Our methodological approaches and methods

Our methodological stance arises from our theoretical position that knowledge emerges in social contexts, informed by the tools that are employed and reflects the historical and cultural conditions of its production. Any form of research is a human process of meaning-making and learning and as such cannot be understood to be value-free, neutral and objective. Rather, the strength of research lies precisely in its materiality, in the embodied processes that inform the knowledge that is produced – whether this is in the ethnographic practices of being there, hanging out, attending to the situation with care or in the massive meshwork of base stations and sensors that produce millions of data points to create models of the climate.

Critical to producing knowledge about the world, therefore, is reflexivity – about the embodied and historical conditions in which research is produced; who is carrying out the research, who is the object of research, what processes are employed and why, who is made (in)visible, who gets to speak, what assumptions underpin the processes of inquiry and attention. This reflexivity also extends to the wider political economy and institutional conditions of our research – as we recognise that the world that we are engaging with is ongoing, exceeds our accounts, and raises questions that are not necessarily easily answered, resolved within the constraints of a research project.

These theoretical and methodological assumptions give rise to our research practices which are characterised by a combination of three approaches, that we often put into dialogue within and between projects. These are: ethnography, convening processes and co-design for improvisation.

Ethnography

To understand learning and education as an embodied, material and social practice, we employ ethnographic methods, often multi-sited and multi-modal. For instance, through conducting an ethnography of sites in which learning is mobilized as a strategy to deal with crisis or change or embedding ourselves ethnographically in a smart city project in order to understand how certain models of learning gain prominence in relation to citizen engagement in smart city planning.  We have also used digital methods to enhance and support ethnographic inquiry, where ethnographic data is collected in collaboration with learners and educators in the city. For instance, using the app Evernote to work with learners across the lifecourse to map and then discuss their learning lives or using VR technologies to connect older people living in care homes back into physical spaces in the city to encourage learning through story sharing.

Drawing on Donna Haraway’s metaphor of playing the string game ‘the cat’s cradle’ we consider our work to be part of a larger, hopeful, shared task of recognising that through coming together and sharing experiences we can come to better understand collective political issues through making the taken-for-granted and the everyday visible and tangible. And that we do this in order to interfere in ‘worldy patterns’ (Haraway). We therefore adopt a performative ontology very often involving a process of ‘ontological reframing’ where we take what is seen as a symbolic/ structural given, for instance generational divides or accepted responses to caring for older people, and reframe them in order to provide room for manoevre and spaces for new action (Gibson Graham, 2008).

Through our ethnographic methods we aim to make visible and tangible the often taken-for-granted, mundane or invisible elements and how they are enacted in the city, our focus is on attending to different materials, texts, technologies and human relations and how they align and are contested in learning and educational practices, and how these contribute to inequalities in the city (McFarlane, 2011). Here we are ‘excavating the possible’ (Gibson -Graham, 2008) in order to offer alternatives to hegemonic experience (de Sousa Santos, 2001).

Convening processes

Often this ethnographic work is collaborative in that we might work alongside organisations or individuals in the city to conduct the ethnographies. In convening these publics we again draw on feminist standpoint research to consider the important role of affect and care in bringing people and material worlds together. Here attention is drawn to the relational practices needed to convene and sustain publics around matters of concern and how understandings of care as an everyday concern, as political, as going beyond language to encompass intimacy in relation to touch, bodies and our interactions with things and as involving attention to detail and messiness. ‘Good’ convening practices, like good caring practices, therefore require constant maintenance through attention to each other’s practices and affective engagement. Here personal expressiveness, emotions and empathy are at the heart of the knowledge production processes (Sorensson and Kalman, 2017).

The mutual learning involved in our collaborations involve us practising relational expertise (Edwards, 2005) as the collective works together to enable an understanding of each other’s practices and motives in order to build common knowledge whilst retaining a critical, speculative orientation. We work with ethical principles of care, friendship, intimacy, solidarity, and empathy— which involve practical enactments of responsibility towards ‘others-in-relation’ (Whatmore, 1996). Ellis (2007, p.4) proposes that ‘this type of ethical thinking requires researchers to act from our hearts and minds, to acknowledge our interpersonal bonds to others.’ Care here is understood, not simply as a moral obligation, or as part of the ‘work’ associated with participatory research, but also as a challenge to the foregrounding of rational decision making and the lack of attention given to unruly bodies and emotions in research relationships (Mol, Moser & Pols, 2010; Beasley & Bacchi, 2007). 

We reflect our findings back to our collaborators and others through re-presenting the messy entanglements of bodies, spaces, policies, politics and artefacts, both digital and material, and how these form particular assemblages and infrastructures in relation to learning and education in the city. We therefore see our process and data as constructing an invitation or an opening for conversations and new spaces of gathering in the city. This re-presentation might take various forms, for instance, our Manifesto for All Age Friendly Cities which worked to disrupt the metrics of child and age friendly cities into a set of principles to inform opportunities for intergenerational encounter and exchange, or various exhibitions, conferences and events set up to bring together new publics in order to stimulate conversation. We see our role here as one of convening diverse publics around particular matters of concern in relation to the challenges and changes of the city. These events and conversations draw on our ethnographic work that reconfigures relations between human and non-human ‘others’ in order to build spaces of co-habitation. This convening role is not simply about running events to bring diverse publics together but involves a recognition of the need to give emotionally of ourselves, understanding the need for embodied and affective learning, in long term processes of coming to understand each other that require a much slower temporal structure than is usually afforded in funded research projects. As we move towards active experimentation we draw on feminist notions of care and affect in order to:

‘meticulously explore, test, touch, adapt, adjust, pay attention to details and change them, until a suitable arrangement (material, emotional, relational) is achieved.’

Winance (2010: 111)

Co-designing and inventive methods

Recognition of the embodied and affective work involved in bringing diverse publics together also means new kinds of methodological approaches may be necessary in designing these gathering spaces. Our methods here look to ‘generate actual possibilties’ (Gibson-Graham, 2008) in order to enable new actors and tools to align in trying out a more democratic and holistic future making approach to the design of new learning and educational possibilities in the city. However, this is not a straightforward process. As Latour (2005, p. 11) suggests:

we don’t assemble because we agree, look alike, feel good, are socially compatible or wish to fuse together but because we are brought by divisive matters of concern into some neutral, isolated place in order to come to some sort of provisional makeshift (dis)agreement.

Here we see the benefits of drawing on practices of co-design, recognizing the need for improvisation and inventive methods in order to ask questions of existing practices and begin to explore and design new ones. We understand each process as situated in and informed by a wide variety of historical, local, global and material processes, ideologies, knowledges and practices. Our methods and techniques come out of the collaboration and reflect the traditions and material lives of those we are working alongside. Designing together is therefore uncertain, messy and complex, and designing for new, socially just futures therefore cannot be done in a straightforward solutionist manner.

Our methods therefore draw on improvisation and arts based approaches that strive towards the creation of spaces that are inclusive of diverse publics, that allow for mutual learning and disagreement, where we might work to design new research or design projects together that work towards social change and have the capacity to intervene in futures. Our focus here is often on ‘doing design together’ together (Ingold, 2013) in order to learn with and from materials and others in making new futures of learning. For instance, working with a group of community leaders, policy makers and other academics to co-create a series of events and research collaborations that bring about a step change in the way the two universities in the city of Bristol engage with the challenges facing the city, working alongside young people to map the diverse learning resources existing in the city, or bringing together technology developers, artists and older people to co-design technologies for democratic community building and intergenerational encounter in care homes.

In a nutshell

Our research to understand and re-configure learning and education and the city often involves long term engagement with diverse publics through multi-sited, ethnographic (sometimes utilising digital) methods. We utilise these ethnographic findings to shed light on and make tangible the everyday practices of, and inequalities inherent in, learning and education in the city. The re-presentation of learning and the city in new spaces of gathering create an invitation to participation for diverse publics to join us. This work is non-simple and must both ‘hold’ and work with the often difficult emotions and disagreements that emerge. Inventive, creative, improvised methods here support diverse publics to begin to understand each other, to focus on the key matter of concern at stake and to therefore join together in working towards social change and engaging in anticipatory thinking in the city. Clearly this is a non-linear, messy process that sometimes works and sometimes does not. However, we hold that these approaches are necessary and important, particularly as we are working in a time of significant crisis of climate change and species loss alongside increasingly unfair social and economic systems that we are ALL embedded and complicit in.