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About UsWe are a research collective made up of members who are linked to, or influenced by, the work of the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC), where many of us worked between 2004 and 2014. Our aim is to further CRESC's work on the Social Life of Methods as we move into new disciplinary and institutional contexts.
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Who We Are |
The founders of SLOM:Lab are:
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Our History |
One of the initiatives launched at CRESC was the Social Life of Methods, a critical conversation about the role that research methods play in the formation of contemporary social worlds. Through this initiative we developed critical conversations on a range of methodological issues including: how to do interdisciplinary research; the potential and pitfalls of collaboration; working with digital data; visual methods; and the challenges of big data.
SLOM encouraged us to focus our attention on both our own research methods and those of the people we work with and this in turn influenced our understandings of how to conduct social research. As a group we continue to see interdisciplinary, collaborative and innovative methods as crucial to successfully studying contemporary forms of social life. However we find ourselves pursuing these ambitions in a research and funding environment that is often driven by disciplinary concerns, that privileges individual production and that does not necessarily recognise the complexities of collaborative knowledge production. We have established SLOM:Lab as a way for us to confront and make public these challenges by sharing experiences and tips, providing advice, posing questions, and continuing the conversations about method that began in SLOM. We hope that this will develop into a resource that will be useful for supporting the future development and continuation of research methods appropriate to tackling the complex issues that social science is grappling with today. |