Imaginative Methodologies in the Social Sciences : Creativity, Poetics and Rhetoric in Social Research

Imaginative Methodologies in the Social Sciences develops, expands and challenges conventional social scientific methodology and language by way of literary, poetic and other alternative sources of inspiration, as sociologists, social workers, anthropologists, criminologists and psychologists all rethink, provoke and reignite social scientific methodology. Challenging the mainstream orthodoxy of social scientific methodology, which closely guards the boundaries between the social sciences and the arts and humanities, this volume reveals that authors and artists are often engaged in projects parallel to those of the social sciences and vice versa, thus demonstrating that artistic and cultural production does not necessarily constitute a specialist field, but is in fact integral to social reality. As such, it will be of interest to scholars and students in the social sciences and across the arts and humanities working on the philosophy of social science, methodology, social theory, creativity, poetics, pedagogy and other related topics.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University, Denmark, and co-editor of The Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman, Encountering the Everyday, The Transformation of Modernity, and Utopia: Social Theory and the Future. Michael S. Drake is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Hull, UK and author of Political Sociology for a Globalizing World, and Problematics of Military Power. Kieran Keohane is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at University College Cork, Ireland. He is co-author of Organization in Play, and co-editor of Irish Environmental Politics after the Communicative Turn, and The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization. Anders Petersen is Associate Professor of Sociology and Head of School at Aalborg University, Denmark and Chairman of The Danish Sociological Association. He is co-editor of The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization.