About the collaboratory

The International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies (ICCM) considers critical research and critical methodology in conjunction, as mutually dependent rather than as isolated entities. The Collaboratory is an ESRC-funded virtual research environment for investigating the potential of critical methods for security studies and a space for collaboration and collective writing. As a web-based research environment, the Collaboratory aims to build a capacity for recurrent and sustainable research exchange and knowledge creation.

 

Postgraduate research is largely focused on a toolbox of methods that students mix and match depending on their particular disciplines (for example, discourse analysis or ethnographic research). Methods are generally taken to be of a limited number and transferable from one field to another and, to a certain extent, from one theory to another. The Collaboratory aims to inquire into the problems that arise out of existing assumptions of transferability, consider the nuanced ways in which methodological developments in other areas can be ‘translated’ in critical security studies and interrogate how methods - in close connection with theoretical apparatuses and conceptual toolboxes - can have critical purchase.