Methodology Cafe
Doing research off the methodological map
6 April - 11am-12pm
Presenter: Professor Brown
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About: In this session I’ll be talking about doing research which is off the methodological map. There are a great many activities in research where there’s a fairly well described process. With thematic analysis, everybody quotes Braun and Clarke (2006) They’ve got a new book out just before Christmas too. Interpretive phenomenological analysis is pretty much micromanaged by Jonathan Smith and his colleagues. They even tell you what to write in the left hand margin and what to write in the right hand margin. Similarly, topics such as experimental design and survey methods and their associated statistical techniques are widely taught, and there’s a good deal of agreement about how one should use these. However, there’s a lot of activity that we do where it’s less clear. With the advent of digital photography and video recording people are collecting a great deal of visual material, for example. In some of my own work recently I’ve been drawing on ideas that don’t necessarily have a widely agreed method associated with them. Michel Foucault for example, doesn’t tell you what to write in the margins in the genealogical analysis of ideas. Pierre Bourdieu never told us how to spot habitus or define what the ‘field’ is in which the social actors are playing. Likewise, when I’ve been writing about social epistemology lately, there isn’t a map of how to do this. It’s something to do with knowledge and thinking and how these relate to social groups or people’s position in a social system, but once again, nobody really tells you how to do it. Using examples from my own work in the health humanities and recent explorations of knowledge and belief in relation to health I will consider how we can construct a defensible ‘method’ which will convince journal editors and reviewers (and maybe PhD examiners too) where there isn’t an established way of doing things.
April 6 2022. 11am -12pm
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To learn more email alison.drewett@dmu.ac.uk