Conference Agenda

Have you ever felt constrained by the rigid boxes of traditional qualitative methodology? What happens when a research begins to transgress its methodological borders? Do you seek more creative, relational, and critical ways to conduct your research in the social sciences?

This workshop offers a hands-on immersion into the frame of transmethodologies (TMs) – a space of onto-epistemological provocation that challenges the established canons of qualitative research. Instead of being yet another method, TMs encourage a critical sensibility towards moving beyond methodological orthodoxies and rulebooks to think about the agency of theories and methods. We will play with some of the main ideas that compose the theoretical mosaic of TMs, including Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of difference and rhizomatic becoming, Barad's intra-actions and onto-epistemologies, non-representational inquiry, and decolonial border thinking.

In this workshop-laboratory, we will experiment with how a TM framework might become useful in your inquiries. Working with the crucial distinction between borders as political performances that separate and exclude, and boundaries as fluid sites of potentiality and becoming, we will engage in embodied, experiential activities to deterritorialize our research practices and assumptions. We will collectively map concerns and navigate the productive tension between methodological borders and epistemological boundaries. The aim is to collaboratively weave tools, affects, and provocations for a transmethodological research practice: one that treats methodological constraints not as rigid borders to be defended, but as agentic boundaries to engage and transcend. The result, perhaps, will be embracing indeterminacy, permeability, and care to imagine inquiries that explore how matter comes to matter and what this mattering does.

Join us to rethink your methodological practice and transform your research from a scripted procedure into a dynamic conversation about methodological mattering.

The workshop aims to safeguard and transmit traditional local knowledge through experiential learning, and to connect contemporary audiences with the art of beadwork within Greek traditional dress.It combines qualitative engagement with tradition, the body, and materiality in research— an approach to qualitative inquiry that employs material discursive, hands-on and interpretive practices as modes of knowledge production. It creates space for discussion around the types of knowledge that are valued within qualitative research and enables participation beyond conventional, text-based academic presentation.

The workshop is structured into two distinct yet complementary parts, combining a theoretical introduction with an experiential, hands-on approach. In the first part, a brief 15-minute introductory presentation will be delivered, focusing on the use of beads both in traditional jewellery and in beaded decoration of dress more broadly. The presentation will highlight the role of beads as decorative, symbolic, and social elements, drawing on examples from the Greek context, with particular emphasis on techniques, colour schemes, and their cultural meanings.The second part of the workshop, which will constitute the largest portion of the session (1.5 hours), will take an experiential, hands-on approach. Participants, under the guidance of the facilitator, will create a replica of an authentic beaded ornament, the “Branditska” from Ormenio, Evros, applying traditional bead-threading techniques.

The workshop functions as a micro-ethnographic field, where participants do not observe from a distance but actively take part.The making of the Branditska is therefore not simply an outcome, but a process of knowledge production, in which knowledge emerges through the body, repetition and rhythm, touch, and material engagement. Beads, colours, patterns, and techniques operate as qualitative data. The ornament thus becomes a carrier of memory, gendered meanings, local identity, and tacit knowledge that is not fully captured in written form. Furthermore, knowledge production is not individual but collective, taking place within the group as participants discuss, compare, observe one another, and exchange experiences.

Materials:All participants will be provided with a complete materials kit (beads in three colours, specialised thread for beadwork, a beading needle) and a a printed booklet in English with detailed step-by-step instructions for the construction of the ornament (one per participant).

In a world marked by rapid change, uncertainty, and complexity, the ability to think systematically about the future is no longer a luxury—it is a necessity. This workshop introduces scholars to the transformative power of futures thinking. Drawing on Sohail Inayatullah’s Six Pillars of Futures Studies participants will get an overview of the methodological possibilities to co-creatively map, time, deepen, create alternatives for, transform and anticipate on the future. Using Glenn's future wheel approach we will further explore the cascading consequences of design related changes made into the configuration of our living environments. Participants will learn how to map first-, second-, and third-order impacts of emerging trends, technologies and prototypes designed to tackle contemporary societal challenge of redesigning the city, enabling a deeper understanding of systemic interconnections and long-term implications of solutions proposed today. The futures wheel method encourages structured creativity and critical thinking, making it ideal for scholars seeking to enrich their own research with futures-oriented perspectives. By the end of the session, attendees will be equipped to use the Future Wheel in academic, policy, and innovation contexts related to their own research responses to emerging challenges.

In this workshop, we will investigate how performance autoethnography can serve as “a method of inquiry and analysis that engages the body as the methodological nexus upon which the text turns, moves, lives,” beyond any “epistemological hierarchy” (Spry, 2016, p.159). Following the concept of the “textualizing body” (Spry, 2016, p.162), we will produce autoethnographic data (Adams et al., 2016), interpretations, and texts—a materiality that continually makes and unmakes itself as ‘form.’

Our work will take place ‘on the floor,’ through the dramaturgical lenses of Ancient Greek theatre (Ashby, 1999), exploring what Diana Taylor (2016) conceptualizes as repetition implicit in performance: the practice of again-ness(p.26). Enacting again and again is essential to performing autoethnography as investigation because it is constructed and deconstructed through the iterative nature of both performance and research. Again-ness in performance—the repeated doing and undoing—is embedded in the word itself (the suffix -ance signaling iteration) and in the practice (Barba, 2009). A similar framing applies to the word and practice of research. According to Benozzo and Priola (2022), scholarly investigation designated as research derives from practices of “reaching again” (re- indicating repetition), tracing back to gatherer-hunter ecologies where looking again and again was vital for survival.

Diana Taylor (2016) emphasizes that performance operates as inquiry, “as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity through reiterated actions” (p.25). Similarly, Soyini Madison reminds researchers that “like good theory, performance is a blur of meaning, language, and a bit of pain” (Madison, 1999, p.108). This workshop explores performance autoethnography through the organizing principles of the theatre laboratory (Chemi, 2018) and performance theories (Schechner, 2003).

Feminist materialist and posthumanist thinking presumes that matter and discourse are entangled and co-constitutive and that neither is foundational. Instead, matter is conceptualised as agentic and all sorts of bodies are recognised as having agency. This radical move has profound ontological, epistemological and ethical consequences; it raises serious methodological questions about how we do qualitative research, and how knowledge in posthuman times can come to matter differently. Drawing on the work of Karen Barad (2007), Jane Bennett (2010), Rosi Braidotti (2013) and Donna Haraway (2015) the workshop invites participants to enact a feminist materialist/posthumanist theory- praxis dérive – a playful, political walk or stroll – which activates walking with feminist materialist/posthumanist theory as a means to unsettle anthropocentrism. In this, the workshop aims to offer a co-compositional research space for experimental encounters. It puts to work a practice of walking-with theory to attend to everyday things that we don’t normally notice or accord value to, and to bring to the fore the value of affective, sensory, embodied and relational research practices. Drawing on aspects of Carol and Nikki’s experimental research practice-ings and theoretical thinking, this workshop is structured as a three-part research-creation process: an initial theoretical orientation; a participatory, experimental feminist materialist/ posthumanist dérive where participants will get out of the room and go for a short walk; and a critical, collaborative speculative wondering regarding the matter and meaning which emerges. All materials for this workshop will be provided. Participants should bring smartphones and dress accordingly for Greek outdoor weather.

The ‘trauma’ industry is one of the most increasingly thriving enterprises in the world over the last few decades. The predominant approach of conceptualising human suffering in the context of ‘trauma’ is on mastering specific techniques that are aimed at alleviating specific symptoms and other forms of discomfort and anguish. This presentation will explore the importance of appreciating the role of imperceptibly constructing epistemological presuppositions that position us in ways that we adopt certain perspectives in perceiving relevant events and experiences. What is the role of ‘curating’ societal discourses that construct commodifying human suffering? How do we inadvertently develop a ‘victim identity’ in those we want to help? What other identities are constructed from such ‘curating’ of societal discourses? Is there an epistemological framework that can overcome such distortions?