Situated Writing as Theory and Method


Book Description

This creative and original book develops a framework for situated writing as theory and method, and presents a trilogy of untimely academic novellas as exemplars of the uses of situated writing. It is an inter- and trans-disciplinary book in which a diversity of forms are used to create a set of interwoven novellas, inspired by poststructuralist and postcolonial feminist theory and literary fiction, along with narrative life writing genres such as diaries and letters, memory work, poetic writing, and photography. The book makes use of a politics of location, situated knowledges, diffraction, and intersectionality theories to promote situated writing as a theory and method for exploring the complexity of social life through gender, whiteness, class, and spatial location. It addresses writing as an inter- and trans-disciplinary form of scholarship in its own right, with emancipatory potential, emphasising the role of writing in shaping creative, critical, and reflexive approaches to research, education, and professional practice. It is useful for researchers, teachers, postgraduate and PhD students in feminist and intersectionality studies, narrative studies, and pursuing interdisciplinary approaches across the humanities, social sciences, design, and the arts to inspire a theory and method for situated writing. Read the December 2019 issue of Reading Writing Quarterly, where Mona Livholts reads Hélène Frichot and Hélène Frichot reads Mona Livholts: https://site-readingwritingquarterly.co.uk/december-2019




Discourse and Narrative Methods


Book Description

Discourses and narratives are crucial in how we understand a world of rapid changes. This textbook constitutes a unique introduction to two major influential theoretical and methodological fields - discourse and narrative methods - and examines them in their interrelation. It offers readers an orientation within the broad and contested area of discourse and narrative methods and develops concrete analytical strategies to those who wish to explore both or one of these fields as well as their overlaps. Illustrated with examples from real life and real research, this book: Maps the theoretical influence from poststructuralist, postmodern, postcolonial and feminist ideas on the field of discourse and narrative. Acts as a guide to the most central analytical approaches in discourse and narrative studies supported by concrete examples of analytical strategies. Presents a variety of oral, textual, visual and other ’data’ for the purpose of analyzing discourse and narrative. Offers deeper insight into discourse and narrative methods within three themes of crucial importance for changing global context: media and society, gender and space, and autobiography and life writing. Acts as a helpful guide to situated writing based on concrete workshop exercises, which promotes ethical reflexivity, analytical thinking and creative engagement in the study of discourses and narratives.




A Research Agenda for Organization Studies, Feminisms and New Materialisms


Book Description

Explaining why contemporary problematic phenomena require a more expansive understanding than what is allowed in conventional organizational studies scholarship, this forward-looking Research Agenda brings insights from recent feminist new materialisms and critical posthumanist theorizing into the field of organization studies.




Postdigital Learning Spaces


Book Description




The Body Politics of Glocal Social Work


Book Description

This book shapes a situated body politics to re-think, re-write, and de-colonise social work as a post-anthropocentric discipline headed towards glocalisation, where human and non-human embodiments and agencies are entangled in glocal environmental worlds. It critically and creatively examines how social work can be theorised, practised, and written in renewed ways through dialogical and transdisciplinary practices. This book is composed of eight essayistic spaces, envisioning social work through embodied, glocal, and earthly entanglements. By drawing on research-based knowledge, autobiographical notes, stories, poetry, photographs, and an art exhibition in social work education, these essays provide readers with analysis and strategies that are useful for research, education, and practice as well as life-long learning. The book constitutes key literature for researchers, educators, practitioners, and activists in social work, sociology, architecture, art and creative writing, feminist and postcolonial studies, human geography, and post-anthropocentric philosophy. It offers the readers sustainable ways to re-think and re-write social work towards a glocal- and post-anthropocentric more-than-human worldview.




Freedom of Information and Social Science Research Design


Book Description

This multidisciplinary volume demonstrates how Freedom of Information (FOI) law and processes can contribute to social science research design across sociology, criminology, political science, anthropology, journalism and education. Comparing the use of FOI in research design across the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada and South Africa, it provides readers with resources to carry out FOI requests and considers the influence such requests can have on debates within multiple disciplines. In addition to exploring how scholars can use FOI disclosures in conjunction with interview data, archival data and other datasets, this collection explains how researchers can systematically analyse FOI disclosures. Considering the challenges and dilemmas in using FOI processes in research, it examines the reasons why many scholars continue to rely on more easily accessible data, when much of the real work of governance, the more clandestine but consequential decisions and policy moves made by government officials, can only be accessed using FOI requests.




Researching Ageing


Book Description

This book explores the diversity of methodological approaches to researching ageing, considering which methodological paradigm best captures the phenomenon. Interdisciplinary in scope, it brings together research from scholars from Austria, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Israel, Poland, UK and USA to uncover the conditions under which qualitative and quantitative approaches to research on ageing can best be reconciled and rendered complementary. Presenting international reflection on methods for studying old age from a variety of research backgrounds, Researching Ageing showcases the latest research in the field and will appeal to scholars across the social sciences, including sociology, demography, psychology, economics and geography, with interests in gerontology, ageing and later life.




Institutional Ethnography in the Nordic Region


Book Description

Developed in response to the theoretically driven mainstream sociology, institutional ethnography starts from people’s everyday experiences, and works from there to discover how the social is organized. Starting from experience is a central step in challenging taken-for-granted assumptions and relations of power, whilst responding critically to the neoliberal cost-benefit ideology that has come to permeate welfare institutions and the research sector. This book explicates the Nordic response to institutional ethnography, showing how it has been adapted and interpreted within the theoretical and methodological landscape of social scientific research in the region, as well as the institutional particularities of the Nordic welfare state. Addressing the main topics of concern in the Nordic context, together with the way in which research is undertaken, the authors show how institutional ethnography is combined with different theories and methodologies in order to address particular problematics, as well as examining its standing in relation to contemporary research policy and university reforms. With both theoretical and empirical chapters, this book will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, professional studies and anthropology with interests in research methods and the Nordic region.




Defending Qualitative Research


Book Description

Focussing on the phases of qualitative research which precede and follow fieldwork – design, analysis, and textualization – this book offers new theoretical tools to tackle one of the most common criticisms advanced against qualitative research: its presumed lack of rigour. Rejecting the notion of “rigour” as formulated in quantitative research and based on the theory of probability, it proposes a theoretical frame that allows combining the goals of rigour and that of creativity through the reference to theory of argumentation. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences with interests in qualitative research methods.




Handbook of Writing and Text Production


Book Description

Writing matters, and so does research into real-life writing. The shift from an industrial to an information society has increased the importance of writing and text production in education, in everyday life and in more and more professions in the fields of economics and politics, science and technology, culture and media. Through writing, we build up organizations and social networks, develop projects, inform colleagues and customers, and generate the basis for decisions. The quality of writing is decisive for social resonance and professional success. This ubiquitous real-life writing is what the present handbook is about. The de Gruyter Handbook of Writing and Text Production brings together and systematizes state-of-the-art research. The volume contains five sections, focussing on (I) the theory and methodology of writing and text production research, as well as on problem-oriented and problem-solving approaches related to (II) authors, (III) modes and media, (IV) genres, and (V) domains of writing and text production. Throughout the 21 chapters, exemplary research projects illustrate the theoretical perspectives from globally relevant research spaces and traditions. Both established and future scholars can benefit from the handbook’s fresh approach to writing in the context of multimodal, multi-semiotic text production.