Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social

Celia Lury is Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at University of Warwick. Her substantive research interests are focused on the sociology of culture and feminist theory. She explores contemporary developments in the culture industry with a special focus on changing cultural forms. Her recent publications include the jointly authored book The Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things (Polity, 2007, with S. Lash) and the introduction to a special issue of the European Journal of Social Theory on ‘What is the empirical?’. More recently, she has become interested in the relations between methods, space and representation in the context of an exploration of the value of topology for social science.

Nina Wakeford is Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London and a visual artist. Her interests include the ways in which collaborations can be forged between social science and design, and the way in which ethnography has been put to use in the design of new technologies. She is particularly concerned with the ways in which contemporary social and cultural theory can play a part in the design process, and how aspects of practice-led disciplines can be brought back into sociology, in particular though science and technology studies. Amongst her publications are papers on virtual methodologies, queer identities, and visual representations in design work.