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Living Research Two: Emotions and research Operation Vaken's posters, newspaper adverts, immigration surgeries and mobile billboards were a dramatic display, designed to reassure some citizens that the government was ‘getting tough’ on irregular immigration. However, the campaign also increased worries and anxiety. The survey carried out for us by Ipsos MORI of a nationally representative sample of 2,424 people (for
Living Research Four: Ethics in uncomfortable research situations The ethical bottom line for sociologists is, ‘first, do no harm’. This can mean taking care that how we present our research does not add to raced, classed and gendered oppressions, and equally, avoiding a well-meaning shrug and a response of ‘It's complicated’. At its best, sociology takes seriously the personal, everyday struggles and inconsistencies of
6 Mentoring arts-based research: a tale of two professors Randee Lipson Lawrence and Patricia Cranton A rts-based research has tremendous potential to foster human creativity and bring about cultural and social change. Unfortunately, in our experience, graduate programmes in mainstream academic cultures may not always seek to foster creativity. Bringing the arts into graduate adult education research has the potential to breathe new life into what has become a fixed and often rather dull process. This chapter discusses this practice as it critiques and
Living Research One: Why are we doing this? Public sociology and public life This short section is a conversation between an activist involved in the project 1 and a member of the research team. Each reflects candidly on the value of the MIC project to civil society and on social research (and socially engaged research) in general as a ‘public good
Living Research Three: Migration research and the media One of the motivations for our project was to use research to intervene in public debates on immigration by providing alternative perspectives on what is often a polarised and entrenched debate where the perspectives of migrants and racially minoritised communities barely feature (Conlan, 2014 ; Migrant Voice, 2014 ) and where, as we found
Living Research Six: Collaborations Our research on Operation Vaken was rooted in several different forms of engagement, with the hope not only of intervening in social injustices (see Passy, 2001 ) but also of producing knowledge differently; a less elitist and collaborative knowledge. The root of the word collaboration, from the Latin collaborare – to work together – carries ambivalence. To collaborate can also suggest betrayal, even
Living Research Five: Public anger in research (and social media) At our end-of-project conference, one participant said that the event had made her think that ‘when outraged by something’ she would try to research it; ‘combine activism with academia and your sociological imagination’. Strikingly, this comment captured much of what brought us together to develop the research discussed in this book. In this section, we
As mentioned in the introduction, the empirical analyses presented in this book are based on the material gathered in my research conducted in 2014–2015 within the Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship SAST. In total, 80 individual in-depth interviews and questionnaires were undertaken with 40 post-accession Polish migrants in the UK and 40 post-2004 Ukrainian migrants to Poland legally residing there (see the Appendix, Tables 1 and 2 ). The participants needed to meet a selection criterion of not having a local spouse or life partner, to
3 Condoms and sex research What are the consequences of getting adolescents to speak about the condom and their sexual experiences in the public arena? What impact has sex research had in producing knowledge of adolescent sexuality? In answering these questions this chapter seeks to provide a history of sex research on the condom. The object of my analysis is government-funded sex research on adolescence. Focusing on HIV/AIDS research conducted within university departments throughout the 1990s, I address the role social scientists have played in constructing
questions posed by my interest in jographies have guided my research for the last few years, during which I have conducted three different projects exploring running widely as a mobile practice and more specifically as a mode of transport (see Cook, 2016, 2017 ; Cook, Shaw and Simpson, 2016b for more details). When these projects began, there was little in the way of methodological precedence for understanding running from social science/humanities perspectives. Auto-ethnography had been very successfully used by Allen-Collinson and Hockey ( 2001 ) in their research