Mattering the Plotlands: Developing a Diffractive Interdisciplinary Methodology for Research with Precarious Informal Communities

With Katie McClymont, Richard Bower & Kate Monson

This project engages Bewdley, Worcestershire — its urgency, its complexity, its resistance to formal categorisation — as a field laboratory to develop, test, and refine an original interdisciplinary methodology for researching precarious informal communities and understanding what they reveal about contemporary polycrises of housing, ecology, and belonging. The approach is diffractive: rather than placing disciplines in parallel or seeking convergence, it places genuinely different epistemological lenses in productive contact, treating the tensions and differences between them as sources of knowledge rather than noise to be managed. The research group spans art, philosophy, photography, social science, planning, human geography, and architecture. Over twelve months, we undertake two intensive field visits to Bewdley, working directly with place and community through qualitative a spectrum of methods. A dedicated research assistant provides cross-disciplinary coordination, facilitating the creative tensions of the diffractive co-design events.