Problem spaces: interface methods and compositional methodology
Professor Celia Lury, University of Warwick
28 January 2016, 12-2pm
Outreach Centre, Holyrood Road, Room B1.11-3, The University of Edinburgh
Sign up here open to all: please bring your lunch.
In recent years, we have seen the proliferation of interdisciplinary, mobile, sensory, affective live and inventive methods. But, this paper suggests, the 'happening' of contemporary social life requires not just a re-thinking of methods but also a return to matters of methodology. This return will be framed in terms of the need for researchers to be able to position themselves reflexively in problem spaces at a time when the dynamics of such spaces are being radically reconfigured by changes in knowledge infrastructures. Rather then seeing problem spaces as container spaces, in which fixed conditions and the implementation of progressively sequential operations leads to the solution of problems, the emphasis is on how problems may be reflexively investigated through the use of interface methods. This approach is elaborated in the notion of compositional methodology, that is, a methodology that understands research in terms of the composition of forms of knowledge.
About the speaker: Celia Lury is Professor and Director at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick. Recent publications address the role of methods in enacting the social world; they include Inventive Methods (co-edited with Wakeford), and Measure and Value (co-edited with Adkins, and a Special Issue of Distinktion on 'Number Ecologies' (co-edited with Day and Wakeford).