Ethical and Methodological Dilemmas in Social Science Interventions

This book develops an understanding of researchers' engagements with their subjects as a generative mode of knowledge production that takes place between researchers and their research fields. It promotes the idea that rather than value neutrality, caring may be helpful when a researcher makes suggestions for improvement and constructs interventions. The authors reflect on questions such as how researchers take can sides without taking a fundamental principle of action for granted. What tensions and obstacles do researchers meet while they strive to engage carefully? How do careful engagements affect academic work and output? What inequalities are produced especially when there is funding involved in the research? The contributions discuss a range of topics including responsibility (and response-ability), collaboration, proximity, ethics, bodily entanglements, values, and affective attachments in social research. The book brings together an impressive team of international researchers from different disciplines to nuance the discussion and provides a rich collection of empirical studies from healthcare, urban planning, environmental science, participatory design, and museums, among others.
This is a very topical volume for all social and behavioural scientists engaging in research, particularly those engaged in ethnographic research.

Introduction: Doing engagements and interventions with care. - Project engagement technologies and their role in shaping conditions for engagement and care in participatory design projects. - Thinking careful engagement with response-ability. - Composing telehealth: Drawing actors together to enact new relations. - To care for the possible: configuring care in the Tele dialogue project. - Researching alongside: engagements inside and outside the academic domain - a look back at participatory research on mutual aid. - Fostering inclusive technologies: being alongside care in the workplace. - Caring in precarious times: engagement as a situated discreet practice. - Encouraging Care and Allowing Space: On the Aftermath of Careful Engagement. - Into a worm(w)hole: troubling careful engagements at the museum and beyond. - CAREFUL STS INTERVENTIONS IN TRANSDISCIPLINARY ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH. - Caring for Methods: `Care-ful Method Practice through Methodography. - Practicing care-as-affect and engagement-as-critique: Careful engagement in Socio-Technical Integration Research and Video-Reflexive Ethnography. - Enactments of evidence-basing: integrating layers of care. - Caring for the bureaucracy. - A carefully engaged researcher s body. - Among bodies and machines: epistemological vulnerability with exoskeletons. - Making voices: Curating encounters with personal experiences in an exhibition space. - On being carefully useful: body(ing work) in ethnographic collaborations.