Thammasat University students interested in sociology, cultural studies, ethnology, anthropology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 27 February webinar on material methods: How can Creative Object-Based Methods Help to Understand Everyday Life?

The event, on Tuesday, 27 February 2024 at 4pm Bangkok time, is organized by the Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong (HKU).

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of material methods.

The speaker will be Professor Sophie Woodward who teaches Sociology at the University of Manchester, the United Kingdom.

Students are invited to register for the event at this link:

https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=92467

With any questions or for further information, please write to

ivyho11@hku.hk

The TU Library collection includes a copy of Professor Woodward’s book, Material Methods: Researching and Thinking with Things.

In the Introduction, she writes:

In Material Methods I outline the methodological possibilities and implications of researching the material world. The book starts from the premise that the world is simultaneously material and social, as the things that surround us are an inseparable part of how our relationships to other people are mediated, and the environment, society and culture we live in. Things and materials – as they come into being and are transformed through relations with other things and people – are an inextricable aspect of who we are, our social relations, and even our humanity (Miller, 2010). The theoretical ways of approaching these entanglements between the material and the social are multiple, yet they all in different ways emphasise the active role that things and materials play in this process. We cannot just impose meanings onto things, as they are not passive but instead are ‘vibrant’ (Bennet, 2009) and may resist, surprise, challenge or excite us.

This vibrancy makes things and materials both exciting to research with as well as raises questions about how we can understand these material vitalities and the ways our lives are entangled with things. In this book, I take up the methodological challenges of how to explore the elusive, silent and complex dimensions of the material world and the myriad possibilities that researching with things offer. The impetus to write this comes from my own experiences of researching with material culture within a range of different projects, and an initial frustration with how to understand clothing as material culture. I wanted to understand what clothing was and to have a language to talk and write about it; I experimented with existing methods which took me on a journey using methods such as ethnographic observations, interviews, diaries, wardrobe inventories, collaboration with materials scientists, and getting people to write about and imagine with objects. In this book, I explore the possibilities for adapting existing methods as well as developing new approaches to allow us to foreground the material, become attentive to things and materials and the effects they might have.

What are material methods?

The term material methods is one that I have created to speak to the diverse ways of carrying out research within the areas of material culture and materiality as well as the expansion of creative methods as they move into the multi-sensory, embodied, visual and material. Material methods encompass both methods that are used to understand material culture and materiality, as well as methods that draw upon the materiality of things to generate data. Material methods are, therefore, both:

1.

routes into the substantive field of materiality (even as the methods are simultaneously always part of that field) as well as

2.

methods of researching with things.

The first sense in which I am using the term material methods addresses the implications of the material turn and the concomitant expansion of research into materiality, materials and material culture. Theoretical and empirical interest in the material world raises questions about how we can adapt existing methods to help us understand things, material properties and the effects that things can have. Methods such as interviews or ethnographic observations have a long heritage within qualitative research, and in this book I explore how these can be – and have been – adapted to allow material relations to be foregrounded. If you are a student or researcher who is already interested in materiality, this book will encourage you to think about what implications your theoretical understandings of materiality have for how you think about methods, as well as introduce you to a range of different methods that can centre the material.

The second sense in which I am using the term material methods is to explore methods that draw upon the capacities of objects to provoke. This builds upon the acknowledgement of the role that things have in research practices (cameras, audio-recorders) as part of the methods-assemblage (Law, 2004). Participants, researchers and the tools of research are all part of how the phenomenon that is being researched is configured (Barad, 2003). All methods are material in the sense that people and things interact in particular contexts to produce knowledge. In this book, I bring together these understandings of the materiality of methods with theories of how things have effects (see Chapter 2) to explore how material methods (such as object interviews and cultural probes) involve an active engagement with the capacities of things to make methods provocative. This aspect of material methods dovetails with broader engagements with creative (see Mason, 2018) and live methods (see Back and Puwar, 2012). They are a way to help you think creatively about how you are doing research, as well as how you can understand and approach the material world.

Material methods as ways to provoke participants (and you as a researcher) is a theme I develop throughout the book and is one which can engage those of you who might not have a research focus into materiality but are interested in thinking creatively about methods that allow us to understand a multi-dimensional and multi-sensory world. In doing this, I am encouraging you to move beyond just thinking reflexively about the role of objects in your research methods to ask you to critically engage with the possibilities of thinking about things you encounter in your substantive fields of research as methodological possibilities. So, for example, you may be researching people’s relationship to their workplace and think about this workplace as a material environment made up of corridors (see Hurdley, 2010), buildings, people, shadows, movements, chatter (see also Yaneva, 2013). These material facets of the workplace can be both a substantive focus as well as methodological possibilities as you engage with how to develop methods that draw upon the capacity of noises in the workplace, the arrangement of things on desks, the shifting lights in a building. The vitalities and agency of things to excite you, resist you, or affect you can be thought about as methodological possibilities. Adams and Thompson (2011) suggest that technologies and things can be research participants; things have effects upon researchers and in doing so can open up new ways of thinking. The provocative capacities of things and how you can become attentive to them are central to the methods discussed in this book.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)