This week’s School seminar on Thursday 21 November 2013 will be given by Professor Graham Crow, University of Edinburgh, and is entitled Community Research: A Field Full of Methods.
Professor Crow is Professor of Sociology and Methodology; Deputy Director, ESRC National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM); and Director of the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science. He has recently been awarded a large ESRC Connected Communities research grant. He has a strong track record in the field of community studies – including doing research with colleagues at Kent on the Isle of Sheppey. His latest book, What are Community Studies? is soon to be published by Bloomsbury Academic. For more details, see: http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/staff/sociology/graham_crow.
The seminar will take place slightly later than normal at 5pm in room G3-03 which is in the Gillingham Building on the Medway campus. For those of you travelling from Canterbury, the 4pm bus will get you there in good time.
We will be having drinks and dinner after the seminar at the Ship and Trades – http://www.shepherdneame.co.uk/pubs/chatham/ship-trades – which is close to the Medway campus. There will be the usual subsidy for postgraduate students.
Abstract: In this talk I will consider the field of community research as one in which a wide range of different research methods have been used. I will argue that this methodological diversity – ranging from surveys to ethnographies, from network mapping to the use of photography, from oral histories to policy analyses, and from interviews to archival work – is one of the strengths of the field. Just as no single key fits all locks, so no single method can provide answers to the full range of questions that it is important to ask about community life. In addition I will argue that the history of community research, including my own involvement in the field, confirms the value of taking an innovative approach when choosing which methods to use and how to combine them.
School contact: Dr Dawn Lyon, Senior Lecturer in Sociology & Director of Studies, BSc (Hons) Social Sciences