Abstracts Panel 4 – Methodological entanglements: creative and radical methods in Brighton’s postgraduate research community

PANEL ORGANISERS – HELEN JOHNSON, BEN SWEETING AND SALLY SUTHERLAND

Sally Sutherland, Tom Ainsworth, Nigel Sherriff and Mathilda Tham - Collaborative printed plan with supervisors. December 2020.

Both Art and Science can be understood as human needs to express the world around us. Both require suspension of disbelief, offering speculations about our physical and immaterial reality prior to proof. And both—as has been the case since the painting of the Chauvet Cave some 40,000 years ago—have no rules and no boundaries. The artists who produced these paintings did so in order to first face, then make sense of, their reality. We do Science with precisely the same motivation. (Neri Oxman. “Age of Entanglement.” Journal of Design and Science  (2016). https://doi.org/10.21428/7e0583ad )

While methodological commitments sometimes separate disciplines, questioning method in radical and creative ways can connect and entangle otherwise disparate enquiries. This panel explores how creative and radical methods are being applied, developed, and disrupted within the University of Brighton’s vibrant postgraduate community. Through this lens we explore a variety of methodological debates and issues, problematising method/ology within different disciplinary perspectives, and considering how methodological issues and frameworks translate into research practices on the ground.  

The session will be structured around a series of three questions, from which participants will unfold stories of their own research practices. 

  1. Is there a collaborative element in your work and, if so, what does it look? You could think across sectors, disciplines, participant groups and other kinds of boundaries.
  2. What does creative research mean to you/in your research?
  3. How) has conducting your research changed your understanding of the wider consequences of the methods that you are using?  

The panel consists of: Rebecca Winter (Brighton and Sussex Medical School); Jordan Whitewood-Neal (School of Architecture and Design); H Howitt (School of Humanities and Social Science). It is organised by Helen Johnson (Principal Lecturer in Psychology and incoming Co-Director of the Centre for Arts and Wellbeing), Sally Sutherland (Design Star Doctoral researcher, School of Architecture and Design), and Ben Sweeting (Principal Lecturer in Architecture and Design).