Drawing as Radical Multimodality: Salvaging Patrick Geddes's Material Methodology

Abstract

This essay, which is accompanied by a collective online sketchbook on the American Anthropologist website, is about drawing as a research methodology. 1 Drawing, like writing, is a craft that can be learned. It is a radical social research method, recalling the lost, undisciplined roots of research into "folk, work, place" in Britain-roots that this essay explores through the Foundations of British Sociology: The Sociological Review Archive at Keele University (Keele University 2010). Too many scholars now research "materiality" as an armchair topic. Multimodality-a young, cross-disciplinary, and still unformed aggregation of research topics, designs, methods, and methodologies-is threatened by the haste to adopt ever-new technologies. Through "slowest" practice, we can begin to understand, first, how salvaged methodologies might transform current practices and, second, how human capacities are limited, channeled, and lost in the race to innovate. Through practicing and developing material methodology, researchers can reshape dominant theories of modernity, because how we make knowledge is critical for fashioning alternative pasts, presents, and futures.

Drawing Atmosphere: A Case Study of Architectural Design for Care in Later Life

“…Despite its use by early 20th-century figures such as Patrick Geddes and the burgeoning interest in visual methods more generally, drawing has been a somewhat marginal practice in the methodological repertoire of contemporary sociologists (Hurdley et al, 2017). Its use has been relatively isolated within particular areas of sociological enquiry, such as research with children (Eldén, 2011).…”

“…This neglect of drawing as a sociological method is widespread among other cognate disciplines with the notable exception of anthropology: in particular, Tim Ingold has argued for a more ‘graphic anthropology’ (2011b: 18), in which drawing is used as a method through which to better understand and engage with the complexities of human experience (2011a). Hurdley and her colleagues argue that drawing, as both research practice and cultural material, disrupts conventional logics and ways of knowing the social: drawing, they argue, is a slow and patient method that can afford ‘a different kind of looking, even a different mode of shaping the world’ (2017: 750). Heath and colleagues similarly argue that drawing leads to a more concentrated practice of seeing than even other visual methods, because of the ‘intense, sustained and embodied engagement between the hand and the eye’ required when sketching in fieldwork settings (2018: 726).…”

“…Also, Heath and colleagues argue, sketching as a practice is a particularly apposite method for capturing the atmospheres of particular places and social encounters (Heath et al, 2018: 720). Hurdley and colleagues agree, suggesting that everyday practices of sketching can help us ‘to interpret, communicate, or share something that escapes verbal evocation’ (2017: 749). Moreover, they continue, drawing is inherently ‘democratizing’; because of its levelling qualities, sketching ‘rebalances power relations between the “expert” and the research participant’ (Hurdley et al, 2017: 749–750; see also Heath et al, 2018: 717).…”

“…Drawings are not purely images, but rather evocative things, with the potential to ‘act as a bridge between researcher and non-researchers’ (Heath et al, 2018: 717). Drawing is an ‘eclectic, sociable, and undisciplined material methodology’ that can prompt us to look more slowly and closely at our areas of study (Hurdley et al, 2017: 752).…”

“…In doing so, the drawing exemplifies an openness to how space may be used by future inhabitants, avoiding too much prescription about how the building should look or how it should perform. It is our argument that drawing, as a creative methodology, offers much scope for evoking a nuanced understanding of the intangible and emotional qualities of our social worlds (Hurdley et al, 2017).…”