The Methods Centre in the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy invites you to a half-day event to discuss how methods make phenomena visible or invisible, how they circulate across disciplinary boundaries and how they are mobilised in diverse fields of practice. While disciplines often rely on established methodological repertoires, methods are always in motion. They travel, they are reinvented and continually reconfigured. Experimenting with methods, inverting methods, or advancing new ways of using methods shapes how research is done within and beyond academia.

The Methods Centre aims to support and foreground research on how methods are used, transformed and contested in practice. The launch event will bring together researchers across the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy and from fields of practice to consider how methods circulate, transform and intervene in the world.

To what extent do the methods that we use differ between academic research and activist projects? Do scholars find methodological inspiration in other fields and vice versa? How do methods help us respond to and redress conditions of insecurity, inequality and injustice? These are only some of the questions that we invite you to explore with us.

Programme

13.45-14.00 Arrival and coffee

14.00-14.30 Introduction to the Methods Centre

Linda McKie, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy, Making an idea a reality
Jelke Boesten, Associate Dean Doctoral Studies, A brief history of the Methods Centre
Claudia Aradau, Methods Centre Director, Methods Centre: Mapping, connecting, collaborating

14.30-15.45 Methods in motion: worlds of practice

Renata Peppl, Migrants in Action (MiNA)
Aleks Berditchevskaia, Centre for Collective Intelligence Design, Nesta
Maksym Demydenko, Ukraine War Archive
Meredith Veit, Business & Human Rights Resource Center

Chair: Suzanne Hall (Policy Institute)

15.45-16.15 Coffee/tea break

16.15-17.30 Unequal worlds and the politics of methods

Clement Sefa-Nyarko (African Leadership Centre)
Amrita Dhillon (Department of Political Economy)
Oscar Pedraza (Department of War Studies)
Yasmin Gunaratnam (School of Education, Communication & Society)
Dörte Bemme (Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health)

Chair: Cathy McIlwaine (Department of Geography & Vice-Dean Research)

17.30-17.45 SSPP in the world 

17.45-18.30 Reception