Creative Writing for Social Research: A Practical Guide

This groundbreaking book brings creative writing to social research. Its innovative format includes creatively written contributions by researchers from a range of disciplines, modelling the techniques outlined by the authors. The book is user-friendly and shows readers:

• how to write creatively as a social researcher;

• how creative writing can help researchers to work with participants and generate data;

• how researchers can use creative writing to analyse data and communicate findings.

Inviting beginners and more experienced researchers to explore new ways of writing, this book introduces readers to creatively written research in a variety of formats including plays and poems, videos and comics. It not only gives social researchers permission to write creatively but also shows them how to do so.

Richard Phillips is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield. He is a specialist in creative and arts-led research methodologies, which he practises in his own work and encourages students to try in the field trips he leads in cities from Liverpool to New York. Richard’s books include Georges Perec’s Geographies (2019), Fieldwork for Human Geography (2012), Sex, Politics and Empire (1996), and Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (1997).

Editor of the Creative Research Methods in Practice book series Helen Kara is a leading independent researcher, author, teacher and speaker specialising in research methods, particularly creative methods, and research ethics. With over twenty years’ experience as an independent researcher Helen now teaches doctoral students and staff at higher education institutions worldwide. She is a prolific academic author with over 25 titles and 3000 citations; notably Creative Research Methods: A Practical Guide in its second edition and Research and Evaluation for Busy Students and Practitioners in its third. Besides her regular blogs and videos, she also writes comics and fiction. Helen is an Affiliate at Swansea University, a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. In 2021, at the age of 56, she was diagnosed autistic. Her neurodivergence explains her lifelong fascination with, and ability to focus on, words, language and writing.