This is not another methods book; it is about the very first phases of research design. This ten-module handbook focuses on the often invisible and solitary process of starting to plan a research project: namely, imagining, conceptualizing, and operationalizing your objectives. The book offers a range of Concept Work practices, including writing research imaginaries, selecting and integrating literatures, building concept maps, formulating a succinct topical description, and creating a framework of inquiry that encompasses one key overarching and several specific data-gathering questions. It teaches how to keep these elements congruent by locating them in a one-page project grid that makes the design easily revisable, accessible for collaborative work, and useful for generating proposals and grants.
What is different about this book is that it brings standard design processes together with intuitive and otherwise non-linear modes of experimenting with design element connections, such as integrating social processes and scholarly literatures into the project that would not typically be included. We call this process “scaling,” by which we mean imbricating different scholarly and empirical domains and dimensions. Our handbook’s processes of making projects multiscalar allows them to coordinate apparently noncommensurate elements within the project’s design space. Such related aspects may only be noncommensurate from a dominant, negating perspective; but are, within the politically and ethically attuned researcher’s experience and sensibility, really related aspects of lifeways and material configurations. “Scaling,” as we teach it, creates dynamic relationships between the project’s internal components (e.g, elements to study, plans for data collection) and external components (e.g., other scholars’ research, structural conditions in the world that will impact the project, the reception of the project by many audiences). As such, this handbook is a departure from standard approaches to methods and design. Through the project design process – and not ethnographic methods – we offer one way to let go of contemporary, western orderings of knowledge and instead turn toward an “otherwise anthropology.”
The core concept of multiscalar design is the object of study (OOS). The OOS is a connective tool that holds the project’s multidimensional components together. It has a dual nature: it is both the ethnographic focus (material) and the device used to scale the different parts of the project (conceptual). It is usually made up of a two-to-three word phrase that fundamentally organizes the theoretically and ethnographically obvious as well as intuitive, counterintuitive, and noncommensurate relationships between all the project parts. All in all, the OOS is a theory and data gathering facilitating hub for all the project parts. As such, it is the foundational device used to create multiscalar ethnographic insights into broader theoretical realms. A multiscalar project with a robust OOS that holds related and seemingly unrelated things together fosters the discovery of project significance because it enables new researchable questions to be asked about things that already exist. This opens the door to unique thinking, ideas, and problem solving. The OOS fosters the significance of the project, enabling its theory-making as well as scientific, social-cultural, artistic, and political importance.
The book also provides ways to help researchers engage in early design processes in a collective setting, and to do so in a manner that foregrounds researcher self-care and ethical considerations for the social liberatory possibilities that multiscalar knowledge production can foster. This brings into view the sensible understanding that self-nurturing and compassion for our own and others’ research processes will lead the way to deep insights and care for intellectual communities within broader social worlds.