Workshop 2: Redesigning the analyser
April 2008, University of Manchester
Professor Les Back, Dr Caroline Knowles, Goldsmiths
This session will look at the opportunities that new media offer for
the development of dialogue with research participants, and train
participants
in the possibilities this offers for shared sociological analysis. It
will also explore the limits on dialogue within sociological analysis
and the role of
critical practice and the interplay between critical analysis and
democratising the research encounter. It will look at specific case
studies, in particular Mitchell Duneier’s study of homelessness in New
York (Duneier 1999).
It will also examine the ways in which photography is being used to open
up the possibilities of dialogic research and as a means to represent
evidence and analysis.
This workshop will organised as a more conventional academic seminar.
Issues to be addressed in the workshop include:
- reflexivity: whose reflexivity? (for example, the history of uses of diaries and other forms of self-reporting in social research, the uses and abuses of autobiography in research, as well as reflexivity in ethnography)
- the relationship between analysis and time
- the uses of photography as an interactive resource
- the ethics of ‘interactive’ researching