, destroy the great tree of life, and kill the quasi-Amazonian Indians who had lived in edenic harmony with it, but they also become infected with their own macho ideology. Outward destruction breeds inward destruction. And again, as in the classical myth, hope is left at the bottom of Pandora’s box—I mean planet—because it lies deep in the forest, thoroughly hidden in the complex web of connections that the Navis nurture with their own Gaia, a biological and cultural network which only a small team of naturalists and anthropologists are beginning to explore.3 It is left to Jake, an outcast, a marine with neither legs nor academic credentials, to finally “get it,” yet at a price: the betrayal of his fellow mercenaries, a rather conventional love affair with a native, and a magnificent transmigration of his original crippled body into his avatar, thereby inverting the relationship between the original and the copy and giving a whole new dimension to what it means to “go native.”
I take this film to be the first Hollywood script about the modernist clash with nature that doesn’t take ultimate catastrophe and destruction for granted—as so many have before—but opts for a much more interesting outcome: a new search for hope on condition that what it means to have a body, a mind, and a world is completely redefined. The lesson of the film, in my reading of it, is that modernized and modernizing humans are not physically, psychologically, scientifically, and emotionally equipped to survive on their planet. As in Michel Tournier’s inverted story of Robinson Crusoe, Friday, or, The Other Island, they have to relearn from beginning to end what it is to live on their island—and just like Tournier’s fable, Crusoe ultimately decides to stay in the now civilized and civilizing jungle instead of going back home to what for him has become just another wilderness.4 But what fifty years ago in Tournier’s romance was a fully individual experience has become today in Cameron’s film a collective adventure: there is no sustainable life for Earth-bound species on their planet island.
It is in the dramatic atmosphere induced by Cameron’s opera that I want to write a draft of my manifesto. I know full well that, just like the time of avant-gardes or that of the Great Frontier, the time of manifestos has long passed. Actually, it is the time of time that has passed: this strange idea of a vast army moving forward, preceded by the most daring innovators and thinkers, followed by a mass of slower and heavier crowds, while the rearguard of the most archaic, the most primitive, the most reactionary people trails behind—just like the Navis, trying...
This paper describes a site-specific sociological experiment and looks back at the history of British sociology from the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh. It considers the role of technological innovation in observation, and explores how attention is guided through two exercises in sensory attunement; augmented listening and telescopic looking. Reconfiguring the observer through different technologies and devices, the paper questions what it means to listen and to look, and highlights how our sociological outlook is deeply ethical and historical.