Abstract
Savage and Burrows’ (2007) much cited article suggests that empirical sociology is in crisis in light of the expansion of transactional data produced through digital technologies by commercial and other public bodies. Empirical sociology can no longer have the same claim to offer a unique understanding of social relationships that it once enjoyed through its methodological tools. There has been a renewed interest in the politics of methods, which continues to place methods at the heart of what the discipline of sociology is able to achieve. This debate is excited both by social changes which entail the proliferation of transactional data that Savage and Burrows discuss, and also through the movement of methods across disciplinary boundaries, including experimentation with the possibilities offered by the visual and sensory as ways of knowing about the world. The widening out of the methodological boundaries of the discipline of sociology raises questions about what is sociological about particular methods and how diverse methods are employed to ask sociological questions. The relationship of methods to disciplinarity is one which runs through both of the edited collections reviewed here; Back and Puwar address the core challenges posed by Savage and Burrows (2007) and explore how a revitalisation of methods is pivotal to how we conceive of the sociological imagination and enterprise. The collection edited by Keightley and Pickering is interdisciplinary in its scope drawing upon a range of disciplines in exploring what methods can be used through the substantive field of memory studies. Although very different in both their form as well as their substantive focuses, what both books share is a consideration of the relationship between disciplines and a reinvigoration of methods.
One would not often describe a methods book as exciting or lively, as instead they are more likely to be characterised as useful or necessary in the service of more interesting empirical work. In part this is due to the approach advocated in many textbook style books which detail specific methods in as comprehensive a fashion as possible or the opposing tendency of books which discuss methods in terms of abstract epistemological discussion. However, exciting is probably the word which most closely describes Back and Puwar’s book; exciting both in terms of the substantive content of the book and also how it will excite readers to think about methods differently.
All of the chapters in the book are written by sociologists, even if specific authors draw methods and inspiration from elsewhere, such as Michael’s chapter, as the aim of the book is how to create a ‘live sociology’ through methods that are similarly vital. Central to this revitalised sociology is thinking about methods in terms of how we cultivate Mills’ (1959) sociological imagination. This is refreshing given how often innovations in methods are associated with interdisciplinary – which can be at the cost of thinking about how we can use these methods to develop discipline areas such as sociology. The book’s aim to inspire is evident in the recasting of the conventional introduction as a manifesto, as the book attempts to provoke its readers to rethink the place of methods in sociological research. The book is characterised by optimism about what the discipline can achieve, even in the face of the supposed ‘crisis’ that empirical sociology is faced with given the capacity of the digital to describe and produce social realities. The book is not comprehensive, yet it is not meant to be, as instead it aims to highlight different possibilities and routes for the sociological researcher.
The book starts with a ‘manifesto’ in place of a conventional introduction. Rather than offer any kind of summary of the book as a whole or outlining of the chapters, it outlines 11 main pointers that run across the book as a whole. This is effective as a tool for inspiring, and is geared towards the researcher who is planning to read through the whole book. Readers who are expecting to ‘dip into’ specific chapters are as a consequence less guided than a conventional book might allow. After the manifesto, the book is structured into four sections: art, storying, digital and designs, each of which contains two or three chapters. In the first section, ‘Art’, the chapters variously engage with the ways in which sociology can learn from artistic practices, whether this is through curation (Back and also Puwar and Sharma) or mapping (Toscano). Puwar and Sharma recast sociology through its capacity to provoke publics through exhibitions, as it emerges through a practice of co-curation. They argue that, even when sociology moves into the exhibition space, research questions can still be sociological yet they are reconfigured through a series of collaborations. In this section, as in the book more widely, words as the main form of the representation of sociological knowledge and research are questioned. This is a particularly pertinent issue, in light of developing sensory and visual methodologies, and one that has not perhaps been given the attention it needs. These questions are not offered any solutions in this book, although, given the complexity of them in particular in relationship to the expectations within academia upon the production of journal articles, it would be unfair to expect this. It is explored in the following section ‘Storying’; in Gunaratnam’s chapter, the theme of her research – pain – is seen to be beyond, and destroyed by, words. Fraser explicitly addresses the role of words, and develops an understanding of words as material entities that provoke and participate in the research process. Within her theorisation, they are no longer an end point of research, merely as a means of representation, but an active and agentic part of research as a whole.
The third section, ‘Digital’, is the one that most explicitly engages with the issues that Savage and Burrows discuss, as the authors ask questions about what implication the proliferation of digital transactional data has for sociological research. Uprichard warns that we need to widen our understanding from the ‘now’ that the instantaneousness of digital data lends itself to, and start to historicise and contextualise data in pasts as well as futures. Marres’ chapter roots its discussion in the analysis of specific internet technologies to demonstrate how research becomes redistributed, as technologies and their users impact upon the kinds of data that are collected. This reconfiguration of research capacities revisits, albeit in different ways, some of the issues raised in the discussions of curation that started the book in terms of a multiplicity of agents in the research process. One of the virtues of the book is the way it connects and builds upon themes in other chapters and sections; the final section ‘Designs’ builds upon the discussions of ‘mobile sociology’ that was introduced in the sections on curation. Lury explores the ways in which sociology can ‘inhabit’ different media rather than be simply a study ‘of’. Michael’s chapter explicitly addresses how sociology can draw from design methodologies; importantly he draws on the overall theme of the book about how sociology can provoke and inspire through the methods it employs to see how sociology not only describes a world, but also provokes and creates it.
There is no overall formula for the structure or content of the chapters, even in how they understand and address the sociological, as they range from the theoretical (Lury), through those firmly rooted in specific research, to the very reflexive (Fraser), to those that discuss specific methods (Michael) as a springboard for a wider discussion of the implications of method. This is certainly not a book for people looking ‘how to do’ in terms of the specifics of methods but more a book for researchers bored of current methods books, or pessimistic accounts of the state of sociology, to start to reimagine ‘how to do’ sociology.
While Back and Puwar’s book is able to place methods at the heart of a revitalised sociology by moving outside the conventions of a methods book, it is much more challenging to make methods exciting in a classic textbook format. Keightley and Pickering’s book is a methods textbook suitable for students, and also researchers, in the substantive field of memory studies. Although the book is constrained by textbook format, the book manages to achieve a balance between clear guidance on particular methods as well as engaging readers with the possibilities of method in the area of memory studies. In part this is through the wide range of methods incorporated, ranging from oral history interviews through to multi-sited ethnographies and innovations such as the self-interview. Although very different to Back and Puwar’s collection, it shares the positioning of methods at the heart of the development of an empirical and theoretical field. The book aims to move beyond memory studies as being fragmented and multi-disciplinary to explore how methods may be a means to generate more interdisciplinary dialogue within the field. It is far from being a comprehensive outline of all possible methods, but rather each chapter speaks through empirical research to raise the implications and possibilities particular methods entail. The methods are always integrated within discussion of empirical research, yet each chapter has clear ‘guidance’ at the end with core pointers to ensure clarity for students or those unfamiliar with the field or methods. The book is ideal for students as it is clear – all chapters are structured in the same way with the bulk of the chapter entailing a discussion of the methods through empirical research and each chapter ending with summary bullet points and suggested reading.
In light of the book’s aim to move beyond a conventional methods textbook, the sections are not organised through specific methods, but through themes, of which there are six in total, including memory and identity, media and memory. Where this is most effective is where the chapters are placed together having a dialogic effect, such as the contrasting chapters and methods on vernacular memory. The book engages with both the connections between disciplines and methods and also aims to transcend this to explore issues that cross over the field of memory studies, such as the importance of ethical issues. The chapters draw from diverse disciplinary fields including oral history, psychology, anthropology and cultural studies as well as sociology. Although each chapter is explicit about how the methods are rooted in particular disciplines, there is considerable variance in how much this is discussed – in some cases much of the chapter concerns the rootedness of the method in a particular discipline, whereas others barely engage with this. The book would have benefitted from more commonality in the chapters upon how much these links to disciplinarity are discussed. It is a difficult issue to balance the over specificity of discussing particular methods in relationship to a discipline with a desire to step beyond discipline specificity in looking at a substantive field of study. This could have been achieved more effectively both by limiting the specificity of some chapters and encouraging more specificity in others; the introduction could have explored more clearly the relationship between an interdisciplinary engagement with a field and the relationship this has to disciplinarity.
The first section, ‘Memory and identity’, addressees a core relationship that runs through the book as a whole: between the collective and the individual. By juxtaposing a chapter on autobiography (Fivush) with one on oral history (Bornat) and collective memory allows an understanding of the different tools to explore this. Both are strongly rooted in their discipline – the first in psychology and the second in oral history, as the latter engages with the challenges to the discipline of online repositories. Fivush’s article outlines mixed method approaches and is particularly useful in introducing the method of writing as a research tool. Bornat’s chapter highlights the specificity of the interview to oral history, yet also has useful issues that may be explored around notions of the interview as a social relationship. In the second section, ‘Qualities of memory’, Brown and Reave introduce discourse analysis from the perspective of social psychology, as they develop a mixed methods approach to encompass mixed methods and material practices of memory. Mihelj’s chapter, picks up the use of interviews as method in relationship to vernacular memory yet is less clearly located in a discipline as it seeks to speak across several.
The third section, ‘Media and memory’, concerns itself with both institutionalised media such as television and also with the everyday media technologies of video recorders. Chapter 5, by Gray, is explicitly located within media studies and through case studies explores how multiple sites of analysis make possible a holistic approach to media such as television. It offers a useful discussion of what counts as sources of data and how we might approach them. Pickering and Keightley’s chapter addresses vernacular memory but in a contrastive way to Mihelj’s previous discussion and also to the media studies approach that Gray outlines. The productive juxtaposition of chapters on similar substantive areas yet with different approaches is where the book works most effectively. Pickering and Keightley outline methods such as ethnography and other established qualitative methods as well as introducing their own innovation of the self-interview as the chapter starts to think about new ways of researching memory.
In section four, ‘Locations of memory’, both chapters are broadly ethnographic. Basu continues to explore the multiple sites of and approaches to memory here through the use of multi-suited ethnography to develop an approach to ‘memoryscapes’. While this chapter is very different to the previous one by Pickering and Keightley, taken together they raise important issues around methodological innovations. Both chapters deal with the innovative possibilities of new methods as they emerge from the substantive area. They are not innovations for the sake of being inventive but rather emerge from the necessities and possibilities of the research area. Kearney explores the methodological implications not only of the ‘where’ of her study but in terms of the ‘who’, as she explores, through ethnography, ethnicity in post-imperial Brazil through notions of wounded-ness.
Section five on ‘Disturbed memory’ is the one that most explicitly brings ethical questions to the fore, which run through many of the other chapters but are most closely engaged with here. Keightley and Pickering’s chapter (Chapter 9) deals with painful pasts to consider how to remain ethically sensitive. They argue that the over-categorisation of things as traumatic in effect in their argument leads to, and emerges from, methodological reductionism. Aldridge and Dearden take this up in Chapter 10 through a specific focus upon research around children to explore how innovative and mixed methods are the most effective way to treat children as active participants in the research. In section six on ‘Confessing and witnessing’, Tileaga’s chapter adopts a social psychological perspective to explore the different methodological frameworks for discursively analysing a range of different types of apologies. The final chapter of the book is on testimony from a psychological perspective as it adopts a discourse approach, akin to many other chapters in the book, yet used here to analyse the testimonies of Holocaust survivors.
Although there is always a place for books which outline the nuts and bolts of particular methods, the two edited books reviewed here have very different ambitions to this. Neither is concerned with simply outlining or introducing different methods, but rather how a consideration of methodologies can be used in one case to suggest commonalities and move forward the substantive field of memory studies, and in the other case to revitalise the discipline of sociology. One of the emergent strengths of both books is that methodology books which consider methods as emerging from and situated in specific substantive research fields allow a more nuanced and imaginative view of what methods can achieve. In both cases there is a strong case for innovation that is not just for the sake of innovation but rather because a research question demands it.