Alan

• Name: Alan Latham
• Affiliation: Professor of Human Geography, UCL

Procedural starting point

The way I described my methods or process in my last funding application was: I described using a range of #qualitative and #observational methods, these included #interviews

I start with a problem that seems important to me.
Sometimes this is less a problem and more a puzzle (or a combination of both).
Because I am a social scientist often I notice something (say an event, or something novel that has suddenly showed up in my immediate environment) and wonder what other social scientists are saying about that thing.
If what people are saying does not seem to adequately address the problem or puzzle I’ve noticed, I start to think how I might go about understanding it.
Thinking about what I can do is based around the research techniques I know about, have used in the past.
These methods also implicitly

What I actually did was / what I usually do is: What I actually do is looser and more #improvised

My previous experience between 'academic' and 'artistic' work:

I collaborated with an artist on a number of projects a few years ago. It was energising to work together, but also kind of challenging as we had quite different aims. We generated a whole range of interesting possible questions. Our approach to these questions was different. I wanted to do more research and find something like the answers to the questions. The artist wanted to produce some art. The art was good – engaging and so on. Working with the artists also generated some distinctive research questions. It did not necessarily get me closer to working through the research questions Which after a while felt a little frustrating, as ultimately I want to try and answer (or address) my research questions.