A Manifesto for Live Methods: Provocations and Capacities

In this manifesto for live methods the key arguments of the volume are summarized in eleven propositions. We offer eleven provocations to highlight potential new capacities for how we do sociology. The argument for a more artful and crafty approach to sociological research embraces new technological opportunities while expanding the attentiveness of researchers. We identify a set of practices available to us as sociologists from the heterodox histories of the tradition as well as from current collaborations and cross-disciplinary exchanges. The question of value is not set apart from the eleven points we raise in the manifesto. Additionally, we are concerned with how the culture of audit and assessment within universities is impacting on sociological research. Despite the institutional threats to sociology we emphasize the discipline is well placed in our current moment to develop creative, public and novel modes of doing imaginative and critical sociological research.

[1]  Celia Lury,et al.  Introduction: what is the empirical? , 2009 .

[2]  N. Hubble Imagism, Realism, Surrealism: Middlebrow Transformations in the Mass-Observation Project , 2012 .

[3]  W. Benjamin The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire , 2006 .

[4]  P. Bourdieu,et al.  Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2 , 2003 .

[5]  M. Savage Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method , 2010 .

[6]  A. Small The Era of Sociology , 1895, American Journal of Sociology.

[7]  C. Renwick British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots: A History of Futures Past , 2012 .

[8]  J. Urry,et al.  Enacting the social , 2004 .

[9]  Rey Chow,et al.  Ethics after idealism , 1998 .

[10]  P. Connerton,et al.  How Modernity Forgets , 2009 .

[11]  B. Latour An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto” , 2010, New Literary History.

[12]  Mike Savage,et al.  Contemporary Sociology and the Challenge of Descriptive Assemblage , 2009 .

[13]  Sally Munt Heroic Desire: Lesbian Identity and Cultural Space , 1998 .

[14]  W. Dickson The art of listening. , 1979, Pharmacy management combined with the American journal of pharmacy : PM.

[15]  Roger Burrows,et al.  The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology , 2007, Sociology.

[16]  M. Burawoy For Public Sociology , 2005 .

[17]  I. Stengers,et al.  The cosmopolitical proposal , 2013 .

[18]  Roger Burrows,et al.  Living with the H-Index? Metric Assemblages in the Contemporary Academy , 2012 .

[19]  V. Das Life And Words , 2006 .

[20]  Nirmal Puwar mediations on making Aaj Kaal , 2012 .

[21]  C. Renwick British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots , 2012 .

[22]  B. Langer,et al.  The Practice of Everyday Life , 2019, Forms of Thinking in Leopardi’s Zibaldone.

[23]  Celia Lury,et al.  What Is the Empirical , 2009 .

[24]  E. Said The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals , 2008 .