Research as Performance - WPPN ECR Workshop
What roles do we take on while conducting research? What scripts do we enact when conducting interviews and fieldwork? How has Covid-19 changed our data collection practices? Can the interface between Zoom screens be stages? As a researcher, are you the actor, the director, the audience, or a bit of everything?
What happens when we try to reimagine our own research, the methods we use, and the frameworks we narrativise ourselves as researchers in, through the lenses of performance and performativity?
Supported by the Doctoral College Networking Fund, WPPN held a series of horizontal and interactive roundtables and workshops, led by Mouli Banerjee, where Early Career Researchers from the University of Warwick and beyond discussed different aspects of research as performance.
Workshop 1:
What: Introduction and Fieldwork as Performance
When: Friday, November 11, 2022 (11.11.2022) 14:00-17:00 BST
Where: In Hybrid Mode: Room: Wolfson Room 1, Wolfson Research Exchange, (University Library Floor 3) on the University of Warwick campus, but also on MS Teams.
The conversations introduced the idea of understanding our experiences as researchers as ‘performance’. We had tasks and cues to conceptualise how we take on ‘roles’ and ‘personalities’ when doing fieldwork, ethnography, online research, conducting interviews and so on. This roundtable of doctoral researchers discussed ethnography as performance, interviews as a method, fieldwork as performance, and how fieldwork during Covid-19 has shaped and changed these performances.
Workshop 2
What: Social Media Research and Performance – ‘Lurking’, Activism and Researcher Identity
When: Tuesday, November 29, 2022 (11.11.2022) 14:00-15:30 BST
Where: In Hybrid Mode: Room: Wolfson Room 1, Wolfson Research Exchange, (University Library Floor 3) on the University of Warwick campus, but also on MS Teams.
This roundtable brought together, across different universities and disciplines, conversations on using social media actively to disseminate research, and using social media as a source of data collection, the ‘roles’ and identity creation and navigation required for both, and the intersections and divergences in methods.