Thursday 29 January, 6:30pm, Graham Wallace Room (5th Floor, Old Building, LSE)

Problem spaces: the infra-empirical and compositional methodology Professor Celia Lury, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick

Abstract

In recent years, we have seen the proliferation of interdisciplinary, mobile, sensory, affective live and inventive methods that seek to capture the dynamic, non-linear, pre-individual and post-representational characteristics of contemporary social life. But, this paper suggests, the expanded- or infra-empirical register of contemporary social life requires not just a re-thinking of methods but also a return to matters of methodology. This return will be framed in terms of the need for researchers to be able to position themselves reflexively in problem spaces at a time when the dynamics of such spaces are being radically reconfigured by changes in knowledge infrastructures. In doing so it emphasizes the importance of thinking about such spaces in terms of processes of space and time. That is, rather then seeing problem spaces as container spaces, in which fixed conditions and the implementation of progressively sequential operations leads to the solution of problems, the emphasis is on how problems and their space-times are co-constituted in lines, traces, tracks, pathways or trajectories. This approach is elaborated in the notion of compositional methodology, that is, a methodology that understands research in terms of the composition of forms of knowledge.