Key Publications

The relations between word, image and sound are central to the contours of the Methods Lab. We put them into play and tension with each other through collaborative methods. In Word: beyond language, beyond image (2015) Mariam Motimedi-Fraser epistemologically challenges us to seriously consider how the sound, feel, touch, taste, place, position, speed, and direction of words come to matter in their uses?

Diaries have a longstanding tradition in social research, especially in mass observation. In 2016 Les Back published aspects of his Academic Diary, with Goldsmiths Press, to reflect on the life and times of university life. He offers humorous and sharp analyses from across the cyclical academic year, moving between doctoral supervision to meeting first year undergraduate students and examinations.

This follows on from Les Back’s previous book which wove together photography, commentary on tattoos and sound in the Art of Listening (2007). The book has become a beacon of navigation for fostering close-up attentive research.

A cross department collection on Live Methods (2013) has been edited by Les Back and Nirmal Puwar. A Manifesto for Methods: capacities and provocations has emerged from the contributions. The book has spurned several postgraduate workshops and challenges to how one can methodologically activate research differently. 

The Special Issue on Post-Colonial Bourdieu (2009) co-edited by Puwar, Back and Haddour emerged out of an ESRC seminar series alongside an exhibition of Bourdieu's Algerian photographs explored the practice of sociology both methodologically and politically.

Other collaborative publications have included Inventive Methods: the happening of the Social (2012), edited by Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford. 

The different modes of relations that produce Intimacy in Research (2009) have been central to how Fraser and Puwar have encouraged scholars to open up difficult encounters in their research to reflections so that the ties that bind and prompt distance, for the sake of social analysis, can be fully explored. See our edited collection on this.

Following on from a large AHRC project Noise of the Past we published a special issue of the journal The Senses and Society (2011)