Below is the content from two presentations from the event from Gayle Letherby and Julie Parsons, conference co-organisers.
Stories of and from solitude: examples of sociological fiction as a way of working within, besides and beyond the academy
By Gayle Letherby
Gayle’s video contains a Power Point accompanied by some audio clips of her speaking:
One of the delegates from the conference has written a response to the poem that Gayle reads at 18:16. See delegates’ comments below:
“How’s your week been?” Reflections on the use of texts, emails and phone-calls as methods of data collection during the COVID-19 lockdown.
By Julie Parsons
This video features Julie’s slides from the conference:
Below are some extra words from Julie:
In this presentation I reflect on methodological issues arising from a British Academy Covid-19 research grant, ‘finishing time at a distance: an exploration of support mechanisms for socio-economically disadvantaged and criminalised individuals during the Covid-19 crisis and beyond.’ The research has been conducted with LandWorks CIO (LWC), a resettlement charity that provides a supported route into employment and community for prisoners and people on community sentences (collectively called trainees), many of whom are socio-economically disadvantaged in terms of employment, housing and health indicators.
Since lockdown LWC have maintained and/or re-established relationships with former trainees and this research follows some of their journeys between September 2020 and March 2021. In the absence of face-to-face support for those released into the community after punishment, the research explores the ways in which the research has engaged with individuals through the exchange of weekly texts, images and phone calls to a mobile phone number specifically set up for this purpose, which have then been used to inform semi-structured interviews.
The research utilises a modified ‘photo-voice’ technique originally developed as a community-based participatory action research (PAR) method, intended to give a ‘voice’ to participants, as well as photo dialogue/elicitation techniques during semi-structured interviews. Incorporating creative/art-based resources within the research process is important as it promotes dialogue and storytelling. To date fifteen people have engaged in a modified photo-voice activity documenting their covid-19 experience(s). I report here on some of the benefits and dis/benefits of using non face-to-face approaches to research.
Read more about the PeN project:
https://penprojectlandworks.org/category/quentin/
https://penprojectlandworks.org/category/lee/
https://penprojectlandworks.org/category/jarvis/