Exploring and explaining socio-legal research through pictograms

Material (as opposed to digital) pictograms can be extremely useful for helping a researcher to better understand their own project, and to explain it to someone else. 

In the above image each participant has grabbed a handful of cubes that have pictograms on each surface (here drawn from the games Story Cubes and Nada). They roll them, study them, adjust their location. When they are ready, they tell a story about their research and/or their research process using the pictograms. 

This method is especially powerful in a multidisciplinary context because it bypasses technical terminology, provokes transparency and forms a communal space for ideas. For example, in the video below, Allison Lindner, a Kent Law School PhD candidate, explores her socio-research in a way that has meaning to her, and to students from three other disciplines: management, tourism studies and psychology. The context was a 2016 workshop I ran on Visualising Social Science Research for the University of Kent Graduate School. See here for notes on the 2015 workshop.

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Exploring/explaining socio-legal research in pictograms from Amanda Perry-Kessaris on Vimeo.