Methods Lab Is an experimental research collective co-directed by Kat Jungnickel and Melissa Nolas.
The aim is to make social research responsive to social life, to bring it alive.
Methods Lab builds a laboratory to stimulate creative debate as well as to institute examples of the ways in which the practice of sociology is changing, what social research should look like today, and how sociology can best respond to the demands of users of social research.
We do this in a range of ways: invited speakers, practice research workshops, collaborations with artists and cultural and creative groups, exhibitions and publications
Coleman, Rebecca, Jungnickel Kat and Nirmal Power (eds). 2023. How To Do Social Research With.… Goldsmiths Press. This new edited collection is collectively made by members of the Goldsmiths Sociology Department.
Back, Les and Puwar, Nirmal (eds). 2012. Live Methods, London: Wiley.
Coleman, Rebecca, Page, Tara and Palmer, Helen (eds). 2019. ‘Feminist New Materialist Practice: The Mattering of Method’, Special Issue of MAI: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture.
Hjorth, Larissa, Harris, Anne, Jungnickel, Kat and Coombs, Gretchen. 2020. Creative Practice Ethnographies, Lexington Press.
Jungnickel, Kat (ed). 2020. Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research, MIT Press. Project website
Jungnickel, Kat. 2018. Bikes and Bloomers: Victorian women inventors and their extraordinary cycle wear, Goldsmiths Press. Project website
Lammes, Sybille., Jungnickel, Kat., Hjorth, Larissa and Rae, Jen. (eds). 2023. Failurists: When research goes awry, INC Publishing. [Open access book.]
Lury, Celia and Wakeford, Nina (eds). 2012. Inventive Methods, London: Routledge.
Nolas, Sevasti-Melissa and Varvantakis, Christos. (2024) ‘Archiving through crowdsourcing’. In Rebecca Coleman, Kat Jungnickel and Nirmal Purwal (eds) How To Do Social Research With...London, Goldsmiths Press.
Nolas, Sevasti-Melissa, Varvantakis, Christos, and Aruldoss, Vinnarasan. (2023) ‘How to invent childhood publics with photo-stories’. In Tomás Criado and Adolfo Estalella (eds) An Ethnographic Inventory: Field Devices for Anthropological Inquiry. London, Routledge.
Varvantakis, Christos and Nolas, Sevasti-Melissa. (2019) ‘Metaphors we experiment with in multimodal ethnography‘, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 22(4), pp. 365-378.
Methods Lab activities link with and feed into much of the Undergraduate and Postgraduate teaching in the Sociology Department, and most especially the MA in Visual Sociology.
For more on Methods Lab, including an archive of activities pre-2019, see our linked website.