Dear colleagues and students, 

In collaboration with the Digital Methods in Empirical Social Sciences Center (DiMES), we would like to cordially invite you to a workshop by Melissa Nolas (visual sociologist, London) on "Multimodal approaches to qualitative research in the social sciences" (see program below), which will take place on 2 June (10-18 hrs) in the "Lernraum" of the Department of Political and Social Sciences' library (Ihnestr. 21).

Please register for the workshop via E-mail to dominik.mattes@fu-berlin.de by 14 May.

The workshop will be capped at 20 participants max. It is primarily designed for pre and postdocs of the Department of Political and Social Sciences but we will be happy to include interested MA students, should there still be places available once the registration deadline has passed. If you are studying at the department and you would like to participate, we will put your name on the waiting list and get back to you as soon as possible.

We are looking forward to welcome you to this exciting event!

Best wishes,

Dominik Mattes & Anika König

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Multimodal approaches to qualitative research in the social sciences

The aim of this one-day, practice-based workshop is to introduce multimodal approaches to qualitative research in the social sciences through theory, hands-on experience, and group work. While text-based approaches to conducting qualitative research across the social sciences remain dominant, there has over recent years been a growing interest and movement towards research designs that incorporate creative, embodied and sensory approaches to knowledge creation, often rendered through different modes and media including images (still/moving; found/made through both analogue and digital means), sound, objects, smell, and mobile methods. 

The workshop will provide an overview of the intellectual heritage of multimodal research methods, a background that cuts across anthropology, sociology, education, gender and childhood and youth studies, and often brushes with developments in the arts, humanities, and visual culture. Special attention will be given to the contribution that the theoretical traditions of phenomenology and the focus on the senses play in shaping the theoretically languages of multimodality and the metaphors that we might draw on in order to help orient the analysis of multimodal data. 

The practice elements of the workshop consist of a series of exercises and activities throughout the day that engage the senses to start off with as well as taking students outside the classroom and introducing them to techniques such as collage for mixing modes and media. Working in pairs and small groups and using the FU campus as a ‘fieldsite’, we will collectively generate a ‘flash’ multimodal ethnography. Ethical and practical issues around working with non-textual data will also be addressed. 

The workshop is designed for all level and no prior experience is need. Participants will be supported to develop confidence in handling non-textual data and to develop non-textual ways of knowing. By the end of the workshop, participants will have a gained an understanding of multimodal approaches to qualitative research in the social sciences, how such approaches can be used for data collection, and in what ways they can approach analysis of multimodal data.

Melissa Nolas is an independent scholar and visual sociologist. She leads the Childhood Publics Research Programme and has published widely in anthropology, sociology, gender and childhood and youth studies, as well as research methods. In 2021, she co-founded and now directs the Children’s Photography Archive C.I.C. which grew out of her multimodal ethnographic research with children and her interests in archiving, collecting, and making social science public. As an editor, she is known for the journal entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography (2018-2022) an experimental, open access publishing project which she co-founded. She holds significant expertise in participatory, qualitative research methodology and ethics, including creative, inventive and visual methods, and has experience of research in majority and minority world contexts. Her public engagement and impact work span exhibitions of children’s photography, blogging, podcasts, public science writing, crowdsourcing, database activism, and working with schools. She is a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute and Emeritus Professor in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.