Textbooks
Explore our diverse range of digital textbooks designed for course adoption and recommended reading at universities and colleges. We publish over 140 textbooks across the social sciences, and an annual subscription to digital textbooks is possible via BUP Digital.
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Books: Textbooks
This final concluding chapter draws together key strands from the book. It reflects on the insights into the development of and the doing of sandboxing, both from the authors’ practice and the examples of the work of other researchers who undertake qualitative interviewing with sand, objects, and figures. It then considers how sandboxing may be taken forward in the future and invites readers to contemplate the ways in which they could adopt, adapt, and advance sandboxing in their ongoing research journeys.
This short introductory chapter serves as an outline to the book. We begin by sharing our personal sandboxing journeys, explaining how we adapted the sandboxing method from The World Technique. We reflect on the first time that we applied the sandboxing method in a research study to explore the experiences of mature undergraduates in higher education: providing a tray filled with sand and miniature figures and objects for participants to create a representation of their educational pathways, barriers, and support systems. In thinking through our intended audience and what we wanted our book to offer readers, we decided that it would be useful to sandbox our ideas. We draw on this sandbox activity to discuss the aims and objectives of the book. The chapter then offers the reader a succinct overview of the following chapters as an orientation to what is to come and what this book has to offer for readers interested in Qualitative Interviewing with Sand, Objects, and Figures.
This chapter examines adaptions to the sandboxing method at different stages of the research process. The case studies draw on research with care-experienced and adopted children and young people; staff and young people in the heritage sector; domestic abuse support workers; and children transitioning to secondary school. The chapter begins by considering the data generation stage, focusing on the introduction of water to the sand tray, the use of the sandboxing figures in different contexts such as a doll’s house, and how sandboxing figures can be modified with other materials. The chapter then reflects on the opportunities for sandboxing scenes and figures to act as tools of engagement in the dissemination of findings and in increasing impact, while at the same time retaining anonymity for participants, exploring the use of sandboxing figures and objects in published articles and short films.
This chapter begins by situating sandboxing within Indigenous practices of sand as a knowledge-producing and creating medium, rejecting the ‘coloniality of design’ that often silences the historical legacy of creativity outside of the geo-political North. It then introduces European psychoanalytical traditions and therapeutic approaches, and documents how material objects have been utilised to access the unconscious and support clients to make sense of traumatic experiences. There is an acknowledgement of how sandpits have been used in play therapy, leading to an emphasis on sand trays in Margaret Lowenfeld’s World Technique. The transference of the sand tray from therapeutic spaces to techniques of qualitative research is discussed as an introduction to sandboxing. The sandboxing method is then outlined, in terms of its equipment, and a case example of its first use in a research study briefly outlines the stages of data generation and analysis. Lastly, critical attention is given to the associated ethical considerations and the extent to which sandboxing can be seen as a participatory approach in qualitative research.
This is the essential guide to the innovative qualitative research technique of sandboxing.
Originating from play therapy, sandboxing enables children, young people and adults to create three-dimensional scenes using miniature figures and everyday objects in a sand-filled tray. Creating these sand scenes offers opportunities for individuals and groups to reflect on and represent memories, everyday experiences and ideas about the future, which are then shared and discussed.
Offering an invaluable resource for students, researchers and practitioners, this comprehensive book:
- introduces a creative and engaging approach to qualitative data generation;
- features key international case studies, real-world examples and thoughtful reflections on the method’s strengths and limitations;
- equips readers with the tools needed to effectively implement sandboxing in their research journey.
By drawing on creativity, reflexivity, ethics and expertise this book unlocks sandboxing’s potential to transform your research with an inventive and imaginative approach.
This chapter is concerned with how sandboxing has been adopted as the basis for interviews in qualitative research studies. It begins by outlining a range of case examples from studies over the past decade that illustrate the affordances, limitations, and ethical considerations of working with objects, figures, and sand. The case studies draw on research with mature students in higher education; queer Latinx men in Australia; people with intellectual disabilities; young parents; young people who have experienced debt; domestic abuse support workers; care-experienced children; children transitioning to secondary school; children whose mothers are in prison; and parentally bereaved children. It introduces studies that have combined sandboxing with other creative techniques of data generation, including body mapping, collage, diaries, drawing, and timelines; exploring the interactions between these different methods and the layering of insights into participants’ lives and experiences. The chapter also outlines some frameworks of analysis that have been applied to make sense of the data generated in studies using sandboxing. Before concluding, the chapter offers some reflections on researcher wellbeing, as while ethical protocols and situated ethics prioritise the protection of participants, the emotional impacts that researchers negotiate are not always given significant attention.
Everything in life is inextricably interconnected. Yet, there is global dominance of neoliberalism, an ideology that is fundamentally based on disconnection. We are living a contradiction, treading a tightrope between cooperation and competition, trying to reform a worldview that is fundamentally at variance with the wellbeing of humanity and the planet. This is a remarkable moment in history: never before has a political system been this successfully destructive; but never before have the ideas, knowledge and skills to build a world of sustainability, peace and justice been at our fingertips.
Crisis is a chance for change
The choices we have made have consequences that have taken life on Earth into a multiplicity of crises, shunting humanity and the natural world of which it is part to the brink of extinction. Climate change, a coronavirus pandemic, species extinction, rising sea levels, environmental degradation … are not limited by national boundaries, but reminders of our planetary interdependence, our responsibility for the health of each other and the planet. At the same time, White supremacy is expressing itself in a resurgence of a Far-Right politics of disconnection, of individualism, greed, Brexit, the nationalistic building of walls, targeting all those other than the privileged. This intersectional, neoliberal project interweaves in a tapestry of structural discrimination its threads of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, disablism … and a strange hatred of our next generation, the hope for humanity’s future! We have, quite literally, been stitched up!
The Map is not the Territory. (Bateson, 1972)
We see the world, not as it is but as we are – or as we are conditioned to see it. (Covey, 2004)
We have explored so far two elements of participatory practice that are key to transformative change and, in doing so, we have indicated that neither can achieve that potential without the third element: critical reflection. While we can start to open up the spaces for engagement with story and dialogue, to sow the seeds of individual and collective learning for change, reflection and reflexivity need to be interwoven into those elements to create the fabric of critical knowledge and thoughtful action. This cannot be an added extra but has to be integral to all we do. We can encourage people to tell their stories of lived experience and we can enter into dialogue together about what we hear, but this will remain a surface activity unless we add critical reflection for learning to happen. So, this chapter will explore what we mean by critical reflection and offer some conceptual ideas taken from critical and other theorists to help in the facilitation of critical reflection, particularly concerning power, both for ourselves and others.
At the core is the art of questioning the taken-for-granteds of everyday life and going ever deeper in that exploration through the continual cycling of reflection and action that underpins praxis and is the basis of transformation, encouraging us all to look below the surface and nurture the development of a sense of curiosity about why things are as they are.
This second edition of our book was written slightly differently from the first. Both are the product of a shared journey, influenced by the experiences of two very different lives. In this, as in the first, edition we have approached the task in the spirit of the book itself, founding our approach on dialogue, on mutuality and respect for each other’s ideas, and on an openness to a dialectical challenge, locating dissent as central to knowledge creation within a frame of ‘connected knowing’ (Belenky et al, 1997). The original book was the product of an organic, transformative process for us, a process that continued afterwards. When we were approached by Policy Press to produce a second edition we were both in very different places, geographically and temporally. This, together with the pandemic during which we were writing, posed a challenge to our previous way of working. The result is a book that reflects our two voices and our experiences since the first edition.
In the book itself, we emphasise the use of story as a way of anchoring the process of change in lived experience. True to this approach, we share aspects of our own stories with you here. A participatory approach calls for us to acknowledge the ways in which our own life experiences have shaped the ideas that we share with you, and these vignettes give you insight into critical moments that have influenced our theory and practice over the years. We met in 1992 and became firm friends, who recognised our shared values long before we recognised shared academic interests.
