- Title
- Sociology's archive: mass-observation as a site of speculative research
- Creator
- Adkins, Lisa
- Relation
- Speculative Research: The Lure of Possible Futures p. 117-129
- Relation
- https://www.routledge.com/Speculative-Research-The-Lure-of-Possible-Futures/Wilkie-Savransky-Rosengarten/p/book/9781138688360
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- This chapter takes up the call, laid out in the introduction to this volume, to develop alternative approaches and sensibilities to take futures seriously - 'as possibilities that demand new habits and practices of attention, invention and experimentation'. Perhaps paradoxically, it does so in relation to the past and more specifically in regard to recordings of the past. It suggests that for sociologists, the past as much as the present must be understood to stand as a site for the development of alternative approaches to the future, and this is especially the case for the data sources or recordings of social life on which sociologists regularly rely to mobilize and activate the past. This chapter amounts to a call for adopting a set of alternative practices and sensibilities to such recordings which are attuned not to the 'pastness' of the data - an orientation which inevitably produces diachronic sociological accounts - but instead are attuned to the capacities of recorded data itself. Such attention, this chapter will maintain, will produce not a 'better' historical sociology, or a synchronic account designed to trump or outplay diachronic accounts, but instead an account which allows time itself to emerge as a key object of investigation. That is, such a sensibility will allow time to emerge not as a backdrop or setting for recorded data, but as part of the very data that is recorded. In as much as speculative research demands that attentiveness be paid to the relations of time, and especially to the question of futures, this chapter posits that such a sensibility contributes to the fostering of such a speculative research agenda. This is so not least because. it allows a form of time to emerge which is not over or complete and stands in a chronological order or sequence ready for comparisons with the present and/or potential futures, but instead is incomplete, not-yet known, and stands in a possible or not yet relationship to the future and to the presents it inhabits.
- Subject
- sociology; mass-observation; speculative research; past
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1399237
- Identifier
- uon:34566
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781138688360
- Language
- eng
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