The idea of Methods Café was put forward by two scholars, Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea as an opportunity for learning in an informal setting. They put this forward in a 2007 article entitled ‘The Methods Café: An Innovative Idea for Methods Teaching at Conference Meetings’. While initially envisaged for the American Political Science Association conference, Methods Cafes have expanded to other conferences and university contexts.

Venue. Bush House South East SE 2.01

Format. Participants are seated at labelled tables. There is a specialist at each table, but the idea is to have informal conversations in small groups. Everyone is encouraged to bring questions from their own research and contribute to the discussion. As Yanow and Schwartz-Shea put it, ‘everyone is a discussant’.

The café part. There will be coffee, tea, biscuits, fruit and other refreshments.

Participation. As seats are limited at each table, please register for only one table. If you find the format helpful, we can have regular cafes.

Materials. Please feel free to bring or share books, articles or other resources.

Specialists. Each of the tables has a specialist. Their role is not to offer answers to each question but to help orient the discussion.

This event is for PhD students and early career researchers at KCL, as well as LISS-DTP students and researchers at KCL, QMUL and Imperial College. Please use your institutional address to register for one of the four tables.

Table A. Ethnographic methods

Ina Zharkevich is a social anthropologist who has been working on issues around the Maoist civil war, migration, and social change in Nepal. Before joining King's, she was a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow and a Departmental Lecturer at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford. She is the author of Maoist People's War and the Revolution of Everyday Life in Nepal (Cambridge University Press 2019).

Table B. Material methods/Researching materiality

Claudia Aradau is Professor of International Politics in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and Methods Centre Director in the Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy. Her current research focuses on how digital technologies reconfigure security and surveillance practices, and how algorithms and machine learning recast relations between security, democracy, and critique. Her latest book, with Tobias Blanke, is Algorithmic Reason: The new government of self and other (Oxford University Press 2022).

Table C. Quantitative methods

Tugba Bozcaga is a Lecturer in Politics & Political Methodology in the Department of European and International Studies. Her research focuses on political economy of development, with a substantive focus on local governance, bureaucracy and state capacity, distributive politics, social welfare, and migration. Her work has been awarded the Mancur Olson Best Dissertation Prize in Political Economy (Honorable Mention) from the American Political Science Association (APSA).

Table D. Visual methods

Phoebe Martin is a Postdoctoral Research Associate (Gender and IR) in the Department of War Studies working on forced disappearance and reproductive harm in Peru, as part of the ERC-funded project ‘Relational Harm’ led by Dr Rebekka Friedman. Previously she completed a postdoc with the Visual and Embodied Methodologies Network at KCL examining the use of creative methods to research sexual harassment and resistance to gender-based violence. Her research focuses broadly on gendered violence, and the role of art and creative strategies in researching, resisting, and challenging it. She is co-editor of Decolonising Andean Identities: Andinxs, Activism and Social change (UCL Press) and her monograph Visual and Embodied Politics: Feminist Activism and Art in Peru is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic.