Creative research methods: rigor and joy in fieldwork and sensemaking

At Tallinn University

Credits: 3ECTS
Language: English
Participants: 25

We all want to do good research - ask complex, nuanced and important research questions and answer them in depth, with credibility and impact. But we also want to have fun with it – to love our craft and enjoy our work. Collecting and generating data about people, their relationships, practices and cultures, and making sense of it is both a research endeavor and a creative endeavor.

This course offers a rigorous yet playful approach to studying people, practices and cultures. We will explore creative and innovative yet methodologically and ethically sound approaches and techniques for studying how people make meaning on- and offline. Through hands-on exercises, discussions and lectures, you'll learn to blend imagination with analytical precision.

The course is rooted in the disciplines of anthropology, interpretative sociology, digital and visual culture studies and explores a range of creative methods, approaches and techniques for analyzing people’s practices of meaning making both on-, and offline. All of the methods, approaches and techniques we discuss share an ethnographic sensibility. We’ll cover creative methods for fieldwork and data generation, as well as for making sense of data and relating to one’s own work as a researcher. We will talk about delineating various on-, and offline fieldsites, ways of being in the field, about contextualizing the research question and operationalizing contexts for study, about studying practices, platforms, and communication not only in textual, but also audio and visual modalities. Examples of methods, tactics and approaches that we will discuss and try (hands on) are mapping, moodboarding, AI-generating, ‘getting off the porch’ and walking-for-meaning, the “buddy system” of interpretation, literary speculation etc.

Register HERE. Registration deadline is on May 18, 2025.

Contact: Eva Valdna, eva.valdna@tlu.ee

The course is organised by the Estonian Doctoral School for Social Sciences partner Tallinn University.