Tickets now live!

Join Anuja Cabraal, Daniel Turner and Christina Silver for two days exploring creative, tactile and reflexive ways of working with qualitative materials. This workshop encourages you to go beyond reading transcripts and common analytical techniques to enact embodied approaches that bring life back to your data.

Through hands-on exercises and experiences, together we will challenge and expand how we interpret qualitative data, drawing on a broad range of senses. Playing with sound, light, touch and even taste we will learn to be more faithful to the stories of both participants and researchers.

Programme:
We begin the workshop with welcomes and introductions, so everyone can get to know one another, and share why we’re here and what we all hope to get out of the two days. This includes setting the scene around what working qualitatively means in our different contexts, the kinds of qualitative materials we work with, how we think and go about interpreting them, and what it means to make the most of our senses in qualitative analysis.

Throughout the two days we build on these themes in a series of sessions that include hands-on exercises and experiences drawing on and expanding on our understandings of a broad range of senses. Some sessions will recur, others will be one-off, and there will be lots of opportunities for reflection, discussion and what we call ‘qualitative fun’ - all in the pursuit of rigour in methods.

Here are just a few of the sessions we have planned:

Bringing findings back into the real world
Qualitative data is powerful, beautiful and rich. But often the necessities of analysis and writing-up confine it to the written word on a digital screen. In this session, we invite you to take your own data, or data extracts from our ‘bank’ of qualitative data: poems, audio, movie clips, and bring it back to life. Choose a section or some key participant words, and bring them back to life, using physical materials that help us remember the depth and embedded experience of data, by bringing them out of the computer and back into the real world.

Creating Creativity in Coding
Coding is the bedrock of many approaches to qualitative analysis but it’s not a uniform activity - it means different things in different contexts and there are many ways it can happen. We’ll start off taking inspiration from real-life, thinking about everyday activities we engage in that are forms of ‘coding’ and discussing how sorting and categorizing in day-to-day life is something we learn from an early age. We’ll then use a series of analogies to expand our creative thinking about coding, and different physical props to awaken our senses in how we can imagine coding differently.

Chocolate Tasting
Tastings can provide deep insights into the role and influence we as researchers have during the research process, as well as research outcomes. From interpretation, to story telling and choice of language and words used, to how our epistemology, ontology and theoretical perspectives influence and affect the research, to us, the researcher as an instrument and how we shape and the research process. We will have a chocolate tasting option (with dairy and gluten free chocolates) encouraging us to explore our taste senses, and how we apply language to our experiences. This will also connect with the optional wine tasting over dinner.

Art Fieldwork
The group will take a short field-trip to the National Gallery of Scotland, to examine and reflect on three connected artworks, looking for common themes and differences, much as we would for qualitative data. This will be done in group session for two of the paintings, and individually in silence for the last. We will take our notes and discussion back to the workshop to reflect on our different interpretations, how we communicate and represent them, and how we interpreted them differently when together or apart.

Dinner
On the Thursday night, we will have a 3 course dinner at David Bann, a high-end vegetarian restaurant (with options for other dietary preferences). This will include a mystery taster dessert platter, with diners encouraged to guess the ingredients, flavours and textures. There is also the optional extra of a wine tasting session (alcohol) with food parings (additional cost).

And many more! Including:

Emoji as a tool for analysis

Building with Lego

Music

Writing sessions

This is a unique and collaborative session for a small group of qualitative researchers, so book as soon as you can! Tickets are just £380 or £320 for students.

Tickets are now available with the 'Buy Tickets' button above , or email [email protected] for more info!

We make fun and interactive experiences designed to help you advance your qualitative research