In this manifesto for live methods the key arguments of the volume are summarized in eleven propositions. We offer eleven provocations to highlight potential new capacities for how we do sociology. The argument for a more artful and crafty approach to sociological research embraces new technological opportunities while expanding the attentiveness of researchers. We identify a set of practices available to us as sociologists from the heterodox histories of the tradition as well as from current collaborations and cross‐disciplinary exchanges. The question of value is not set apart from the eleven points we raise in the manifesto. Additionally, we are concerned with how the culture of audit and assessment within universities is impacting on sociological research. Despite the institutional threats to sociology we emphasize the discipline is well placed in our current moment to develop creative, public and novel modes of doing imaginative and critical sociological research.

This article works across disciplines: politics, geography and social and cultural theory. Issues of space and body are brought to bear on how we think about the question 'making a difference'. By considering difference in terms of the socio-spatial impact of the presence of hitherto socially excluded groups, such as women and racialised minorities, the gendered and racialised nature of the body politic and most specifically its 'elite' positions is brought into focus. The co-existence of women and 'black' and Asian MPs in Westminster demonstrates how these 'groups' are both historically and conceptually 'space invaders'. This positionality underlies a series of social processes which illustrate how their very presence is a disruption as well as a continual negotiation. While accepting the agnostic perspective that there are 'no guarantees' that the arrival of these 'new' bodies will articulate a different politics, in terms of policy outcomes and political debate, this article asserts that the sociological terms of their presence deserves in-depth attention.I can remember very clearly a sight which often used to strike me when I was nine or ten years old. I lived then on the outskirts of Manchester, and 'going into town' was a relatively big occasion; it took over half an hour and we went on the top deck of a bus. On the way into town we would cross the wide shallow valley of the river Mersey, and my memory is of dank, muddy fields spreading away into a cold, misty distance. And all of it-all of these acres of Manchester-was divided up into football pitches and rugby pitches. And on Saturdays, which was when we went into town, the whole vast area would be covered with hundreds of little people, all running around after balls, as far as the eye could see. (It seemed from the top of the bus like a vast, animated Lowry painting, with all the little people in rather brighter colours than Lowry used to paint them, and with cold red legs.) I remember all this very sharply. And I remember, too, it striking me very clearly-even as a puzzled, slightly thoughtful little girl-that all this huge stretch of the Mersey flood plain had been entirely given over to boys. I did not go to those playing fields-they seemed barred, another world (though today, with more nerve and some consciousness of being a space invader, I do stand on football terraces-and love it) (Massey 1996, 185).The sheer maleness of particular public spaces and women's experience of increasingly occupying them while still being conscious of being 'space invaders' even while they enjoy these places is vividly captured by Doreen Massey. Westminster has also been a space that has been given over to men, and has, over time, witnessed the increased entry of women and 'other' excluded groups, such as racialised minority groups. When minorities or hitherto excluded groups enter institutions that have for a long time been dominated by men (usually white and 66 NIRMAL PUWAR from a specific social class), people are generally inquisitive to know whether these 'newcome...

This paper reflects on the recent experience of interviewing women MPs. The research process is analyzed in terms of the micro-politics of the relationship between the researcher and the researched. Relevant methodological debates from two areas of sociology which are rarely brought together have been incorporated. Elite Studies and Gender Studies. Both of these fields have discussed the politics of space within the process of interviewing. However, the research experience of interviewing female MPs does not neatly fit in with the descriptions of interviewing to be found in either of these fields. This paper will discuss how the experience meets, criss-crosses and contradicts research reflections that are to be found in both of the above fields. So at times my experience echoed Ann Oakley's description of interviewing women as a cosy, friendly and sisterly exchange of information (Oakley, 1982: p. 55). Whilst at other times I could relate to Stephen Ball's description of interviews with MPs as '...events of struggle, as a complex interplay of dominance/resistance and chaos/ freedom.' (Ball, 1994: p. 113). Often the same interview shifted between these two types of scenarios. After a short introduction to the debates on space and power within Elite Studies and Gender Studies this paper will go on to detail some of the complexities of interviewing women MPs for a feminist project.

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One of the central ways in which institutional racism is perpetuated is through the designation of the somatic norm. However, although the classed and gendered nature of the somatic norm underlying somataphobic representations of the universal `individual' have been both theoretically and substantially explored, the racial character of this embodied being has received scant attention. This paper introduces race to the wider debates on the embodied nature of the political `individual', before analysing the specific ways in which an institution that is deemed to be at the absolute apex of disembodied, neutral professionalism - the British senior civil service - is naturalised as the domain for white men. The somatic norm underlying the representation of the impartial senior civil service is brought to the fore in this paper by discussing the location of black senior civil servants, whose presence helps us to highlight the synchronic relationship between racialised bodies and elite spaces in the body politic. These `Space Invaders' disturb the racialised nature of these spaces whilst at the same time adhering to the assimilative pressure of the somatic norm. An engagement with the interview accounts of black senior civil servants allows us to grasp some idea of what it is like for them to coexist in a place that is built on a `racial contract' which has demarcated spaces in accordance with racialised corporealities. As matter out of place these `different' bodies generate disorientation, undergo the burden of invisibility and abide by the racialised and classed informal rules of behaviour, particularly those of the legitimate language. All of which problematises the notion of `difference' in organisations as entailing much more than the mere existence of `different' bodies, on the basis of race or gender.

The introduction to this special issue addresses the production of intimacy in the labour of research. It explores the sensory, emotional and affective relations which form an integral, if often invisible, part of the process through which researchers engage with, produce, understand and translate `research'. The article argues that these processes inform the making of knowledge, shape power relations and enable or constrain the practical negotiation of ethical problems. These issues are not, however, often foregrounded in debates on methods or methodology and are frequently erased from researchers' own accounts of their work. The article explores some of the possible reasons for this, which include institutional and cultural conventions of academic practice, the historical legacies with which disciplines often struggle, and the difficult issues and decisions that individual researchers face as they try to negotiate the relations between scholarly research and personal relationships across time, and between scholarly research and, for example, creativity, fiction, or sensationalism. The article concludes with a review of the main themes in the special issue, focusing in particular on the ways in which the contributors use the concept of intimacy to challenge the boundaries between creativity and analysis; spatial and temporal proximity and distance; freedom and censorship; subjects and objects.

Building on the range of methods available to the roaming sociological imagination, curating sociology is concerned with instituting ‘live’ public encounters. Contending that there are practices in the history of sociology that can be considered instances of curating sociology, this article makes a case for harnessing these to inventive research processes today. The discussion in this article draws attention to recent developments in curating before excavating a selection of practices within sociology upon which we can reflexively build live methods with consideration to creative collaborations, publicness and exhibiting as research. Each of these involves a degree of mutation within the craft of sociology. By way of illustration, the final section of the article explores an in‐depth case study of curating sociology for the Noise of the Past project, which involved us, as sociologists, collaborating with creative practitioners and ‘curating’ a large‐scale public event.

The act of decentring established Euro-North American sites and flows of knowledge as longstanding geopolitical anchors of epistemological authority presents déjà vu scenarios, involved in centre-staging processes. The very position of being a messenger from the ‘North’ of knowledge and theory from the ‘South’ can reproduce the same patterns the undertaking seeks to unsettle. The context in which academic performativity is shaped is integral to both the making and taking of space in intellectual circuits of production and circulation. This article considers how centre-staging in academia performatively involves particular features. As a case in point, the focus is on the centre-staging of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (epistemology of the South) and Raewyn Connell (Southern Theory), who have become globally known for insisting on bringing knowledge from the South to the North. The wider ecology of the global circuits of academia, as well as their own performative dramaturgy, constitutes points of observation. A self-enterprising ownership of big global conceptual programmes places them high in the decentring of knowledge. There is a leap frogging over former stocks of published academic knowledge, as well as a centre-staging of knowledge projects, whereby it is they who become the flag bearers of this enterprise. Within this process it is important to recognise who is illuminated. Bibliographic tracks become traced over, in the very ways in which fields are mapped in order to produce a point of intervention.