Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1,500 titles.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
In this chapter we – Emma Lazenby, a filmmaker, and Karen Gray, a researcher – introduce the analogue journey method. The term ‘analogue’ has dual meanings, and both are relevant. An ‘analogue’ is a thing that is similar to, or that is used to represent, something else through the process of comparison or analogy. The analogue journey method is a novel creative analysis tool that can be used with almost any kind of qualitative or mixed-methods research data, making sense of such data by visualising them in the shape of a journey, with the end goal of communicating this sense to others. The word ‘analogue’ is also now commonly used to denote things whose means of representation is through the quantities and qualities of the physical world. This contrasts to the ‘digital’ world, in which physical quantities are processed through and represented by electrical signals. For example, analogue time is told through the movement of the minute and second hands of a clock, rather than through changing numbers on a computer screen. The analogue journey method requires analogue tools, such as paper, pens, scissors. However, its results are intended to be translated into either words or images using any media to support wider and creative dissemination of research findings. The word ‘journey’ in the name indicates that it involves information being organised and presented in a form that, while linear, is mobile and mutable – open to change. The analogue journey method demands thoughtful connection and reconnection with the data. Its activities encourage cross-disciplinary collaboration, opening up different perspectives or helping to form different constellations of information.
This chapter will discuss analysis of multimodal creative and qualitative research that has been undertaken by the International Women in Supramolecular Chemistry Network (WISC, 2020). WISC’s overarching aim is to create a community to support the retention and progression of women and other marginalised genders within the field of supramolecular chemistry. WISC use an ethos that ‘calls in’ the community and embeds equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) expertise (Caltagirone et al, 2021a, 2021b). We intentionally use reflective methods as part of an Embodied Inquiry (Leigh and Brown, 2021) to capture and share their ‘invisible, embodied, emotional experiences’ (Leigh et al, 2023, p 1) as a way to raise awareness and effect change (Leigh et al, 2022a). Science is not known for its diversity and inclusion, whether that is regarding gender (Rosser, 2012), race (Prasad, 2021; Royal Society of Chemistry, 2022), sexuality, (Smith, 2019) or disability (CRAC, 2020). Women are subject to resistance in academia generally (Shelton, Flynn and Grosland, 2018; Murray and Mifsud, 2019), and this is intensified within the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (Rosser, 2012). Despite investment in programmes designed to address the gender imbalance, women remain a minority, particularly in more senior roles (Rosser, 2017). This imbalance is more pronounced in some STEM disciplines than others.
The Unspoken Voices Project is concerned with understanding the experiences of people who rely on augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), also known as communication aids, because they cannot speak clearly. People who use AAC are frequently excluded from being involved, or they are misrepresented, in research because they cannot provide the ‘rich narrative’ often demanded by qualitative analytic methods. The project was inspired by clinical practice as I am a speech and language therapist with experience of working with people who use AAC. I have frequently had cause to wonder at interactions between people who use AAC and their familiar communication partners and have marvelled at the nature of the mutuality that exists beyond words. These observations led me to search for, but not find, analytic methods that would enable me to explore and authentically represent people who use AAC and their experience of communication. A dialogic theoretical lens provided the conceptual tools to extend my understanding of communication and voice, and to develop a creative data analysis method incorporating my embodied experience as a speech and language therapist and researcher. I will draw on data from the Unspoken Voices Project, a research project concerned with understanding more about the experiences of communicating using AAC, to elucidate and illuminate my application of this method and the impact that it had on my research. This method synthesises multimodal data sources through attending to the complexity and nuance of dialogue with this population.
Building on a developing practice of first-person writing as critical method and a theory of knowledge as partial and situated, this chapter will take the form of a conversational autoethnographybetween two early career researchers, Dr Karen Hammond and Dr Nick Fuller. Inspired by the work of Ellis and Bochner (2006), this chapter highlights the potential of autoethnography to aid in the development and dissemination of creative forms of qualitative data analysis. It documents our exchanges and experiences in the context of two recent doctoral projects carried out in the University of the West of Scotland and the University of Stirling. As we both occupy a marginal position between two different and apparently contradictory worlds, we think about how our other identities and, specifically, our spiritual and alternative healing practices outside of the academy have shaped our approaches to data analysis, with a focus on Nick’s unique use of the shamanic journeying method. Together, we explore the challenge of developing creative approaches to qualitative data analysis in the context of mainstream research spaces where conforming to institutional and disciplinary norms is rewarded with research capital. Our dialogue seeks to address important ethical and practical considerations; as we render visible some of the difficulties in describing and engaging with highly individual experiences, we reflect on if and how such creative methods that require specific skillsets and qualities can be taught or passed onto other researchers. It is hoped that the conversational style will make learning data analysis methods more accessible and engaging for students and experienced researchers alike.
A spider created an intricate web in the outside corner of my writing room window. I see her perched in the centre when I look up from my desk. That the delicate legs support the large, round abdomen the size of a small stone amazes me. Throughout the year, she goes about her business, and I go about mine here in the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the south-western United States. The seasons of the year serve as a backdrop to the web’s silhouette. The web frames the cumulus clouds of summer as they drift across bright blue sky and the bright green leaves and clusters of magenta flowers of a New Mexico locust tree just beyond the fence. The leaves of that same tree turned gold, rust, and red with the crispness of autumn beyond the web. When snow begins to fall in soft flurries to announce winter’s arrival, I wondered at the spider’s ability to survive. I still do not understand; just know that I am grateful when the air warms again in the late-arriving spring of this altitude. The spider’s web maintained its shape, structure, and strength through the seasons. As the frame of web connects the seasons outside the window, so its connective power has much to teach us as we delve into transdisciplinary and creative research methods. Transdisciplinary research and creative methods honour complexities. These complex dynamics encourage us to move beyond discipline-specific and isolated analyses and into rich and deep research, as ‘only a thoroughly transdisciplinary perspective can navigate such issues, which are at once technological, cultural, ethical, political, economic, and ecological’ (Wells, 2013, p 126).
Using examples from a short but intensive period of fieldwork within my doctoral research to provide context to my decision-making processes, this chapter provides a reflection of my experiences in designing and developing a creative analytical framework. Following the provision of foundational information regarding the overall research project and my original plan for conducting fieldwork and data analysis, I detail the different ways my research methods and focus deviated from this plan, the ethical and practical considerations I encountered, and the evolution of how I understand data analysis to relate to research practice. My presented approach to creative data analysis is subsequently presented as a formulaic analytical process that merges creative practice with thematic analysis that can be used as is or adapted to fit other preferred methods. However, my experiences in developing this approach demonstrate why a formulaic approach to data analysis is not, and should not be, everything.
This chapter describes the how and why of a co-created method of creative data analysis. It came about when a creative practitioner (Mel) and a neurodivergent researcher (Anne) used their different forms of expertise to co-create a sensory assemblage and a set of interpretation notes. Anne was nearing the end of her doctoral studies and needed to synthesise a complex array of transdisciplinary theoretical explorations and empirical research conducted using a number of collaborative and co-design methods. She had a deep feeling that her accumulated evidence and fragments of findings formed a coherent whole. However, she could not put into words her sense of direction, organising principles, or overall shape for this coherent whole. Nor could she find words for the analysis and synthesis required. In everyday life Anne relies on sketching and mind mapping when words fail her. Given this, her university agreed to a collaboration with a North Wales creative practitioner. The aim was to see if the partnership could help Anne synthesise her work first visually and then in words. This collaboration indeed solved Anne’s problem and in the process gave rise to a method of creative data analysis that both authors think has wider application. Both authors believe that knowledge is contingent, partial, and subjective. Anne uses the language of cognitive maps (Furnari, 2015) to describe the subjectivity of sensemaking. Mel prefers the metaphor of personal geography (Hall, 1994), believing that we all have our personal geography, a map helping us make sense of our journey through life.
This chapter will present a composite method of analysis for embodied movement data, developed in the first author’s doctoral project (in progress at time of writing), which considered attitudes towards the body in English primary schools. This project sought to understand embodied experiences and their pedagogical implications, suggesting that heightened embodied awareness might support a more perceptive and responsive pedagogy. It drew heavily on the first author’s career as a dancer and aerialist specialising in creative movement. Residencies in three schools over the course of nine months consisted of weekly, one-hour sessions of creative movement play with at least two classes in each school, over the course of six weeks in the pilot school and the first enquiry school, and ten weeks in the second enquiry school. Children were mainly aged 7 to 11 and attended in whole-class groups. Class teachers supported, sometimes joining in and sometimes observing the movement. Data generated included: interviews with staff, video of the children moving using both high-quality video and infrared cameras, and drawings and voice-recorded comments made by the children at the end of the sessions. Extending and adapting Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 1992), we used creative dance practice for non-verbal interpretation of the intangible experience of the learner. Analysing primary, embodied, movement data through a series of dance-led lenses avoids immediately grappling with the limitations of translating movement into language, focusing instead on the perceptual level of these experiences and opening the possibility of deeper understanding.
In this chapter, we reflect upon our experiences of translating research findings for public audiences through the production of two artefacts. In both cases, we created composite ‘narratives’ – a collection of participant accounts combined and reshaped to produce central messages and stories (Willis, 2018), and ‘characters’, fictional participants combined from several participant characteristics whose lives the narratives described. We did this primarily because our data pertained to personal and sensitive issues which, when presented in the form of a fuller narrative, risked making our participants recognisable. However, in the process of creating our composite characters, we realised that this work was more than a process of anonymisation – it involved rich and creative analytical thinking. In producing both artefacts we found ourselves moving iteratively between cases and themes and thinking critically about diversity and how this can be represented. We also engaged in productive processes of generalisation in our attempts to harness the ‘spirit’ of our data, striving to identify the nub of how relationships, practices, and the rhythms of everyday life worked for all of our participants.
