Cultivating Creativity in Methodology and Research

This book presents a variety of narratives on key elements of academic work, from data analysis, writing practices and engagement with the field. The authors discuss how elements of academic work and life usually edited out of traditional research papers can elicit important analytical insight. The book reveals how the unplanned, accidental and even obstructive events that often occur in research life, the detours, can potentially glean important results.
The authors introduce the process of writing-sharing-reading-writing as a way to expand the playground of research and inspire a culture in which accountable research methodologies involve adventurousness and an element of uncertainty. Written by scholars from a range of different fields, academic levels and geographic locations, this unique book will offer significant insight to those from a range of academic fields.

Charlotte Wegener is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University, Denmark. Her work concerns innovation with a specific focus on education, workplace learning and research methodology. She is co-author of The Open Book: Stories of Academic Life and Writing or Where We Know Things.
Ninna Meier is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Work at Aalborg University, Denmark, where she teaches and supervises students in organisational sociology. With Charlotte Wegener, she is developing Open Writing and resonance conceptually and as a field of research.
Elina Maslo is an Assistant Professor in the Danish School of Education at Aarhus University, Denmark, where she teaches second language learning, as well as within the Masters Programme for teachers of Danish as a second and foreign language. Her main research interests are learning spaces ¿ multiple, diverse, changing, fluid, complex, always in construction ¿ in and outside the school, and at the workplace.

1. Editors Introduction: The Power of Showing How it Happened'; Charlotte Wegener, Ninna Meier and Elina Maslo.- Part I: Different vantage points, new insights.- 2. The Wonder of Things as They Are. Theorizing Obesity and Family Life with Art; Lone Grøn.- 3. Into the wild time: notes from a traveller; Christina Berg Johansen.- 4. Thats responsibility; Chris Smissaert.- Part II: Research life life& research.- 5. In Between: Creative Spaces and Detours as Part of a Researchers Life; Lene Tanggaard.- 6. An Unexpected Detour from Ivory Tower to Action Research; Jody Hoffer Gittel.- 7. Deliberate detours as paths to emergent knowledge creation; Karen Ingerslev.- 8. Worth, wonder and worry in the accelerated academy; Rasmus Hoffmann Birk.- 9. There is no such thing as a journal paper; Sarah Gilmore and Nancy Harding.- Part III: How we know: making sense of methods and field work.- 10. The unanticipated outcomes of research: Learning and development at work; Stephen Billett.- 11.Knowing across time and place; Ninna Meier.- 12. Staying on topic: doing research between improvisation and systematisation; Constance de Saint-Laurent.- Part IV: Coping with complexity: writing to understand what we do.- 13. Metaphorical structuring of pattern analysis; Camilla Kølsen Petersen.- 14. Telling tales of the unexpected; Elisabeth Willumsen.- 15. Writing my way home; Charlotte Wegener.- 16. Riding the waves of collaborative-writing-as-inquiry: some ontological creative detours; Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt.- 17. Give it a name and it will be yours: How opportunities to reflect on essential questions can create space for learning; Elina Maslo.- 18. Confessions of a procrastinator; Noomi Matthiesen.- 19. Epilogue or why creative detours (often) have happy endings; Vlad Petre Glveanu.- Index.