Hurdley, Rachel, Biddulph, Mike, Backhaus, Vincent, Hipwood, Tara, and Hossain, Rumana (2017) Drawing as radical multimodality: salvaging Patrick Geddes's material methodology. American Anthropologist, 119 (4). pp. 748-753.

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Abstract

[Extract] This essay, which is accompanied by a collective online sketchbook on the American Anthropologist website, is about drawing as a research methodology.1 Drawing, like writing, is a craft that can be learned. It is a radical social research method, recalling the lost, undisciplined roots of research into "folk, work, place" in Britain—roots that this essay explores through the Foundations of British Sociology: The Sociological Review Archive at Keele University (Keele University 2010). Too many scholars now research "materiality" as an armchair topic. Multimodality—a young, cross‐disciplinary, and still unformed aggregation of research topics, designs, methods, and methodologies—is threatened by the haste to adopt ever‐new technologies. Through "slowest" practice, we can begin to understand, first, how salvaged methodologies might transform current practices and, second, how human capacities are limited, channeled, and lost in the race to innovate. Through practicing and developing material methodology, researchers can reshape dominant theories of modernity, because how we make knowledge is critical for fashioning alternative pasts, presents, and futures.

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