Material Methods

Researching and Thinking with Things

Sophie Woodward

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526479037
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

Material Methods brings together resources for researchers investigating both the material, as well as the social world through material objects we design, buy, make, exchange and collect. It covers the whole research process, from theoretical underpinnings, selection of methods and their possible uses, as well as representing and analysing data. It introduces students and researchers to the wide range of cross-disciplinary methods which help us to approach and interpret material culture and materials. The book also provides students and researchers with the tools to critically reflect upon pre-existing methods to see their limitations as well as possibilities, and apply them to their own research practice.

1 Introduction

In Material Methods I outline the methodological possibilities and implications of researching the material world. The book starts from the premise that the world is simultaneously material and social, as the things that surround us are an inseparable part of how our relationships to other people are mediated, and the environment, society and culture we live in. Things and materials – as they come into being and are transformed through relations with other things and people – are an inextricable aspect of who we are, our social relations, and even our humanity (Miller, 2010). The theoretical ways of approaching these entanglements between the material and the social are multiple, yet they all in different ways emphasise the active role that things and materials play in this process. We cannot just impose meanings onto things, as they are not passive but instead are ‘vibrant’ (Bennet, 2009) and may resist, surprise, challenge or excite us.

This vibrancy makes things and materials both exciting to research with as well as raises questions about how we can understand these material vitalities and the ways our lives are entangled with things. In this book, I take up the methodological challenges of how to explore the elusive, silent and complex dimensions of the material world and the myriad possibilities that researching with things offer. The impetus to write this comes from my own experiences of researching with material culture within a range of different projects, and an initial frustration with how to understand clothing as material culture. I wanted to understand what clothing was and to have a language to talk and write about it; I experimented with existing methods which took me on a journey using methods such as ethnographic observations, interviews, diaries, wardrobe inventories, collaboration with materials scientists, and getting people to write about and imagine with objects. In this book, I explore the possibilities for adapting existing methods as well as developing new approaches to allow us to foreground the material, become attentive to things and materials and the effects they might have.

What are material methods?

The term material methods is one that I have created to speak to the diverse ways of carrying out research within the areas of material culture and materiality as well as the expansion of creative methods as they move into the multi-sensory, embodied, visual and material. Material methods encompass both methods that are used to understand material culture and materiality, as well as methods that draw upon the materiality of things to generate data. Material methods are, therefore, both:

1. routes into the substantive field of materiality (even as the methods are simultaneously always part of that field) as well as
2. methods of researching with things.

The first sense in which I am using the term material methods addresses the implications of the material turn and the concomitant expansion of research into materiality, materials and material culture. Theoretical and empirical interest in the material world raises questions about how we can adapt existing methods to help us understand things, material properties and the effects that things can have. Methods such as interviews or ethnographic observations have a long heritage within qualitative research, and in this book I explore how these can be – and have been – adapted to allow material relations to be foregrounded. If you are a student or researcher who is already interested in materiality, this book will encourage you to think about what implications your theoretical understandings of materiality have for how you think about methods, as well as introduce you to a range of different methods that can centre the material.

The second sense in which I am using the term material methods is to explore methods that draw upon the capacities of objects to provoke. This builds upon the acknowledgement of the role that things have in research practices (cameras, audio-recorders) as part of the methods-assemblage (Law, 2004). Participants, researchers and the tools of research are all part of how the phenomenon that is being researched is configured (Barad, 2003). All methods are material in the sense that people and things interact in particular contexts to produce knowledge. In this book, I bring together these understandings of the materiality of methods with theories of how things have effects (see Chapter 2) to explore how material methods (such as object interviews and cultural probes) involve an active engagement with the capacities of things to make methods provocative. This aspect of material methods dovetails with broader engagements with creative (see Mason, 2018) and live methods (see Back and Puwar, 2012). They are a way to help you think creatively about how you are doing research, as well as how you can understand and approach the material world.

Material methods as ways to provoke participants (and you as a researcher) is a theme I develop throughout the book and is one which can engage those of you who might not have a research focus into materiality but are interested in thinking creatively about methods that allow us to understand a multi-dimensional and multi-sensory world. In doing this, I am encouraging you to move beyond just thinking reflexively about the role of objects in your research methods to ask you to critically engage with the possibilities of thinking about things you encounter in your substantive fields of research as methodological possibilities. So, for example, you may be researching people’s relationship to their workplace and think about this workplace as a material environment made up of corridors (see Hurdley, 2010), buildings, people, shadows, movements, chatter (see also Yaneva, 2013). These material facets of the workplace can be both a substantive focus as well as methodological possibilities as you engage with how to develop methods that draw upon the capacity of noises in the workplace, the arrangement of things on desks, the shifting lights in a building. The vitalities and agency of things to excite you, resist you, or affect you can be thought about as methodological possibilities. Adams and Thompson (2011) suggest that technologies and things can be research participants; things have effects upon researchers and in doing so can open up new ways of thinking. The provocative capacities of things and how you can become attentive to them are central to the methods discussed in this book.

Why is this book needed?

The ‘material turn’ (see Hicks, 2010 for a discussion) has led to a profusion of interest in things and materials within the social sciences and humanities; however, despite the proliferation of theoretical accounts of materiality and empirical work exploring specific materials, objects and contexts, there has not been a concomitant development that addresses the methodological consequences of thinking about material culture and material relations. The parallel fields of visual and sensory research, in contrast, include an extensive literature, which deals with the methodological implications of a renewed attention to the sensory and visual (such as Banks, 2001; Pink, 2009; Rose, 2016). The lack of methodological discussion within the literature on material culture is more profound than just a lack of books or articles explicitly focusing upon materiality and methods, as often even within articles using empirical accounts to explore materiality there is an absence of discussion or reflection on methods.

The recent spate of readers and handbooks on material culture are a case in point; they include chapters that explore the theoretical debates and orientations to materials and objects (such as Hicks and Beaudry, 2010; Harvey et al., 2014; Tilley et al., 2013), yet the methodological challenges and possibilities of researching objects often remain implicit. Epistemological concerns over how to understand messy material and social relations (see, for example, Law, 2004) point towards the need to think more critically about how to engage with these challenges methodologically. In addition, there are books that engage with specific theoretical positions and the implications for carrying out empirical research (in particular for the connection between new materialism and methods, Fox and Alldred (2015), but also for non-representational theory, Vannini (2015)). This book is the first book to explicitly engage with the methodological implications and possibilities of researching materiality as well as researching with things. It does this by bringing together a wide range of methods for understanding material culture, by offering a critical reflection upon existing methods as well as exploring more recent innovations.

The lack of literature focusing on methods and materiality does not do justice to the wide range of innovative and thoughtful methods that are carried out in practice. As these ways of doing research are often not reflected upon or written about, many of these methods are not ‘named’. The process of writing this book has involved reading research that has employed material methods but does not discuss them, and thinking through the traces of these methods and analysis in what is written. Writing this book has also been a process of drawing together at times quite seemingly disparate projects and methods, as well as ‘naming’ some of these methods. I have drawn from a wide range of disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, geography, history, design, archaeology. While there are of course disciplinary specificities in how things are approached (see Hicks and Beaudry, 2010), theories already move across disciplinary boundaries, as material culture is an inherently interdisciplinary field. Thinking through and across disciplines has allowed me to see connections between ways of approaching things, which are simultaneously theoretical, empirical and methodological. Throughout the book I will note the discipline that specific approaches come from, as the heritage of methods matters. However, I have also found it very productive to think across disciplines, and to put disciplinary methodological approaches in dialogue with each other to advance thinking about material methods.

What kind of book is it and who is it for?

Thinking about things and the material world emerges from an engagement with that world; it is impossible to theorise materiality without thinking about stuff. This book situates material methods at the intersection of theory, the empirical and the methodological as the three cannot be separated. In the next chapter, I raise and explore questions of how you can understand what things and objects are; these questions animate the chapters that centre on specific methods (Chapters 3–7). In this book I understand ‘the empirical’ as an engagement with the material world: defined in this way, the empirical runs throughout the book (not as separate to theory or methods sections) as each chapter is centrally concerned with methods for thinking about that engagement with the material world. The methods can help us to understand the material world, as well as being generated through an engagement with the empirical. In the ‘methods’ chapters (3–7), specific empirical case studies are central to the exploration of how methods have been used to answer different research questions to highlight the principles and possibilities of each method. Given that often material methods are not written about or reflected upon, this is particularly important to show ways in which researchers have approached the material.

The book aims to introduce you to the possibilities of different material methods; it is not reducing particular methods to specific disciplinary or theoretical stances. Instead, through examples, I will show you the ways in which people have used methods and, by juxtaposing different approaches, I will tease out the possibilities these methods have. There are no ‘right’ methods for different questions, as methods allow you to do different things – no method can capture everything (Bhattacharya, 2009) – but exploring different methods can allow you to think about the material differently. I have written this book with the intention of provoking you to think creatively about how you could approach your research.

While the book is for anyone who wants to read or use it, it is anticipated that it will be of particular use and interest for those of you who:

• are carrying out research specifically into material culture and materiality and want to reflect upon current methods and explore alternative methodological approaches;
• encounter things/objects in doing your research and want to think about how to approach and understand them;
• wish to expand the possibilities of your methods and to understand what material methods can offer;
• want to know about and understand what things/objects are, and what place they might have in your research.

For all those who read the book it is intended to provoke you to think differently about your methods and the material world.

The content of the book and how to use it

The book covers the whole stage of thinking about research:

• How to orient yourself to things.
• The role theory has in setting up your empirical research.
• Specific methods – their potential uses as well as limitations.
• How to analyse data generated.
• How to present your research.

It, therefore, leads you through the entire process of research and can be read as a whole. It is also a book that you can dip into, if you have an interest in a specific method, or you want to think about how to analyse your data. Chapter 2 sets up some of the core issues that run throughout the book as well as key issues and debates around what things/objects are, and as such is a useful starting point even if you are planning to read about a specific method. There are threads that run through the book, such as how you can attune yourself and become attentive to things. If you do not already carry out research into materiality you may not notice the role the material has in your research field, and if you do, it can be challenging to understand the material, given how dominant social science methods are people-centred and privilege verbal accounts. As a consequence, what it means to attune yourself to things, and how you do this, runs throughout the book, in terms of specific methods as well as data analysis. Other key ideas running through the book (that I have already introduced) are the vitality of things and the ways methods and things can be provocative.

In Chapter 2, I outline what it means to orient yourself to objects and things in your research. I start the chapter by addressing key questions that you have to engage with when using material methods, such as what are things, objects and material properties? Thinking about them as objects, things or as entangled materials are not just questions of terminology but fundamental questions about how you understand what they are and how they work. This question will draw on different theoretical traditions to open up different ways of thinking about things and the implications that this has for how you frame and approach your research. As part of how you understand things, the chapter then moves on to think about what effects things have. Drawing upon the emphasis upon the relational in many theories of materiality (albeit differently conceived), the chapter extends this to the methodological and empirical question where do things end and how do you draw the boundaries of what you are researching? As a whole, the chapter sets up a way of orienting yourself to things as I outline what a material-oriented ontology might look like: things or materials are central to an understanding of the world (this will be returned to throughout the book). Throughout the chapter I address the relationships between theory, methods and the empirical that underpins the book.

In Chapter 3, I introduce object interviews as a material method. The questions that animate the previous chapter are extended here to show that how you understand what things are will impact upon how you think about and do an object interview. Seeing something as a thing or an object is both a theoretical question (discussed in Chapter 2) as well as a practical question as to whether to keep the item in its original context or carry out an interview in a separate setting (where people bring objects along). I develop the idea of an object interview as a space of encounter and/or space of connection to look at different ways of approaching object interviews. The differences and similarities between object elicitations and interviews are introduced to explore the potentials for the method. The chapter engages with how you can approach interviews as a material method and how you can centre objects which involves engaging with what types of things you use in interviews and how they can provoke responses in participants. As material relationships are understood as embodied and practical rather than verbalised, I outline the ways in which the verbal can be used as a way to understand the material world. The chapter finishes by discussing some practical considerations and useful techniques for thinking about doing object interviews.

Chapter 4 explicitly picks up the ways in which material methods draw upon the provocative capacities of things by introducing cultural probes and arts-based methods. The previous chapter on object interviews opened up the ways in which you need to pay heed to the materiality and material properties of things when thinking about interviews as a method of drawing out and eliciting responses. This chapter expands how methods can be material provocations through the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Praise for the Book
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Orienting yourself to things
• 3 Object interviews and elicitations
• 4 Provocative methods: cultural probes and arts-based methods
• 5 Understanding things-in-relations: surface assemblages, inventories and interviews
• 6 Follow the things
• 7 Ethnographic approaches
• 8 Analysing, writing and disseminating
• Bibliography
• Index