TEACHING
Undergraduate
For junior honours students for many years I provided a grounding in Qualitative Methods (not much more than an allotment of research skills). For senior honours I teach in one research electives. In Researching with Media, Julie Cupples and myself, along with students, root around in internet forums, Youtube, indigenous and tabloid media for hidden gems and things left lying around in plain sight. Starting 2025 I am teaching part of a course taking our second year students to Inverness to develop their field work practices through ethnographic studies of cold water swimming (AKA wild swimming). For five years, with Dan Swanton, we took a group of students to Berlin for a week to develop their ethnographic craft, exploring streets, community gardens, museums, parks, squats and hipster cafes.
Postgraduate
For MSc & Year 1 PhD Students I teach a seminar-based course Methodolological Debates (a glass house of warm discussion through the winter). I direct the Postgraduate Research team in GeoSciences. For MSc students I run a 3 week course in making comic-zines to tell their research stories. There are a variety of shorter and longer courses in video analysis, EMCA and comic-strip making that I run for PhD students. I’m lucky enough to supervise a number of PhD students who have worked on, or are working on, intriguing topics like manga, the changing nature of the contemporary museum, trans-national knowledges of townscapes, street performers, Chinese urban public spaces, the organisation of disabled travelling in public transport in Chile, walking as methodology, the conservation of ospreys, retirees in Spain using social media, hillwalking and the animism of mountains, cafes as alternative spaces of art & politics, the tourist in Sri Lanka, AI and new mediations of drawing, high demand religions, reporting racism to the police, decision-making in later life and more.
Potential Phd Topics:
Ethnomethods of public space
Ethnomethods of mobility
Trouble-making in public space
Workplace studies of creative industries
Practices of suburban neighbouring
Infrastructures and their routine repair
The production and/or consumption of digital media
Service encounters in cafes, markets, shops etc.
The socio-material organisation of households
Practical reasoning
Socio-logistics
The relationship between Cavell, Wittgenstein and ethnomethodology
Video analytic or conversation analytic studies of almost any setting really.
I co-organise the Scottish Ethnomethodology, Discourse, Interaction & Talk group (SEDIT) with Sue Widdicombe and sometimes Steve Kirkwood. Postgraduate students and post-doctoral researcher with an interest in these topics will have the opportunity to join the group and present their empirical material there.
Staff
For PhD supervisors I run a half day training course, using the wonderful corpus of recordings created by Binh Thanh Ta during her PhD research (and document in her book - A Conversation Analytic Approach to Doctoral Supervision). The course uses CARM and allows supervisors to discuss and reflect on how they talk to their students.
Undergraduate
For junior honours students for many years I provided a grounding in Qualitative Methods (not much more than an allotment of research skills). For senior honours I teach in one research electives. In Researching with Media, Julie Cupples and myself, along with students, root around in internet forums, Youtube, indigenous and tabloid media for hidden gems and things left lying around in plain sight. Starting 2025 I am teaching part of a course taking our second year students to Inverness to develop their field work practices through ethnographic studies of cold water swimming (AKA wild swimming). For five years, with Dan Swanton, we took a group of students to Berlin for a week to develop their ethnographic craft, exploring streets, community gardens, museums, parks, squats and hipster cafes.
Postgraduate
For MSc & Year 1 PhD Students I teach a seminar-based course Methodolological Debates (a glass house of warm discussion through the winter). I direct the Postgraduate Research team in GeoSciences. For MSc students I run a 3 week course in making comic-zines to tell their research stories. There are a variety of shorter and longer courses in video analysis, EMCA and comic-strip making that I run for PhD students. I’m lucky enough to supervise a number of PhD students who have worked on, or are working on, intriguing topics like manga, the changing nature of the contemporary museum, trans-national knowledges of townscapes, street performers, Chinese urban public spaces, the organisation of disabled travelling in public transport in Chile, walking as methodology, the conservation of ospreys, retirees in Spain using social media, hillwalking and the animism of mountains, cafes as alternative spaces of art & politics, the tourist in Sri Lanka, AI and new mediations of drawing, high demand religions, reporting racism to the police, decision-making in later life and more.
Potential Phd Topics:
Ethnomethods of public space
Ethnomethods of mobility
Trouble-making in public space
Workplace studies of creative industries
Practices of suburban neighbouring
Infrastructures and their routine repair
The production and/or consumption of digital media
Service encounters in cafes, markets, shops etc.
The socio-material organisation of households
Practical reasoning
Socio-logistics
The relationship between Cavell, Wittgenstein and ethnomethodology
Video analytic or conversation analytic studies of almost any setting really.
I co-organise the Scottish Ethnomethodology, Discourse, Interaction & Talk group (SEDIT) with Sue Widdicombe and sometimes Steve Kirkwood. Postgraduate students and post-doctoral researcher with an interest in these topics will have the opportunity to join the group and present their empirical material there.
Staff
For PhD supervisors I run a half day training course, using the wonderful corpus of recordings created by Binh Thanh Ta during her PhD research (and document in her book - A Conversation Analytic Approach to Doctoral Supervision). The course uses CARM and allows supervisors to discuss and reflect on how they talk to their students.
