C. Smart - The Craft of Knowledge: Experiences of Living with Data

The Craft of Knowledge

Edited by

Carol Smart

The Morgan Centre, School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, UK

Jenny Hockey

Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, UK

and

Allison James

Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, UK

Selection, introduction and editorial matter Carol Smart, Jenny Hockey and Allison James 2014 Remaining chapters Respective authors 2014 Foreword Jennifer Mason 2014

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 610 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2014 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martins Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN 9781137287335

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

Cover photograph by Adrian James.

For the community of scholars from whom each of us learned
our craft of knowledge

Qualitative methods books tend to come thick and fast these days, but a book on the craft of knowledge is a rarer beast, and that is one reason why I am so delighted to see this book emerge. The book offers a timely reflection on some of the most crucial and difficult questions that we engage with when we try to generate and craft knowledge from research and scholarship.

Perhaps even more importantly though, the book captures the spirit of enthusiasm, vibrancy, and creative thinking and practice in qualitative methods that I think has characterised the field in the last couple of decades. The book puts qualitative approaches at centre stage, and in my view this could not be more timely or important. We are living in an era when institutional and governmental concerns about a supposed quantitative skills deficit in a competitive international market could come to define the methodological enterprise, were it not for the enthusiasm of researchers keen to pursue the craft of knowledge. There is quite a tide of creative, enthusiastic and innovative qualitative practice happening out there. This book reminds us why we need to continue to find inventive ways to generate resonant and evocative insights about the fascinating experience of living in our multi-dimensional world.

I think there are two distinctive things about this book, and the contributions that comprise it, that in combination make it quite unique. The first is that it does not only treat the engagement with difficult questions about crafting knowledge as an intellectual matter, in a clinical fashion (although there is plenty of intellect in it), but instead it has a real body and soul to it. It makes the craft of knowledge real, although not in a simplistic or crudely realist sense, but instead in the sense that it gets at what really matters, what really happens and what the real issues are that need our attention. Apart from anything else this makes it a very good read. But also, across the pages of the different contributions, the reader starts to really feel the messy, mesmerising and consuming reality through which insights are drawn and resonant knowledge can be created. It shows us that research, and the craft of knowledge, are lived experiences. The second distinctive thing is that the clever combination of disciplinary orientations, perspectives and epistemological conundrums that the editors have brought together in their choice of contributors, along with the sheer weight of experience that the book brings together, creates the sense for the reader of being invited into celebrated company for a significant conversation and being urged to continue the dialogue.

I think that idea of an interdisciplinary methodological conversation is a crucial one to carry us forward in the current and future research climate. We need to be genuinely interested and curious to learn about other ways of doing and seeing the methodological enterprise, so that we retain and evolve the ability to keep surprising ourselves and others with new insights. We need to keep having methodological conversations about our craft, so that we do not become overly focussed on creating ever more sophisticated silos of specialist technique, yet lose sight of the importance of resonant and authentic knowledge. To draw from my personal experience in organising conferences on the theme of Vital Signs at the University of Manchester, there is nothing better than interdisciplinary methodological conversations, often with unexpected others rather than our usual associates, to stimulate and engage research imaginations. At those conferences, an interdisciplinary group of participants, most of whom had not been brought together before, engaged in the most fascinating and stimulating of methodological conversations. These took place around themes such as Real Lives in the Street, or Senses, Evocation and Histories, or Nature and the Social or Competing Epistemologies, or Capturing the In/tangible, or Life, Death and the Virtual. The themes were distilled from the interests and agendas that the participants brought into the conversation. Indeed many of the contributors to this book contributed to those conversations, as presenters, keynote speakers or participants.

Those of us who have been around qualitative methodology for a long time know that qualitative approaches have always led the way in getting us to focus in practical ways on crucial philosophical questions about how we know, and what we can know. But the new methodological enthusiasm makes it clear that qualitatively orientated researchers are not complacent about their craft. Instead we keep having new and creative ideas about the craft of knowledge. Enthusiasm is infectious, and the whole field feels very vibrant and alive. It is thus very exciting to see this book emerge now. It captures all the enthusiasm and creativity of the qualitative research imagination and makes us pause and wonder about the nature of knowledge at a crucial time when we are facing pressures for a rather different kind of academic enterprise.