In the beginning ⌠or the middle
As a condition of the funding grant for my PhD studentship in Social Psychology, I was obliged to attend a methods training session organized for all first-year UK Psychology PhD students who were funded in the same way. We were each asked to provide a precis of our research topic and approach. These summaries were pinned to a board so that we (and our instructors) could get a sense of the sorts and range of interests within the cohort. One evening, we were treated to a keynote talk by a well-known senior psychologist. Standing next to an old battered heater, the professor assured us that one day we would be standing where he was. We were the future generation of famous psychologists. He then offered advice on how to gain a PhD in Psychology quickly and efficiently. Find an anomaly in a sequence of experiments in oneâs chosen field (say, on some aspect of cognitive processing) and then work on that through oneâs own series of experiments. What one should not do, he said, was ⌠and then he started reading out my precis.
In retrospect, I am in no doubt that my little summary was pretentious, overambitious, arrogant and not a little devoid of empirical substance. It would have been replete with postmodern bombast and post-structuralist jargon, all of which was alien to Experimental Psychologists. At the time, needless to say, I was outraged by such unfair treatment at the hands of a senior academic.
Why do I begin with this anecdote? Is it because the events described in it had a formative effect on me? No doubt there is some sort of continuing catharsis going on â especially in light of the number of times Iâve repeated the story (names have been left out to protect the guilty). More relevantly, it is an anecdote that serves the purpose of opening up what might be meant by the âresearch eventâ. Located at a distance âinâ time and place, it nevertheless â I would argue â can still be thought as an element, albeit small and of perhaps dwindling significance, in the emergence and unfolding of a research event that Iâm subsequently involved in. It is indicative of the heterogeneity of elements, more or less proximal âinâ space and time, that feed into what it is we do when we do research, and what is done through (and to and with) us. Moreover, in the retelling of the anecdote, there is a refreshing (and altering) of the affects associated with the original event that is now caught up in a reconfiguration of times and places: and all these too feed into the research event.
This affective dimension of doing research should come as no surprise. After all, the doing of empirical research is one of the most affecting things we can do as social scientists, at whatever stage in a career. These affects are shaped by numerous factors of which a subset might include our personal investment in â or disillusion with â the âidentity of researcherâ; the more or less urgent topics we are investigating; our participants (sometimes called co-researchers) and their more or less disadvantaged conditions; our collaborators drawn from different walks of academic life; and our institutions with their chronic rivalries and contested injustices, and their formal and informal requirements for research productivity, global relevance and, increasingly, high-profile âimpactâ. Of course, these affects are not so easily separable in the everyday experience of the researcher. Our sense of self as a researcher is influenced by our collaborations, our participants reconfigure our research questions, our institutions have an influence over what is viably researchable as a topic, and our intellectual community affects the framing of our research field (just as the so-called affective turn has affected the foregoing framing in terms of affect). We might say, drawing loosely on actorânetwork theory, that we are enmeshed in a nexus of networks or assemblages that affects us in a number of ways, even as we are busily trying to put together something like our own research network to affect the world around us. Such a network might minimally include recruiting various constituencies to identify with our research topic, drawing on colleaguesâ expertise to formulate and refine research questions and associated research design, working with administrators to develop a research proposal that might successfully attract funding, forging research collaborations and finding research participants, doing the actual empirical research in the midst of teaching and administration demands, subjecting the data to analysis and writing up the results and finding the time initially to craft, and then negotiate, the acceptance of a journal paper or a monograph.
One might read these paragraphs above as a type of vignette â a simple storying of the research process. There are number of features to note. First, the storyline is linear â we move straightforwardly in time from topic to question to proposal to participant recruitment to empirical engagement and data collection to data analysis to write up and publication. Except, as hinted, things turn out not to be quite so linear. For example, as many writers on methodology comment, our research participants can influence the research questions, and our collaborators can shape our sense of self as researchers (which might encompass how we think about data or practise analysis). So, there is also something about the research process that is messy â it can take unexpected turns in relation to what and who and how weâre researching (with). Further, especially in comparison to many methods textbooks, this vignette addresses parts of the research process that sit outside âmethodologyâ as it is usually narrated. Institutions can thus lend their support to research projects on the basis of criteria that are not strictly âintellectualâ (for instance, they might rank projects on the basis of which are more likely to yield articles that can be placed in high-ranking journals). The point is that research is shaped by elements that sit at a temporal and spatial âremoveâ from the âactual doing of researchâ which is what methods textbooks tend to focus on (a noteworthy exception is Tim Mayâs (2011) 4th edition Social Research: Issues, Methods and Process where he comments on how, within a context of frenetic, contract-research fund-seeking, spaces for critical reflection had to be consciously built-in, rather than assumed).
If these aspects of the research tend to get neglected in typical accounts, there are also other neglected elements that lie within the timeframe of the âactual doing of researchâ. These include, for example, actions of participants that are so far removed from the framing of the research that they are automatically bracketed by the researchers, or even go unnoticed. In other words, research is potentially full of elements that to a lesser or greater degree make no âsenseâ. The argument is that such nonsensicality might be an interesting resource for the extended âactual doing of researchâ that will be developed over the course of this book.
One can think this expansion of the research both âinâ time (e.g. the institutional pressures on research productivity) and space (e.g. the co-present ânonsensicalâ actions of participants) in terms of âthe research eventâ. This term does a number of things. It highlights the fact: that research is made up of many disparate elements (that are âextendedâ temporally and spatially); that there are elements âpertinentâ to the research that remain systemically and systematically unaddressed; that these elements can affect and reshape one another; and that, as a result, this opens up new possibilities, including what ultimately counts as research. The âresearch eventâ thus serves as a particular heuristic for thinking about a subset of events in the world â those that concern social research and how these events might unfold.
The rest of this chapter situates the research event in a number of literatures. At the outset, we can note that the present book The Research Event is itself a âresearch eventâ. There is thus an attempt not only to show how research is composed of heterogeneous elements that co-become with one another, thereby potentially transforming the research event, but also to self-exemplify this. As noted later, the usual hierarchical structure that warrants a research design is eschewed: rather ontology, epistemology and method, and experience with data are held mutually to affect one another. Just as the research event can encompass many otherwise marginal and othered aspects of academic life, so too does this book try to evoke ways of enfolding autobiographical anecdotes, institutional settings as well various âothersâ. In this respect, as an event, the book ideally (and perhaps delusionally) can contribute to a sort of punctuation in the seemingly unceasing flow of research methods texts. This is partly because, along with a number of other similar-minded writings, very few of the concerns typically addressed by traditional research methods texts are tackled, and where they are discussed this is not in the standard terms. Rather, such notions as âdata analysisâ and âresearch questionâ are opened up to creative scrutiny by being embedded within an expanded version of research, that is, by being grasped through the âresearch eventâ.
So what is the âresearch eventâ? In the rest of this introductory chapter, I address this in a number of ways. First, I lightly situate the book in the relation to a loose agglomeration of work that addresses such cognate concepts as assemblage, care, affect, invention, otherness. This will lead on to a discussion of the idea of the âeventâ and in particular how it links to a world conceptualized as âin processâ â that is, to a âworld of becomingâ. The implications of such a vision of the event for the social research process are then elaborated, and the notion of âresearch eventâ is re-introduced and expanded. The chapter ends with an outline of the chapters.
Situating this book
It has become increasingly apparent through a number of recent debates around the nature of the empirical (e.g. Adkins and Lury, 2009; Ruppert et al., 2013), the âinventivenessâ and âlivenessâ of methods (e.g. Lury and Wakeford, 2012; Back and Puwar, 2012) and the involutions of interdisciplinarity (e.g. Barry and Born, 2013a; Lury et al., 2018) that social scientific methodology is at something of a crossroads. In light of the performativity of their methods, the complexity and sociomateriality of their data, and the processuality of their research questions, social scientists are increasingly turning their attention towards new theoretical and practical techniques. Thus, we find growing interest in thinking in terms of, and operationalizing, care and otherness, engagement, participation and experimentation, multiplicity and mutual becoming, to name but a few of the more obvious developments. All of these serve as means for incorporating, on the one hand, a sense of the ways in which social scientists construct their objects of study and constitute others that are more or less neglected, and, on the other hand, a reflection on how researchers themselves, in the process of doing research, are emergent along with their human and nonhuman co-participants.
The volume will draw on several discussions that inhabit this dispersed landscape of emerging social scientific methodology (and associated theory). In particular, it will draw inspiration from recent process-oriented work in the social sciences, comingling several theoretical and methodological issues that have arisen in discussions about how best to engage empirically in a sociomaterial world marked by process and emergence. Central here are such concerns as heterogeneity and otherness (e.g. Law, 2004; Hinchliffe, 2007; Braidotti, 2013), affect and care (e.g. Anderson, 2014; Puig, 2011), multiplicity and co-becoming (Barad, 2007; Mol, 2002), speculation and virtuality (e.g. Wilkie et al., 2017; Ardevol et al., 2016), temporality and futurity (e.g. Adam and Groves, 2007; Coleman and Tutton, 2017), topology, performativity and assemblage (e.g. Lury et al., 2012; Law, 2004), aesthetics and experience (e.g. Highmore, 2002, Massumi, 2011), accountability and interdisciplinarity (e.g. Barry and Born, 2013a; Lury et al., 2018), multi-sensoriality and more-than-representationality (e.g. Pink, 2012; Thrift, 2008). It goes without saying that this is a hugely underpopulated list: many more authors could have been mobilized, and several more concepts and frameworks could have been referenced. But then, that is ever the case.
With this partial backdrop in place, my aim is to provide a, hopefully, distinctive and novel contribution to the methodological elements of this shifting intellectual terrain. In particular, I will introduce and expand on the notion of the âresearch eventâ (along with related concepts and techniques â see next). The âresearch eventâ as deployed here serves several interwoven heuristic functions. For example, it allows us:
- to question what goes into a research event, especially, the heterogeneity of its constitutive elements;
- to consider the performativity entailed in the research event â how does research practice compose the sociomaterial world by engaging with it through the particular research event?
- to address how those elements affect one another, co-becoming in the process, and potentially altering the character and status of the research event;
- to speculate on the emergence of new possibilities through the research event â that is, instead of âsolutionsâ to a research question, how is the prospect of âinventive problemsâ enabled?
- to reflect on the parameters or borders of the research event â how far can it stretch to enfold divergent entities and elements and encompass different times and spaces?
- to explore what it is that is left out of the making of the research event â that is, what are the otherings that take place, and what are the âqualitiesâ of these otherings?
- to investigate the means by which a research event is judged âcompleteâ â when do we know that a research event has accomplished a degree of âcogencyâ or âsatisfactionâ?
- to examine the various impacts of affect in conducting a research event â in what ways is a researcher attuning themselves, and being attuned, to the unfolding of a research event? And conversely, in what ways is affect disconcerted by, and disruptive of, the research event?
As a condensed list of problematics associated with the idea of the research event, the above might give the impression of a series of cleanly demarcated foci. However, these issues intimately interdigitate in a number of ways, so reference to (admixtures of) them will be made throughout the volume. Moreover, the notion of the research event will be attached to a range of other concepts that cut across these issues. For instance, the idea of âpre-propositionsâ alerts us to the ways in which the process of research can engender novel relationalities that require new ways of thinking about empirical connections and units of analysis. Here, the composition and performativity of the research event are related to the prospect of inventive research problems and the possible extension of the research event temporally (proposition) and spatially (preposition). Another example: the concept of the anecdote illuminates the practices and affects, and the emergence and transition, of the researcher as they go about enmeshing heterogeneous elements and disparate others in the process of a research event. The simple point is that the research event is meant to sensitize us to a nexus of concerns, to encourage sensibilities that engage with possibilities of research that otherwise might remain opaque or blurred.
One upshot of this focus on the research event is that the present text is not a typical research methods book. While it touches on specific technique â methodological practices that in one way or another yield useful data and facilitate interesting analysis â that is not its primary focus. Rather, the purpose is to suggest some ways of thinking and doing that heuristically enable researchers to explore what it means to conduct research in a world that is conceived as fundamentally in process. Of course, this processuality also applies to the research event itself. So, the book is about becoming practically â âmethodologicallyâ, if one insists â sensitized to being entangled in a world characterized by heterogeneity, emergence and possibility. How does one explore, engage and enact this processual world of which âoneâ is indissolubly a part?
Now, what is meant by âsensibilityâ? For present purposes, I suggest that it embodies a nexus of features. If I were to set these out, included would be aspirations towards openness, incompleteness, partiality, possibility, relationality, attunement, intimacy, curiosity, riskiness, differentiality, reflexivity, response-ability, compromise, care, compassion. These terms are iterative between and within themselves: one can ask what are the partialities entailed in reflexivity, but also how can one be reflexive about partiality? What does it mean to be incomplete about incompleteness (e.g. when does one stop acknowledging the incompleteness of a data set and its analysis in order to write, and what are the incomplete conditions under which one feels obliged to write)? In other words, sensibility is recursive insofar as to be sensible is to be sensible about sensibility: when is it too constrained, too exorbitant? And that includes an engagement with âself-standingâ as it were: how is the self situated as an eve...
