Literary Methods in the Social Sciences – serie

Why have there been so few women mathematicians? This book does not seek an answer in absence but in the forces, ruptures, and intensities that shape the becoming of a femme philosophe—a mathematician, scientist, and philosopher—within the shifting assemblages of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Moving beyond exclusion as mere negation, it traces the conditions of emergence, the differential speeds and slippages through which women entered, inhabited, and transformed the mathematical sciences.Drawing on auto/biographical documents, literary and philosophical writings, and the materialities of the archive, this book approaches the digital turn not as a tool but as a plane of composition, where new trajectories of memory work unfold. Between historiography and fabulation, it maps a space where women’s mathematical thought was not only possible but inevitable—if only in flashes, excesses, and détours.This book will resonate with scholars in the sociology, history, and philosophy of science and mathematics, particularly those engaged with feminist thought, the politics of knowledge, and experimental archival methods.

This festschrift honours the work of Liz Stanley, whose scholarship has been highly influential in opening new paths in feminist research across the human sciences. Bringing together contributions from scholars shaped by her thinking, the volume reflects both on the intellectual reach of her work and on its continuing capacity to inspire feminist inquiry.The chapters engage with key strands of Stanley’s intellectual legacy, including feminist epistemologies, the auto/ biographical I, letters and correspondences, the epistolarium, and her concept of archigraphics as a way of opening the ‘black box’ of the archive. Through a wide range of studies, contributors explore her challenge to mainstream sociology, her distinctive approach to feminist research with texts, her foundational role in auto/ biography studies, her systematic analysis of letters and correspondences, and her pioneering work on archives, temporality, and the writing of history. Collectively, the contributions trace an intellectual lineage and demonstrate the enduring relevance and generative power of Stanley’s scholarship across disciplines.This volume is intended for scholars and postgraduate students in the social sciences and humanities, particularly those working in feminist theory, qualitative methods, archival studies, auto/ biography, and the sociology of knowledge.

This book presents Documents of Life (DoLs) as a research framework, offering both scholarly insight and practical guidance for conducting this kind of work. DoLs are everyday materials that illuminate the organisation of ordinary lives and their social worlds.Addressing key methodological questions in autoethnography, it brings together critical socio-cultural autoethnography (CSA) and DoLs through the innovative use of facet methodology (FM). This approach enables analytical engagement with texts across the social sciences while remaining attentive to narrative form, integrating literary studies within sociological inquiry through the DoL approach to an accountable/dialogical storytelling. Grounded in relational ethics and a critical humanist orientation, the book remains in dialogue with people and their accounts, recognising connections between the sociological and the literary, as well as the historical and the cultural. These strands are brought together through a sustained empirical focus on those who go to war (including the author, a former soldier) and those engaged in different, but equally consequential, struggles.The book will be of strong interest to PhD and postgraduate students seeking guidance on conducting autoethnographic research, in addition to scholars in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, politics, gender and masculinity studies, memory studies, organisational studies, and the social sciences more broadly.