In recent years, along with researcher’s growing attention to datafication (van Dijck, 2014; Kitchin 2014; Thylstrup et al. 2021) the integration of creative practices (art-based method, research-creation, etc.[1]) has gained significant traction across various digital research endeavours, manifesting in diverse forms with varying degrees of creative ambition. This turn toward creative practice can be understood, in part, as a response to the methodological and political challenges of studying datafied societies. Critical Data Studies has shown that data and their systems are neither neutral nor technical. Rather, they are shaped by, and in turn encode, institutions, infrastructures and histories through which visibility and value are unevenly distributed and new forms of surveillance, governance and extraction are produced (Dalton & Thatcher, 2014; Iliadis & Russo, 2016; Kitchin 2025; Grohmann 2025; Amir et al. 2026). This special issue seeks to interrogate what this interest in “unbounding” of scholarly methods entails in the context of a datafied society.
Datafied environments pose distinct methodological problems due to their opacities, instabilities and aesthetic qualities that are not always rendered accessible through textual or quantitative analysis alone (Kara 2023; Phoenix & Chamberlain 2025). Researchers and practitioners within the field of Critical Data Studies therefore increasingly work with data visualisation (Drucker, 2020; D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020; Tatari 2025), artistic research and research-creation (Borgdorff 2012; Kitchin, 2023; Batty & Zalipour), speculative design (Dunne & Raby, 2013; Watson 2025) and critical making (Ratto 2011; Medrago & Verdegem 2024; Bharghava 2024) as well as experimental ethnography and participatory practice (Waltorp 2021). The benefit of these approaches are that they are able to generate encounters and forms of knowledge that otherwise remain unavailable to traditional research methods and ontologies (Odumosu & Huber 2022; Thylstrup et al 2025; Dahir & McKittrick 2026). As Leavy (2015) argues, arts-based approaches access the “in-between spaces” of human experience, making them particularly well suited to interrogating systems that are simultaneously technical and intimate, structural and everyday.
The many different kinds of artistic practice-based methods often deploy post-disciplinary strategies (Braidotti 2019; 2023) that deliberately converge (van der Tuin 2022) theory from across disciplines to locate, analyse, and enlarge cultural and socio-political imaginaries with new concepts and vocabulary. Working with intersectional politics and the embedded and embodied politics of location, practice-based research offers to amalgamate such theory with practice into a situated mode of inquiry in which concepts are tested, manifested, and discussed. Artistic practice-based methods allows matters of fact and matters of concern to meet and collide, opening up more speculative, complex, entangled, unstable questions on encounters that cannot meet with informatics certitude in ways that remain speculative and experimental, located and embedded, much like a laboratory, creating epistemic, changeable objects.
Following Borgdoff (2012), we argue that artistic practice-based methods do not simply represent insights arrived at through other means: they constitute distinct forms of knowledge production that engage sensory, affective, relational and speculative dimensions of datafied life. Equally, artistic methods may introduce a fragile counterpoint to systems of measurement, revealing the absurdity of how individuals and society might be constrained and shaped by data (even if and when using data to stage or explore this condition). Equally, an artistic practice might foreground the embedded and embodied (locational) impact data has on a user’s body. Or, artistic practice may find ways of capturing minor activity, that cannot become imaged or representated by data, foregrounding that which is typically edited out when life becomes datafied.
This special issue proposes to explore what it means to “unbind methods”, that is, to loosen them from settled disciplinary conventions, fixed objects of inquiry and inherited divisions between research and artistic practice in new creative ways. At a moment when artistic and creative practices are increasingly mobilised across interdisciplinary research, we ask what this methodological shift entails for Critical Data Studies. How can methods be unbound (and newly developed) when the objects under investigation are themselves unstable, distributed, opaque, sensory, infrastructural, and politically contested?
This also means moving beyond accounts of creative practices as supplementary or inherently emancipatory. Crucially, like their more traditional counterparts, creative and artistic practice-based approaches can also reproduce exclusions just as they risk turning political problems into aesthetic experiences that efface the political stakes of its interventions. Bringing research-creation and Critical Data Studies into conversation, we seek to foster a productive proposition: artistic and practice-based research can open unexpected ways of sensing, imagining and intervening in data cultures, while Critical Data Studies can bring historical, political and infrastructural specificity to creative practice. By bringing together scholars from different fields, artists, designers or community practitioners, this issue aims to foster a methodologically rigorous and politically engaged dialogue about what creative practices make possible, and necessary, for Critical Data Studies today.
Focus of the Special Issue
We are interested in works that treat method as an object of inquiry and experimentation.
- Reveal and challenge the hidden politics of data through critical data visualisation, mapping, interface interventions, and counter-archival, forensic or infrastructural methods.
- Test concepts in and through practice, including artistic research, research-creation, critical making, hacking and prototyping.
- Examine how creative practices transform the production, validation and communication of knowledge through experimental ethnography, sensory methods and other situated forms of inquiry.
- Engage publics in critical dialogue about data through participatory, collaborative and community-based practices, as well as accessible, interactive or affective formats.
- Imagine alternative data futures and enlarge cultural and socio-political imaginaries through speculative, fictional, performative and post-disciplinary approaches.
- Reflect critically on the epistemological possibilities, political limits and potential exclusions of integrating artistic and creative practices into Critical Data Studies.
Possible areas of engagement include, but are not limited to: data colonialism and extractivism; gender, race and inequality in datafied societies; infrastructures and the material politics of data; climate data and environmental justice; praxis; cultural memory and digital heritage; platforms and AI; public sector data systems and activists, community or counter-data practices.
Editorial form: an unbound issue
The issue will enact its methodological argument through its editorial form. Alongside full-length peer-reviewed articles, we envisage a curated set of shorter or experimental contributions, potentially including methods notes, visual essays, interviews or conversations, dossiers, object studies, field reports and conceptual interventions. Contributors may also propose forms appropriate to their methods and materials. Short cross-commentaries or conversations between contributors could draw out points of friction and reciprocity across scholarly, artistic and practice-based approaches.
Schedule and Submission
- Abstracts (max. 300 words) and short biographical note (max. 75 words) with specification of the type of submission (e.g. full length, short commentary [1000-3000 words], etc.): 15 October 2026
- Notification of authors/invitation to submit full/short paper: 15 November 2026
- Submission of full papers: 15 March 2027
- Peer review feedback: Spring / Summer 2027
- Final manuscript: Autumn 2027
- (Expected) Publication of special issue: Winter 2027
Please send your abstract and short biographical note by 15th October 2026 to methodsunbound@gmail.com as a PDF. Based on the abstract, the editors will pre-select authors that will be invited to submit a full contribution. All full papers will be double-blind peer reviewed.
References
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Borgdorff, H. (2012). The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Amsterdam University Press.
D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, L. F. (2020). Data feminism. The MIT Press.
Dahir, M., & McKittrick, K. (2026). The Poem, a Smile, and Black Feminist Placemaking. GeoHumanities, 1-18.
Dalton, C., & Thatcher, J. E. (2014). What does a critical data studies look like, and do we care ? Society + Space.https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/what-does-a-critical-data-studies-look-like-and-why-do-we-care
Drucker, J. (2020). Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display. The MIT Press.https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12523.001.0001
Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.
Iliadis, A., & Russo, F. (2016). Critical data studies: An introduction. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 205395171667423.https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716674238
Kara, H. (2024). The Bloomsbury Handbook of Creative Research Methods (1st ed). Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Kitchin, R. (2014). The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences. SAGE.
Kitchin, R. (2023) Arts-based methods for researching digital life. Data Stories Working Paper 1. https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/16870/
Leavy, P. (2015). Method Meets Art, Second Edition: Arts-Based Research Practice. Guilford Publications.
Odumosu, T., & Huber, S. (2022). Shooting Back/Speaking Forward. Visual Activism in the 21st Century: Art, Protest and Resistance in an Uncertain World, edited by Darcy White and Stephanie Hartle. Bloomsbury.
Pasquale, F. (2016). The black box society: The secret algorithms that control money and information (First Harvard University Press paperback edition). Harvard University Press.
Phoenix, C., & Chamberlain, K. (2025). Arts-based research: Attending to methods. Methods in Psychology, 12, 100179. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.metip.2025.100179
Ratto, M. (2011). Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life. The Information Society, 27(4), 252–260.https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2011.583819
Thylstrup, N. B., Agostinho, D., Ring, A., d’Ignazio, C., & Veel, K. (Eds.). (2021). Uncertain archives: Critical keywords for big data. MIT Press.
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Waltorp, K. & ARTlife Film Collective (2021). Notes from collaborative film-work in an Afghan-Danish Film Collective. Peripheral methodologies: Unlearning, not-knowing and ethnographic limits. Routledge