NOTE FROM THE OUTGOING DIRECTOR

Dr. Louise Braddock, ISRF Director of Research

Chris Newfield has now taken up in person his post as the ISRF’s new Director. I am glad to welcome him at last and to hand over to him the future of the ISRF. In the short term he will take over managing the still uncertain situation of the Covid pandemic as it continues to engage the ISRF’s adaptability in interesting ways. In the past months, since the March lockdown, we have been finding out what works best in the online medium. One successful development has been the format of online mini-workshops in which current and former Fellows have been able to present research and share responses with each other. We have found that with preparation beforehand, turn-taking in discussion, and good time-keeping by all, an ‘ISRF Research Conversation’ can be intercalated into the academic online working day and has been welcomed by participants. The articles in this Bulletin on ‘Structures of Feeling’ arise from this programme. The three contributing ISRF Fellows previously met virtually for a miniworkshop with presentations and discussion of three different pieces of social research where the concept could be said to be doing work. Brought into relation with the three types of case material—socialhistorical, legal-criminological, and personal-psychological—the idea of a structure of feeling is a way to capture for further analysis an underlying process of ongoing adjustment to changes in social and political conditions, at the levels of social and individual consciousness.

The question of the relation between these levels was then the subject of a larger research conversation. Reported in this Bulletin as a ‘curated’ conversation, in the tradition of earlier Bulletin Conversations, this is an edited version of the larger group video-discussion on Raymond Williams’s concept and its application to different social sciences. The starting point was my research note, reproduced in a shortened form here, on the question of whether the concept is able to provide the social sciences with an access to psychoanalysis.

These and other ISRF ‘Research Conversations’ have been productive and enjoyable, and have succeeded in reproducing, in miniature, the excitement of interdisciplinary discovery that characterises the Annual Workshops. These, it is hoped, will resume in something like their usual form in 2021. As a programme in its own right, however, the ‘ISRF Research Conversation’ model has the added advantage that, being simple to set up, manage and record (on Zoom), an onward programme can easily be instigated; more easily than with the Annual Workshops themselves where the difficulty of maintaining momentum has long perplexed me.