On the 15th and 16th of October GSEJ’s Dr. Matty McKenna and Dr. Trude Sundberg travelled to the University of Manchester to join a two day workshop on Improvising methods. The participants comprised of a select group of social researchers and practitioners who share an interest in responsive, innovative and experimental research methods.
The workshop served as an innovation forum for exploring and developing site-responsive, apposite and improvising approaches to methods. Participants collectively examined how responsiveness, attunement, and openness can be enacted in the research process.
Dr Sundberg shared insights from Flow.Walk.Drag , an art + science project that advocates for environmental justice by exploring Margate’s hidden microorganisms (with a focus on E.coli) and water histories through the joy of drag performance. Dr McKenna discussed how “go-along” interviews to the “Milk” exhibition may help disrupt taken-for-granted assumption about science, food and politics among those he intends to study in the Futuring Biological Commons project.
The first day of the workshop focused on openness, curiosity, and letting go, taking participants through Research Drama, improvisation, and an outdoor multispecies exercise. The second day built on these experiences, using research vignettes from each participant to prompt discussion on what improvising methods might entail and how they might be further developed.
The conversations evolving from these sessions focused on interdisciplinarity and what we need to keep in mind to be responsive researchers. Throughout the days, it became clear that this includes a need to be vulnerable, humble, and flexible when applying site-specific and apposite approaches. In these conversations, participants proposed to conceptualize knowledge as a kaleidoscope. Perhaps, one can see improvising methods bifocally: improvisation itself (re-)creates knowledge and at the same time improvising can be a method through which we arrive at new knowledge. As with queer methods, as argued by Heather Love, improvising in its fluidity and ongoing call to responsiveness can also be seen in tension to research methods, which at its core has a focus on ordering. This creates a field of tension out of which new knowledge, connection and understanding can arise.
The two days were facilitated and led by Dr Sophie Stone based at the University of Edinburg. It is part for a project led by Dr Robert Meckin at the University of Manchester. The event was funded by NCRM’s Innovation Fora initiative. Congratulations to the organisers and fellow participants for co-producing such a nourishing space for methodological exploration.
(photo credit: NCRM)