Methods in Dialogue: Researching Home
Date: Wednesday 12 May 2010
Location: University of Manchester (venue and directions)
Workshop summary
Our three speakers will introduce the different methodological approach they have taken to researching home. This is followed by by discussion and debate from participants, exploring the distinctive research questions, practices, insights and types of knowledge claim that different methodological approaches to researching a topic can offer.
Speakers
‘Ethnographies of the Home: Anthropology of the Everyday’ - Inge Daniels (University of Oxford)
Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, I will explore the strengths and weaknesses of a number of methods used to study everyday, lived-in homes. The focus will be on the innovative possibilities of material and visual methodologies that question the overemphasis in the bulk of social research about the domestic arena on narrative approaches that stress meaning and human agency.
Inge Daniels is a social anthropologist based at the University of Oxford. View Inge Daniels' University of Oxford webpage for more details.
Play recording of Inge's presentation (audio only - you can view photos of the items Inge mentions on her website, www.ingedaniels.com and in her book The Japanese House, published in 2010 and also available via her website)
'At Home They Feel Like Tourists – Imagining home in settler nation-state’ Stewart Muir (University of Manchester)
Home is not always, or not only, a place or a fixed location; it can also be a state of mind or a feeling, it may be fleeting or never quite realised. This paper outlines some of the methodological and substantive issues confronted in teasing out the attitudes and practices of Australian members of the holistic spiritual milieu, of people whose sense of home felt unsettled by unresolved colonial guilt.
Stewart Muir is a Research Associate based in the Morgan Centre at the University of Manchester. View Stewart Muir's webpage for more details.
'Home, away and domestic Ideologies’ - Rebecca Leach (Keele University)
The presentation will be based on work in the Le Play (Institute of Sociology) archive at Keele University. I will explore the substantive methodologies of the early sociologies of the Institute, (which were in themselves controversial) as they investigated locality, community and domesticity in both UK and international settings, which included very particular ‘constructions’ of the domestic in photography, household budgets, household plans (literally floor plans). I will also reflect on the methodological issues that link this reconstruction of historical archives to my own history as a researcher interested in the home.
Rebecca Leach is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Keele. View Rebecca Leach's webpage for more details.
Directions
The workshop is in Lecture Theatre G7 on the ground floor of the Humanities Bridgeford Street Building, which is number 35 on the campus map (opens in new window).