Culture, Imagination and Practice Research Group (CIP)

Culture, Imagination & Practice is a transdisciplinary research group that brings together the study of disciplines, institutions and everyday lives.

Culture, Imagination & Practice (CIP) connects the activities of several initiatives in the School of Social Sciences to a transdisciplinary research group, that brings together the study of disciplines, institutions and everyday lives.

Engaging with social science, social philosophy, cultural studies, science and technology studies, psychosocial research and feminist theory, CIP addresses the political and cultural resonance of new social formations and social movements.

The group investigates cultural, social and material practices as 'world-making' processes in the shaping of relations, and their consequences for ecology, geopolitics and social justice. We want to open up ways of understanding the shifting divisions between the social, the political, the natural and the technological.

The CIP research group meets every month through its lunchtime seminar programme and invited seminar presentations and events. CIP activities include:

Invited speaker series
Public workshops
Reading seminars
Development of research proposals
Doctoral research students meetings
Work in progress seminars
Organisation of conferences and symposia
International co-operations and visiting research exchanges
Active webpage
Public engagement with social movements, practitioners, and other non-academic institutions and persons

The group brings together a number of different groups and clusters:

Research topics

Cultural, social and political theory
Social and ecological transformations
Affect and the circulation of identities
Everyday experience: emerging modes of relationality and subjectivity
Process theory: radical empiricism and constructivism
Human, animal and non-human associations and assemblages
Medical anthropology and critical studies of health
Care: ethics, knowledge, science and technology
Radical social movements: their practices and mobilisations
Human enhancement: embodiment and exploitation
Methodological innovation – 'ethnography without borders' – tracing stabilities and
transnational transformations through tracking the local

MSc and PhD possibilities

CIP runs the ESRC approved MSc Social Science Research Methods: Culture, Identity and Social Organization Specialism (Sociology Pathway)

We invite PhD applications in the topics listed above. The group maintains intensive support of research students through individual supervision and regular doctoral and postgraduate research meetings.