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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

Research

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.

Projects

Current projects:

  • Growing older in the age of anti-ageing science & medicine
  • Caring in technologically mediated kinship, relationality and affect
  • Politics of matter – Ontology and justice after constructivism
  • Researching affect
  • Precarious working conditions in technoscience
  • Human & non-human animal relations
  • Social movements in the sciences

Meet the team

Academic staff

Publications

Next steps