Critical Approaches to Open Qualitative Data

This one-day workshop, Critical Approaches to Open Qualitative Data: Archiving, Practices and Possibilities, explores critical, creative, and practice-based approaches to archiving and sharing qualitative data in the humanities and social sciences.

Bringing together speakers working across qualitative, feminist, community, and experimental archival practices, the workshop focuses on archives, datasets, repositories, and collections developed through research projects. The event will include informal “show and tell” reflections on archives, datasets, and emerging approaches to data sharing, and collaborative discussion.

Context

Across UK universities, open data mandates are expanding rapidly, shaped by funders, governance frameworks, and digital infrastructures. Yet for many qualitative and critical researchers, these agendas can feel ethically reductive, methodologically misaligned, and framed more as compliance than as meaningful scholarly practice.

Core commitments, such as informed consent, participant confidentiality, and the careful stewardship (and sometimes destruction) of sensitive materials, often sit uneasily with dominant models of openness. At the same time, open data requirements can be experienced as extractive, labour-intensive, and under-resourced, contributing to a sense of data sharing as bureaucratic obligation, rather than engaged, ethical practice.

Yet alongside and beyond these institutional frameworks, a wide range of creative, ‘DIY’ archiving practices are already underway. Researchers are building digital collections, assembling datasets, and developing community-linked repositories that challenge conventional infrastructures and assumptions. These practices remain under-recognised and often under-theorised, and offer fertile ground for thinking differently about what ‘open data’ might be and do.

In rethinking these issues, the workshop draws in part on emerging work in feminist and community archiving, including intersectional and decolonial approaches that foreground care and relationality, and insist on attention to power, difference, and context in knowledge production. From this perspective, research data can be understood not simply as a resource to be shared, but as a set of relationships and responsibilities to be sustained.

Themes and Questions

Throughout the day, participants will explore questions such as:

• What motivates the creation of qualitative archives or datasets?
• How are these projects being built in practice? What decisions shape whether to work within existing infrastructures or to seek alternatives?
• How are ethical questions negotiated in practice, including the kinds of ‘care-full’ risks involved in sharing, withholding, or curating data?
• Whose labour sustains these projects, and (how) is it recognised?
• What challenges arise in the creation and maintenance of collections of qualitative data?
• What infrastructures, platforms, and tools are being assembled, and what kinds of support or networks are needed for this work?
• How do these projects rework or challenge dominant models of open data?
• What conceptual resources are helping to make these projects possible, and do they emerge within or beyond disciplinary frameworks?
• In what ways do these practices unsettle or rework usual research practices?

Aims

The workshop aims to:

• foster exchange between researchers experimenting with alternative data practices
• develop critical perspectives on “openness” in qualitative research
• highlight under-recognised forms of archival labour and infrastructure
• build connections for future collaborations, networks, and events

By reframing data sharing as a site of critical intervention and theoretical innovation, we seek to imagine more just, reflexive, and accountable forms of data stewardship.

The workshop is open to researchers, archivists, librarians, and practitioners interested in qualitative data, archival practice, and critical approaches to openness.

Organisers:

Dr Martina Karels, IASH-SSPS Fellow & Dept of Media and Communication, St. Francis College, NY, USA

Dr Many Hanlon, IASH Fellow & Dept of Sociology, Okanagan College, BC, Canada

Dr Niamh Moore, Sociology, University of Edinburgh, UK

Contact: [email protected]

This workshop is made possible with kind support from the SRSF from SPS and IASH.

This is a free event, which means we overbook to allow for no-shows and to avoid empty seats. While we generally do not have to turn people away, this does mean we cannot guarantee everyone a place. Admission is on a first come, first served basis.

Accessibility:

This event will take place at IASH, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9NW. Please see a map here: https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/location

The Seminar Room is on the first floor, and unfortunately IASH does not have a lift. If you have mobility issues and would like to discuss access, please contact [email protected] as soon as possible.

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Host or Publisher Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities