Methods Lab Projects

Digital Security Methods Session

Doing digital research requires students to keep themselves, respondents and data safe. This is becoming increasingly critical and complicated. Skills asn well as devices need regular updating. In collaboration with Tom Sanderson of the Centre Investigative Journalism, Methods Lab will run a bespoke data security methods session to teach students how to do safe online searches on topical subjects (to avoid being red-flagged), encrypt sensitive communications, safely secure their data, and protect respondents’ anonymity.

 Research in Process/ Student Reading Group

Methods Lab encourages and supports the development of student led sessions in the form of research in progress sessions and reading groups. This is part of our commitment to support and make links with MA and PhD Visual Sociology students.

A fading public space: Coventry Ritz cinema

funded by the British Academy

Exploring different collaborative methods for engaging with complex histories and futurities through in-habitation of (public) space, voice, sound, colour, stone and paper are called upon. Menace, melancholia and every day practice move as layered textures in concurrence and tension.

This project has released a film titled Cinema III (2009/9mins) made by Nirmal Puwar and Sanjay Sharma and produced with Ioanna Karavela in a close collaborative relationship with sound artist Shervin Shaeri, cinematographers Des & Tom Seal, technical paper artist Antoinette Brown, film editor Domina Favata, as well as the voices of community activists Jitey Samra, Erskine Howell and Ann Small; each of whom have differing intimate relationships to the cinema which has sat as a ruin for over twenty years, is due for demolition and was at one time a thriving South Asian cinema, owned by forty shareholders in the post-war period.

Noise of the Past

Screening of Unravelling - A film by Kuldip Powar, with original score by Nitin Sawhney

Performance of Post-Colonial War Requiem – composed by Francis Silkstone

Les Back, Live Sociology: Practising Social Research with New Media

ESRC, Research Development Initiative
January 2005 - December 2008

Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting

Photographic Exhibition
Goldsmiths, University of London
October 2006 - May 2007

Nirmal Puwar, Working with Private Media Materials in the Public Realm

A collaboration between the Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, Coventry University and the Methods Lab at the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths.

AHRC Research Workshops: Museums and Galleries
June 2006 - April 2007