The Methods Centre in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Policy is dedicated to advancing research with novel and interdisciplinary methods. Drawing on our collective expertise, we also develop teaching and training on methods. We foster collaboration across and beyond established boundaries between qualitative and quantitative methods, analogue and digital devices, and explanatory and interpretive approaches.

As methods circulate within and beyond academia, the Methods Centre supports research into how methods are used, transformed and contested in practice. We approach methods as having historical, social, and political lives: methods are developed at specific moments, are situated institutionally, and respond to emerging challenges. For example, the rise of Large Language Models and Generative AI poses new methodological challenges, from content analysis to statistical techniques. International organisations also promote and advance methods, as in the case of UNESCO’s development of foresight and futures literacy. Grassroots organisations engage with creative, arts-based methods to facilitate social change. Social science researchers also pioneer innovative and interdisciplinary methods to address emerging issues at national, international and transnational levels.

The Centre also conducts research into the theoretical, epistemological, and political dimensions of methods, exploring how methods shape and are shaped by knowledge infrastructures, power relations, and justice claims.

 Our aims

• To make social science methods expertise visible nationally and internationally
• To support interdisciplinary research with and about methods
• To foster research collaborations that advance social science methods
• To enhance methodological teaching and training for students and staff