Date: 02/06/2025
Mobile Methods in Social Research
When: Wednesday 2 July 2025, 13.00-14.30 online
What: The next event in the QUEST*/NCRM**/SCDTP seminar series will take place online on zoom with our usual format of three speakers on a linked theme and a discussion. Our theme is mobile methods following the promising developments in doing research with participants while ‘on the move’ in various ways – walking, swimming, and driving.
On the Move: Unpacking Mobile Methods in Qualitative Research – Insights, Strengths, and Challenges
Professor Ruth Bartlett, School of Health Sciences, University of Southampton
Ruth is a Professor in Applied Dementia Research interested in alternative care options for people living with dementia, and disability rights. She co-leads the School’s Ageing and Dementia Research Group and is national lead for the National Institute of Health and Care Research Applied Research Collaborations (ARC) Dementia Post-Doctoral Training Programme, known as DEM-COMM. Ruth is a social care researcher with experience of inclusive research methods involving people living with dementia, including diary method and go-along interviews. With colleagues in Norway where she worked for two years, she has published a synthesised review in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods on ‘Using walking/go along interviews with people in vulnerable situations.
In this talk, Ruth draws on findings from her synthesised review to explain why researchers use mobile methods in qualitative research and to highlight the strengths and drawbacks of data generation on the move.
Swimming With: Using Swim-Along Interviews to Explore Lived Experiences of Blue Spaces
Sadie Rockliffe, University of Brighton
Sadie is an ESRC South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership-funded PhD student researching the lived experiences of visually impaired people in blue spaces, with a focus on wellbeing, interdependence, and accessibility. Her work is informed by therapeutic landscape research, critical disability studies, and blue space geographies. Before beginning her PhD, she collaborated with governing bodies and local communities to co-create inclusive and accessible events.
This presentation explores swim-along interviews as a method for attending to how people with visual impairments inhabit and make meaning in blue spaces. Swimming together enables a shared orientation to movement, texture, sound, and rhythm, inviting a mode of co-presence that is affective, situated, and relational. In focusing on the method’s capacity to surface layered and contingent accounts of wellbeing, the talk reflects on how mobile research practices might more carefully attune to embodied difference and interdependence, offering possibilities for expanded, non-normative forms of encounter.
Driving together: Shared car journeys as research space
Professor Cabrielle Lynch, University of Warwick
Gabrielle is a professor of comparative politics. She has conducted research on the nature and political salience of ethnic identities, transitional justice mechanisms, elections and democratisation, and role of social media in campaigns with a particular focus on Kenya. She has a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a new project on African judges and their off-bench activities. She is co-editor of African Affairs, a member of council for the African Studies Association of the UK and British Institute in Eastern Africa, and leads the African Judiciaries Research Network. She has recently published a paper on car journeys as research space in Qualitative Research.
This paper introduces driving around with people in private cars as a research space to which different walking methods can be adapted and in which productive accidental ethnography can take place. Whether one is walking or driving together with research participant(s), one's shared mobility is key: the act and rhythm of moving together through land and sense-scapes provides prompts and insights and facilitates conversation and rapport. However, the coverage of larger distances at greater speeds in a car and the car's existence as a private space separate from the scenes and places passed through ensures that driving together is qualitatively different to walking together and that it – depending on research focus, context, and ethical and security considerations – can sometimes be more useful.
How to join
As this event is open and likely to have high demand we appreciate you signing up in advance through the NCRM Eventbrite page
Last minute joiners can connect through Zoom:
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82011823429?pwd=txMA0KeNYGDW2FwVlJiVDxVW0ljAgw.1
Meeting ID: 820 1182 3429
Passcode: 258838
