We are looking for a volunteer to attend the International Creative Research Methods Conference online and help to manage and moderate the chat. In return for this work, we will provide a free ticket to the online conference.

We are specifically seeking an individual with prior experience of moderating and managing online conference chats or similar digital events. Confidence in managing discussions, responding to participants, liaising with the people coordinating the online event from the venue, and supporting smooth online delivery is essential. You will be working with a second volunteer, already recruited, who is very capable but not experienced.

There is a keynote at the start of each day, followed by two parallel streams; you will need to decide between you who will attend which sessions so that all are covered. The full programme can be found here. It is essential that you are available for both full days (Monday 7th and Tuesday 8th September 2026) to ensure complete coverage across all sessions.

If you would like to apply for this opportunity, please create a Word document confirming that you can work in the BST time zone and will be available for the entire conference. You should also outline your relevant experience moderating or managing online events and explain why we should select you (in no more than 200 words).

Please send your application to enquiries@creativeresearchmethods.com by midnight on Friday 10th July 2026. We look forward to hearing from you!

Like many, many others, I met Raul on Twitter some time around 2010. Social media was Raul’s natural habitat; it could have been made for him with his burning desire to communicate and demystify. Later we communicated via Facebook and Instagram, until I gave up almost all things Meta in 2019 (I’m reluctantly still on WhatsApp; no idea why everyone doesn’t move to Signal, it’s so similar to use and much less unethical). And we emailed. Not often, not at length, mostly to share resources. Raul was endlessly frustrated by difficulties in accessing academic materials, because of paywalls and because many publishers won’t ship books to Mexico. I was able to help him by emailing PDFs and occasionally sending books.

Raul’s big passion was justice, particularly around water, public policy, and governance. Those are not my areas of expertise or scholarship, but our interests coincided around methods and ethics. And here he has left us a marvellous legacy, in his voluminous blog and his published work. The strapline for his blog is “Understanding and solving intractable resource governance problems” but he couldn’t resist also working to understand and solve all sorts of scholars’ and researchers’ problems with academic and research processes.

I tracked down his published work via Google Scholar where I was shocked to see how little his work has been cited. He was so visible that I was expecting to see tens of thousands of citations. In a beautiful ‘in memoriam’ post by Raul’s friend Jo VanEvery, she suggests that one of the best things we can do in his memory is to read and cite scholars from the majority world. I endorse Jo’s suggestion 100%, and would add that citing Raul’s own work should be part of this. He wrote about methods for the open access International Journal of Qualitative Methods, and about teaching in various book chapters and encyclopaedia entries. Here are his key methods texts, all open access:

2018: with Kate Parizeau, article on the opportunities and challenges of doing ethnography with vulnerable populations

2018: open access editorial showcasing six writing books to improve your qualitative methods prose

2019: open access editorial on why and how to write fieldnotes

I will be using and citing these works, and I feel ashamed that I have not already done so.

But for Raul it was never just about the work or the public persona. He brought his whole self to social media, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish. We don’t often speak of love in professional scholarly circles, but it seems to me that love underpinned all of Raul’s life and work. When I was looking through our email correspondence, I found a message he sent me in early April 2020, when my mother had just died from Covid. Raul and I knew each other; I feel confident in saying we liked and respected each other; but we never met and we were not close. And yet, at a time when all the world was shocked and afraid, he made the effort to send me this kind and loving message.

To me, these heartfelt words seem like the essence of Raul. I have seen similar posts elsewhere in recent days, which makes me realise that as well as his tangible legacy of written work, he has also left us a wonderful bequest of kindness.

There is an ongoing debate about kindness, and the lack of it, in scholarly life. I have written about this myself. Through the ways he chose to live, work, and communicate, Raul exemplified kindness, in academia and beyond. So I think another way we can honour his memory is to spread and amplify that kindness in our own lives, work, and communications with others. And maybe even, here and there, some love.

I am delighted to announce that I have been awarded funding from the Arts Council to work with Kate Fox to offer (deep breath) creative writing opportunities for late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults. That was the official wording on the bid, and what it means in practice is that we’re offering online and in-person workshops for neurodivergent people to have a go at creative writing.

You get to decide whether you’re neurodivergent and, if so, whether your official or self-diagnosis was late. You must be 18 or over and be able to write in English. Other than that, you don’t need any specific writing experience or skills, just an interest in creative writing and a willingness to give it a try and have fun. We will be including prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction, dialogue and even opportunities to incorporate drawing or images for those who wish. We are also likely to include neurodivergent forms including zuihitsu, language as stimming, the links between biodiversity and neurodiversity, neuroqueering forms, and generally exploring neurodivergent self-acceptance through creative writing and reading.

The in-person workshops are at Heath House in Uttoxeter on Tuesday 22 September, and at Cheese & Grain in Frome on Thursday 24 September, from 10-4.30. Our funding is enough to subsidise the workshops quite heavily, so the charges are between £30-£60 – you decide how much you can pay within that range.

The online workshops are on Zoom, on Sundays from 27 September to 1 November from 3-4.30 pm BST/GMT. Again, these are heavily subsidised, so the charges for all six workshops are between £30 and £95 – you decide how much you can pay within that range. We are only accepting applications to attend all six workshops; it is not possible to sign up for just one or two workshops.

In excellent news, there are two bursaries for each of the three workshop options. These bursaries only cover the cost of the workshop, so for an in-person workshop you would need to cover any other costs such as travel and accommodation.

Places on our workshops are limited; click here if you want to book.

(We’re also running a residential version at Lumb Bank, the Arvon Foundation’s house near Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire, but that one sold out before I got around to writing this.)

The funding isn’t only for the workshops. We are going to evaluate those thoroughly, then use our findings to produce a draft toolkit for writing facilitators who are, or may be, working with neurodivergent writers. We will pilot that toolkit with staff at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, Norfolk, and then finalise it and share.

I’m so excited about this project! It’s different from anything I’ve done before, yet it draws on a lot of my experiences and skills. My experiences and skills, and Kate’s, are complementary and I’m delighted to be working with her.

If you have any questions, you can either leave me a comment below or email ahappyplace.enquiries@gmail.com.

A few weeks ago I received a mysterious parcel. When I opened it, I found a book called Making Qualitative Research Happen: Getting The Best Out Of Your Qualitative Research Project, edited by Jess Weisser, Cathy Gibbons, and Daniel Turner. I know Daniel quite well, and Cathy a little, and I thought it very kind of them to send me a copy of their book. Until I scanned the contents pages, I had completely forgotten that I wrote a couple of its sections myself!

I wrote the sections on creative research methods and on collaboration, data analysis, and ethics. I’m in good company, too, as other contributors include Mónica Sánchez-Hernández on colonialism, coloniality and decolonising approaches in research, and academic extractivism and exploitation; Christina Silver on what’s occurring in the qual-AI space and why it matters; Kimberley Hirsh on when to use a priori coding; and Anuja Cabraal on using emojis for coding and analysis. But Jess, Cathy, and Daniel wrote most of this 373-page book, and that is a laudable achievement. They are all very experienced qualitative researchers, and experienced teachers of other qualitative researchers, and their wealth of experience and knowledge enriches every page.

The book is written in a friendly style and lightly referenced, and so is very readable. It is comprehensive, too, with sections on epistemology and meta issues, designing and planning research, gathering data, managing and handling data, analysing and transforming data, and writing and reporting findings and research. The structure and contents are well signposted, and there is a useful index, so it’s easy to dip in and out of to read the parts you need or which interest you most. And the chapter on qualitative research and AI brings the book bang up to date.

I was interested to read, on the QDAS website, that Christina Silver’s position on the use of generative AI in research is different from Daniel Turner’s. I wasn’t surprised, though, because I know Daniel to be open-minded and interested in viewpoints that are different from his own. I think this is exemplary book editing practice, because books where all contributors share the same views would soon become boring to read. Also, the book is very competitively priced, with the paperback plus eBook at £30 and the eBook alone at only £8.

But perhaps most importantly, this book acknowledges the challenges qualitative researchers may face as well as giving invaluable advice on the process of qualitative research. I wish I had had this book when I started my MSc in social research methods in 1999 – though some of the content would have read like science fiction back then!

Of course Making Qualitative Research Happen doesn’t include every single thing about qualitative research. That would be impossible because there is too much to cover and the field is always developing. However, the back cover describes it as ‘everything you need to get started with qualitative research’ and I think that is no exaggeration. This book is a very clear and useful companion for anyone who is new to, or would like to know more about, qualitative research in practice.

It is no secret that the university sector in the UK is experiencing a massive financial crisis. I guess this is why I’m getting new requests to work for universities for nothing. I wrote a post about this 11 years ago, after which the situation got a lot better for a while. I’m not suggesting my post caused that: there was a lot of chat about the issue on Twitter and Facebook, which were useful platforms in those days, and sympathetic academics helped to make the change. But now it’s happening again.

One recent request was from a Russell Group university which made a post-tax surplus of £35m in 2025. This was a lot lower than its 2024 surplus, and I do understand that businesses have to be careful with their money. But it is still THIRTY-FIVE MILLION POUNDS. My own most recent post-tax surplus is £14,545. So what makes it OK for that big and profitable business to ask me to contribute my expertise, which is based on 27 years of research experience and 15 years of scholarly experience, for free?

Of course it’s not actually a university asking me, it’s a person. I don’t blame individuals for trying to find good opportunities for their students, events, colleagues etc. But it is the university which would be paying me (or not, as the case may be). And people in universities need to remember that they represent an organisation which is often, despite its protestations, very wealthy.

If I am invited to work in a university, that means there is nobody on that university’s payroll who can do whatever it is I am being invited to do. The same, no doubt, applies to plumbers, roofers, landscapers, and so on. Do universities ask those professionals to work for nothing? Of course they don’t. So why is it somehow, apparently, once again OK to ask external knowledge professionals to work for nothing?

Fortunately there are still universities which are paying me to work for them. So far this year I have worked for Dublin City University, Nottingham Trent University, Bath Spa University, Ulster University (twice), and Queens University Belfast. I have had an enquiry about my availability for 2026-27 from Birmingham City University, where I have worked every year since 2016, and Brunel University invited me to work there but unfortunately that was on a date I couldn’t do.

Also, I get good feedback. Here are some examples from a creative academic writing workshop I ran at Ulster University in April (I have permission to share them):

Very useful for writers – but also just that the speaker was brilliant and inclusive.

This has been the most beneficial workshop / event I’ve been to since I started in September – it was as if Helen was able to climb inside my head and activate the ‘WRITE’ lever!

I’ve really struggled to get the creative & the academic writing as I couldn’t separate them – and yesterday really was a golden pathway that showed how I write IS good enough. I wrote more yesterday than I have from when I started my PhD in September.

Would appreciate taking points from Helen on how to make workshops more inclusive/accessible. She elegantly addresses them without disrupting the flow of the class nor does it feel like she has to do them out of training.

So it’s not just me saying my work has value.

I will and do work for nothing, but I reserve that for (a) user-led groups with no funding and (b) my own passion projects: the International Creative Research Methods Conference, the Journal of Creative Research Methods, and the Independent Research Ethics Committee.

It seems important to highlight this, not only for my own sake, but also for the sake of the increasing number of independent researchers and scholars. Expertise has value. This means we need to set sensible prices for our own expertise, and – where necessary – fight for our expertise to be valued equally by others.

I have written four previous posts on this topic, with different examples of creative theses and dissertations. Here are the first, second, third, and fourth of those posts.

Today I am showcasing: a thesis written in two different styles throughout; another which takes a multi-media approach; and a third which has been self-published as an open access comic. As a bonus, I will share a creative recording of a doctoral dissertation and its defence.

The thesis written in two different styles is by Anne Collis whose doctorate was in social policy and inclusion, with a focus on how to include people with learning disabilities in policy-making in Wales. Anne’s thesis is written in a reasonably conventional way, except that she also writes an ‘Alongsider Thesis’. This is a plain English version which is presented in the PDF of the thesis alongside the academic version. Close to the start of the Alongsider Thesis, Anne says:

“This thesis has two versions alongside each other.

• The right hand pages are written in Academic language.
• The left hand pages are written in Everyday language.

You can read just the Everyday pages to get an idea of what is in the thesis. You can start with the Everyday pages and then look across to get more details any time you want.

If you read Academic, you can read just the Academic pages. You can use the Everyday pages to make it quicker to read any parts of the thesis you aren’t so interested in. I hope some academics will get ideas by looking at the Everyday pages for ways they can try to share what they know.”

As Anne’s thesis is all about inclusivity, this creative approach makes perfect sense.

The multi-media thesis is by Elona Hoover whose doctorate was in Human Geography with a focus on urban ‘commoning projects’ in London and Paris. Elona is a musician; she plays the cello. Her thesis includes an experimentally written document, punctuated by five ‘samples’ and accompanied by a soundtrack. The written document uses a variety of fonts for different purposes: one for an ethnographic narrative, another for text taken directly from fieldnotes, a third for excerpts from documents, a fourth for quotes from interviews, and a fifth for notes for the reader, among others. The ‘samples’ are audio samples: sampling is a compositional technique that can be ironic, inclusive, and playful, among other things. And the soundtrack includes material from field recordings, Elona’s cello, people reading poems, and the sounds of turning on and off the microphone. In the PDF of the thesis, the soundtrack and samples are embedded audio files. There are invitations to the reader with each audio file, either to stop reading while listening or to listen while continuing to read. The author uses this multifaceted approach to reflect the complexity of communing with all its interpersonal, political, and conceptual interactions.

The thesis which was self-published as a comic is by Omar Bah, which is a pseudonym. The author is an African anthropologist who studied international development with a focus on expatriate aid workers who are known in some African languages as Mzungus. Omar’s PhD ‘tells stories of Mzungus and goals that were never reached’ and apparently no academic journal agreed to publish any part of it (Omar, if you’re reading this, please try the new Journal of Creative Research Methods). So Omar decided to self-publish his thesis – as an online comic, in two parts: first and second. It is a great read: insightful, uncomfortable, educational, funny, and worth the investment of time.

Vanessa Santos did a PhD in tourism with a focus on sustainability. She produced a video called ‘My Doctoral Viva’ which presents her doctoral dissertation through autoethnotheatre. In the associated text she describes her research as advocating “for context-sensitive, adaptive, experimental policymaking that balances economic growth with social sustainability, emphasizing a human-centered approach to tourism development”. The video is compelling to watch, and I’m delighted that Vanessa is coming to this year’s International Creative Research Methods Conference to present and discuss her work.

We know from social media that the immediate impact of the International Creative Research Methods Conference is always very positive. You can see some recent examples on the website (scroll down) with links to their sources for verification. But now that the conference is in its fourth year, we are beginning to see some of the longer-term impacts.

At our first conference, in 2023, academic Heather Bullen met artist Jean McEwan and they generated an idea for a collaborative zine-making project for women asylum seekers and refugees in Liverpool. They got funding from Research England via the University of Liverpool. Through local charity Asylum Link Merseyside (ALM), they gathered a group of women, focused on them as artists, and helped them to use their artwork to build resilience. ALM launched the zine on 27 June 2024 and it was reported in the Liverpool Echo.

Independent researchers Rowena Hay and Fran Harkness met at the second conference in 2024. That autumn they set up the Mighty Mini Research Collective, a peer support group for independent researchers which is going from strength to strength. They have an active group on LinkedIn with 200 members, and this year they are holding their first event, an unconference in Stockport, Manchester, on 16 June 2026. All independent researchers are welcome and tickets are available until 5 June.

Our third conference in 2025 was attended by Anita Barrand who is a Community Engagement Officer in the Centre for Ethnic Health Research at the University of Leicester. Although she is based in a university centre, Anita is not an academic herself, she is a creative professional and a researcher. She told me that the conference inspired ideas for her work on a study investigating ways to empower care home and home care staff through research. This study is part of the National Institutes for Health Research Applied Research Collaboration in the East Midlands. Anita’s study is called Living Labs for Care (LiLaC) and has tested creative research methods in two care homes. Fabric printmaking was used with international care home staff, and cultural food and recipes were used with staff at an Asian-led care home, to explain the stages of research. These creative methods helped to connect a diverse group of people with the research process.

The Binks Hub is a network of academics, community members, artists and policy-makers, based at the University of Edinburgh, who use creativity and the arts to co-create research for social change. In 2024 The Binks Hub was a sponsor of ICRMC, and several of their members attended the conference: Jimmy Turner (Binks Hub Research Fellow), artist and doctoral student Rhiannon Bull, comedian and writer Susan Morrison, and artist Jean McEwan (who we have already met earlier in this post). They ran a workshop to share some working drafts of a book they were creating: A Field Guide to Artist-Researcher Collaborations. That book was published open access in March 2026 and I cannot recommend it highly enough. There is also a booklet of activities you can download. Jimmy told me,

“The opportunity to workshop some work-in-progress material for our book at the 2024 International Creative Research Methods Conference was invaluable. We had just completed the workshops we had run with the artists who would become our co-authors, so for the conference workshop we drafted up some plans of chapters and creative activities to share with our participants. Sharing at a conference like this, which brings together experienced creative methods researchers, artists, and folk who were taking their first steps into creative methods research, meant we were able to identify any gaps and assess whether the approach we were developing would be helpful.”

Then of course there is the Journal of Creative Research Methods. Sadly this is not fully open access at present, as the publisher has not yet been able to secure funding for that, but some articles are open access and we hope that in time we will be able to find funding to make it all OA. The journal and the conference are closely linked. The existence and popularity of the conference helped Bristol University Press decide to take on the journal. Many of the articles in the first two issues were created by people who had been to the conference. The journal was launched at the conference in 2025 (there were cupcakes!) and is now receiving a steady stream of submissions. And the journal editors and board members scrutinise the conference programme for potential article creators. (I say ‘creators’ rather than ‘writers’ because we welcome conventional formats with creative elements, such as a research article including illustrative sketches or audio files, as well as creative formats, such as a research article produced as a video or written as a comic.)

I’m sure there is lots of other impact I don’t know about. If you have stories, please share! I didn’t see this coming – I didn’t think so far ahead – I just knew the creative research methods community needed a place to come together. So it is truly heartening for the organising team to see the conference having such a positive impact.

If you are a writer, or any other kind of arts practitioner, no doubt you will have had submissions rejected. Probably many, many submissions. Actors fail auditions; painters have submissions rejected by exhibitions; writers’ work is rejected by journal editors, reviewers, publishers, literary agents etc; and so on. We talk a lot about the pain of being rejected and how to deal with that. Some people compile a ‘shadow CV’ listing their rejections, others print out their rejections and stick them to a wall, and some take a more personal approach. I know one fiction writer who, every time she receives a rejection, buys herself a new piece of good quality underwear. She still doesn’t have a novel published but her knicker drawer is in great shape.

There is plenty of advice online for managing rejection, but I haven’t seen much about the difficulty of turning people’s hard work down. I have rejected journal articles, book proposals, research methods case studies, book chapter proposals, conference submissions, and probably other things as well. I try to do this with compassion and care, though on at least one occasion I cringe to remember (and no doubt more besides) I have not lived up to the high standards I aim for.

As so often with us humans, emotions can get in the way. These may include:

• Disappointment – an intriguing title or premise, and/or a known and respected author, can raise expectations which are not always met.
• Anxiety – for an anonymous author, what if my rejection of their work harms their mental health? For a known author, will my rejection of their work harm my relationship with them? Could they ruin my professional relationship in turn?
• Frustration – this can be generated by a good submission which either doesn’t follow the guidelines, or is not quite as good as a better submission on the same topic, and so has to be rejected. Or by a submission so bad you wonder what the author was thinking.
• Stress – when life feels as if demands are coming at you from all sides, it can be hard to muster the care and compassion needed to produce a kind rejection.

Another thing that can get in the way is time pressure. Care and compassion, for ourselves and for others, takes time. And we need to practice care and compassion for ourselves before we can practice it for others. We need time to process our emotions – our disappointment, anxiety, frustration and stress. Do you allow yourself that time? Or do you eat/drink/smoke/shop your feelings into submission and carry on chasing deadlines?

In today’s super-speedy world, it can be difficult to prioritise ourselves. But if we don’t prioritise ourselves, others are less likely to prioritise us, and we are less likely to prioritise others. This leads to a vicious circle of increasing emotional scarcity which is not healthy for anyone. My Australian colleague Narelle Lemon edits a solution-focused book series on Wellbeing and Self-care in Higher Education which contains a wealth of advice and support for anyone struggling with this, or just wanting to do it better.

So when you’re reviewing something that is going to need rejecting, deal with your own feelings first, because it does take a toll. Give yourself the time and space you need to process those feelings. Then think about how to frame the rejection in a careful, compassionate way. Are there any aspects of the work you can praise? Where improvements are needed, can you offer advice on how to make those improvements? Do you know of any useful references you could recommend? Can you add some encouragement for the future? The answer to one or more of these questions may be a straightforward ‘no’, and that is understandable; I’m certainly not suggesting you should invent praise, advice etc. But these are questions I ask myself when I’m reviewing, and where possible I aim to answer them in my review, even if it is a rejection.

I received a truly delightful rejection recently. I was seeking sponsorship for the International Creative Research Methods Conference, and I thought an organisation I have worked with several times might be interested, so I emailed my main contact. The response came from someone else who I didn’t know. They wrote:

Dear Helen,

Thank you so much for getting in touch. It’s impressive to see the breadth of your contributions to [organisation] over the years: your commitment and dedication to creative research methods is clearly deep-rooted and inspiring.

The International Creative Research Methods Conference sounds like a brilliant and much-needed space for methods enthusiasts! While we’re unfortunately not in a position to offer sponsorship at this time, we really do appreciate that you thought of [organisation] as a potential sponsor.

We wish you every success with next year’s event!

With best wishes, and the very best of luck,

[name]

There is a saying that goes “in a world where you can be anything, be kind” which I think makes a lot of sense. That rejection was so kindly written that it barely even stung. I think it’s exemplary, and from now on I’m going to try to inject more kindness into the rejections I need to make.

I have a new book out! At least, I’m co-editor… The book is Using Documents In Research: When, Where, Why And How. The lead editor is Dr Aimee Grant who is a joy to work with. And our contributors are an absolutely stellar bunch!

We are holding two online book launches on Thursday 19 March, at 10 am and 5 pm GMT. They are open to all and free to attend, and each will include presentations by three of our contributors.

The first event, at 10 am GMT on 19 March, will feature:

Helen Abnett, Research Fellow in public health and social policy at the University of Hertfordshire, who will present her research on using data from charity annual reports to consider questions of representation.

Max Perry, a post-doctoral sociologist at the University of Edinburgh, who will discuss what can be gained by reading medical records as documents of practice.

Abigail Winter, an independent researcher (yay!) who will introduce her work using public documents in arts-based research and knowledge translation.

You can register for that event here.

The second event, at 5 pm GMT on 19 March, will feature:

José Ragas, Assistant Professor of History at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile, who will showcase his work on using historical ethnographic techniques to research identity documents.

Kate Carruthers Thomas, transdisciplinary Associate Professor at Birmingham City University, who will tell us about creating an illustrated digital archive from diary and interview data.

Órla Meadhbh Murray, Assistant Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University, will talk about using institutional ethnographic techniques to conduct feminist research with audit documents from UK universities.

You can register for that event here.

And those are only half of the contributors to the book! We would have liked to include them all, but that wasn’t feasible. However, I can tell you about them here. The other lead contributors, in alphabetical order of first name, are:

Anna J. Davis, an expert on foreign policy, international identity and nuclear cooperation based in Washington, DC, who offers a gripping account of the challenges of obtaining documents on nuclear policy in Armenia, Belarus and Ukraine during times of political turbulence.

Ella Houston, Senior Lecturer in Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University, who studies representations of disability in advertisements.

George Jennings, Senior Lecturer in sport sociology at Cardiff Metropolitan University, who uses a variety of books to theorise Asian martial arts folklore.

Katarzyna Niziołek, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Białystok in Poland, who explains the research method of documentary theatre.

Rosemary Golding, Professor of Music at the Open University, who finds evidence of both music and silences in texts about Victorian asylums.

Victoria Pagan, Senior Lecturer in the Business School at Newcastle University, who uses government inquiry documents to research non-disclosure agreements, and outlines how she analyses her data abductively using a framework of epistemic injustice.

This brief summary shows how documents can be useful in research on a wide variety of topics across many disciplines. It also signals that researchers can use a vast number of theoretical and methodological options when working with documents. In ethical terms, we should all be using secondary data first, because there is so much of it now which is readily available. And documents form a big part of that.

So I hope to see you at one or other of the launches, which promise to be both informative and entertaining. Or, of course, you could just buy the book! (Word to the wise: if you sign up for the publisher’s e-newsletter, via the banner at the top of the webpage, you get a huge 25% discount on this and any other books of theirs that take your fancy.)

I am planning this new book with Dr Derek Ong, quant supremo at the University of Hertfordshire (OK that’s not his official job title but it is what he is). And I’m so, so happy about it. I feel as if my scholarly life has come full circle, because my first degree was in social psychology in the early 1980s when psychology was an entirely quantitative subject, at least at undergraduate level. I’m also super excited because I know there is a whole load of fascinating creative work being done by quant researchers, and I’m really looking forward to showcasing the best of it in this book. I know the book is needed, too, because the few people I’ve mentioned it to have been very positive, making comments like “Hurry up, I want to read it”!

Our call for chapter proposals is online here with a link to download the call as a PDF. Bristol University Press are interested in publishing our book, and the deadline for proposals is 15 May 2026. Please share the call far and wide, and/or with anyone you think might be interested. Thank you!