How to Do Social Research with

A guide to the doing of critical and creative research with a range of unusual means to apprise places and build ethical relationships.

This catalogue of methods draws on the wealth of cutting-edge critical and creative social research from the Goldsmiths Sociology Department to offer an engaged guide to doing research with a range of unexpected relations. The collection focuses on multiple assemblages of objects, media, materials, practices, relations, devices, and atmospheres, spanning methods and topics involving food to activism, knitting to ghosts, theater to documents, collaging to corridors. Through hands-on discussions of the practicalities, ethics, and politics of doing social research, the catalogue showcases a wide range of examples of what methods might mean and do. It builds a case for an understanding of contemporary social research as interdisciplinary, responsive, dynamic, vital, and urgent in studying and shaping social worlds.

Goldsmiths Sociology Department is internationally recognized as being at the forefront of some of the most daring, original and unconventional methodological innovation. Their unbounded approach to social research offers textured yet clear paths through the problems and issues before us, as contributors present the methodological puzzles they have become knotted with. The short and imaginative case studies offer new ways of teaching, learning, and doing lively and rigorous research. This is research as close-up observations, infrastructural interventions and imaginative play. How to Do Social Research With ... will be essential for anyone interested in expanding their repertoire of social research methods.
About the Author: Rebecca Coleman is Professor at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies and Bristol Digital Futures Institute at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Transforming Images: Screens, Affect, Futures and The Becoming of Bodies: Girls, Images, Experience.

Kat Jungnickel is Reader in the Sociology Department of Goldsmiths, University of London and the author of Bikes and Bloomers: Victorian Women Inventors and Their Extraordinary Cycle Wear (Goldsmiths Press). She co-directs the Methods Lab and the Digital World Making group that supports interdisciplinary collaborations and runs events across college that experiment with inventive ways of doing social research.

Nirmal Puwar is a senior lecturer at the department of Sociology at Goldsmiths University and Co-Director of Methods Lab. She has been a member of the Feminist Review editorial collective since 2000.