Jennifer Buckley, University of Manchester – "Finding and Using Data: Free E‑learning Modules” The poster will showcase a series of eLearning modules developed by the UK Data Service in collaboration with three ESRC Doctoral Training Partnerships. These free, self paced online modules are open to anyone who wants to learn how to find, assess, and use data responsibly. They are especially useful for those starting their own research projects, offering a practical introduction to sourcing and working with social research data. The course is made up of eight short modules, which you can complete in any order and return to whenever you need. Finish all eight modules to receive a certificate of completion. Modules cover topics such as types and sources of data, evaluating and accessing datasets, ethical considerations, navigating datasets, and reproducible research. We will also include an interactive element where attendees can tell us what data related training they need. Vermon Washington, Hertie School - “Small light today, big light tomorrow: Electricity Access in Liberia” When the Mount Coffee Hydropower plant (with 88MW capacity) was rehabilitated in 2016, there was a strong expectation that it would expand access to electricity in Liberia for the approximately 5 million people without it, but that has not quite been the case, as only those mostly in urban areas have benefited from the project. Using Afrobarometer data from rounds four to nine, ESMAP data from the World Bank, and geocoordinate shapefiles, this poster uses spatial analysis to evaluate pre- and post-access rates for communities in rural and urban areas, as well as those near grid infrastructure, and examines how access rates improve over the 13-year study period. The findings show that electricity access increased significantly for those in urban areas, and those within 10km of grid infrastructure experienced a 44.2-percentage-point increase in reported electricity access after the Mount Coffee plant began operation in 2016. Meanwhile, those in rural areas remain deprived, with 93% lower odds of access to electricity. The results have underlying policy relevance and indicate that policymakers in Liberia must focus on rural electrification projects and provide optimal subsidies for off-grid electricity pathways. Additionally, interventions to improve electricity access should target rural areas first to reduce the rural-urban gap. Laia Nualart Moratalla, Autonomous University of Barcelona - “Qualitative GIS as a Methodological Link in Socio-Spatial Research: Integrating Interviews and Observation” The recent integration of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) into Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) has expanded the methodological possibilities for socio-spatial research. This poster presents the role of qualitative GIS as a methodological junction point in the integration of interviews and qualitative observation within a study examining the influence of urban space on the development of individual social networks. In the initial research design, interviews and observation were only indirectly connected, as they addressed different dimensions of the research object. The use of qualitative GIS, implemented through ATLAS.ti and its integrated spatial tools, allowed for a more direct and systematic link between both methods. It facilitated the spatialisation of interview data, the comparison and synthesis of information from multiple sources, and the identification of spatial patterns relevant to the research aims. The poster reflects on the methodological implications of using qualitative GIS to connect distinct qualitative methods and discusses its contribution to integrating geographical and narrative dimensions in socio-spatial research. Zhuo Wang, University of Manchester – "Digital Subjectivity as Affective Practice: An Autoethnography of a Researcher-Influencer's Platformed Journey” How do connections to people and place shape the methods we employ? This poster addresses this question by presenting critical autoethnography as a method forged through deep, sustained connection to both a digital community and its participants. My research explores the affective digital practices of Chinese female international students on Xiaohongshu—a field I access not as an outsider, but as a long-term community member and content creator. This "insider-outsider" positionality enables a form of research where connection is not a barrier to objectivity but the very foundation of insight. Through systematic self-archaeology of my own posts, comments, and platform metrics, I examine how affective labour (strategic sharing of anxiety, hope, cultural negotiation) builds relational solidarity. This method collapses the researcher/researched binary, allowing emotional practice to be analysed from within. The poster critically reflects on how this connective approach reshapes understandings of rigour, power, and ethics. It argues that methods built on genuine connection do not compromise social science—they transform it, generating situated knowledge that is both analytically rigorous and socially responsible. Joanna Hayes, University of Liverpool - “Connecting the dots: Using ripple effects mapping to evaluate the role of community connectors” Connecting the dots: Using ripple effects mapping to evaluate the role of community connectors." The Heseltine Institute carried out an evaluation of two roles funded by L30’s Million Big Local partnership: a Community Builder and a Health and Wellbeing Connector. In asset-based community development (ABCD) terms, both are connectors: neighbourhood-based practitioners who help build thriving communities through the 3Cs of connectorship – capacity, connectivity and commonality. The evaluation used embedded research and appreciative inquiry techniques including ripple effects mapping to consider how these roles have contributed to change in the community. It found that the connectors effectively strengthened local networks and community participation, creating ripple effects as residents themselves became new connectors. The ripple effects mapping was a powerful process. Community members said it was empowering to tell their stories and deepened their relationships with each other. The poster will focus on the ripple effects mapping, using experiences from the evaluation to illustrate how it can be used – including facilitating the mapping process, recording and analysing the data, and combining it with other methods – and to highlight aspects to consider. Maria Mercedes Fleitas Delgado, University of Manchester– "Decomposition of Group Differentials” Understanding unexplained differences in outcomes between social groups, such as income gaps between men and women, is central to social science research and policy. Traditional decomposition methods often rely on models that estimate global averages, implicitly assuming that wage gaps are uniform across populations. However, social inequalities are shaped by local contexts. This research introduces a new non-parametric method for decomposing group differentials inspired by Topological Data Analysis. Rather than imposing a single global structure, the method identifies locally comparable individuals in covariate space using balls and estimates outcome differences within these groups. By comparing individuals with the same observed characteristics from different groups, any remaining outcome difference reflects unexplained disparities. This approach connects people, context, and methodological purpose, offering a novel way to study inequality. Ganapathy Muthuthandavam , University of Liverpool – "How Environmental Policies Regulate Sustainability in Supply Chains? A Synthesis of Responses to develop an Enactment-Paradox Framework” Supply chain response (SCR) to environmental policy (EP) is a broad notion that includes a variety of operational, behavioural, and strategic changes in supply chains to respond to the policy. These transformations are not straightforward, significant implementation difficulties, and strategic challenges are experienced due to organisational capacities, and the particulars of the policies. The primary objective of this study is to comprehensively synthesise and expand the knowledge of SCR to the EP, identify the tensions emerged due to the strategic and operational decisions, and management of these tensions by using data-driven approach to literature review. Given this background, we specifically focus on answering the following research questions (RQs): RQ1 - What are the key themes emerging in literature investigating supply chain responses to sustainability policies? RQ2 - How Environmental Policies Regulate Sustainability in Supply Chains? Using a topic modelling approach called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we aim to unbiasedly determine the underlying subject structures and their frequency in an extensive body of scholarly literature. By avoiding subjective classification, this approach will allow the identification of discrete theme clusters that reflect different SCR to the EP, and pinpoint important research gaps, and suggest significant directions for future research. Also, this review is produced a strong and empirically supported conceptual framework on enactment and paradox theory (Enactment-Paradox Framework) of SCRs. This framework is helpful to capture the cognitive complexity and inherent tensions to achieve the sustainable supply chain outcome Alaa AlSaffar, University of Leicester - “Emotions and Bodies as Change-agents in Researching Organisations” This study reflects on how emotions and bodies serve as portals to affective and epistemic knowledge in organisational change research. While traditional methods often focus on rationality, logic, and masculine sensibilities, this work, grounded in feminist and phenomenological approaches, highlights the researcher’s body and emotions as primary sites for embodied and relational understanding of emotional experiences. Adopting (auto)ethnographic and embodied methods and drawing from empirical fieldwork materials on emotions during organisational digital change, I explore how bodies and emotions, through their sensitivity, attunement, and vulnerability, act as gateways to change within organisations. Ultimately, the study emphasizes the need of recognising non-verbal, sensual, and intangible elements often overlooked in conventional qualitative research, advocating for other ways of knowing, researching, and writing organisations during change. Cesar Vicencio Vega, University of Manchester – “Drawing the Discard: Layered Visual Methods for Researching Extractive Urbanism in Chuquicamata, Chile” This research proposes that visual representation methods are not a complement to analysis, but its constitutive language. Studying urban discard in Chuquicamata, Chile, each analytical pattern requires a distinct graphic system: economic optimisation is represented through operational diagrams that visualise corporate extractive logic; selective sacrifice is documented through planimetry and photography that record the physical transformation of the inhabited territory; and community topology is expressed through flow diagrams and sketches that capture the breakdown of residential and labour practices. This approach emerges from an insider positionality that combines lived experience as a former camp resident and CODELCO employee with ethnography conducted during the 110th anniversary of Chuquicamata in May 2025. The event functioned as a methodological device, enabling observation of how community, territory and memory paradoxically coexist under corporate management. The poster proposes that the choice of graphic language is itself an epistemological decision, and discusses how different methods of representation can capture distinct dimensions of the same territorial phenomenon. Brogan Pritchard, University of Manchester - “What does the body know?: Body-mapping and embodied inquiry in feminist prison health research” In recent years, there have been calls to make criminology more creative, particularly in its engagement with the sensory, affective, and bodily aspects of experience. This poster focuses on a novel creative method called body-mapping, which is a co-productive cartographic tool for visualising and representing embodied experiences. Embodiment, in this case, refers to the idea of not only having, but being and living through a body, something that is mostly neglected in criminological research. Drawing on reflections from a project that explores menstruation in women’s prisons in England, it makes the case for the use of body-mapping to both foreground material prison experiences and situate them within discursive penal power structures. Blending, for the first time, feminist phenomenology, criminology, and critical menstrual studies, this poster demonstrates the utility of embodied methods for illustrating health experiences in prison, advocating for the adoption of techniques that centralise the body as an epistemic agent to enrich knowledge production practices in custodial settings. Alongside this, the poster also considers pragmatic issues in the use of body-mapping; this includes organising and facilitating a workshop in prison, and techniques of analysis, both of which are accompanied by a discussion on ethics, carceral power, and epistemic justice. Simon Rudkin, University of Manchester - “Persistent Homology and the Dynamic Social Systems” Persistent homology when applied to time series allows the capturing of phase transitions, periodic behaviours and dynamics which are missed by widely adopted time series methods. As the volume of high frequency time series data within the social sciences grows, it is prudent to look to methodologies in the literature of areas that have been analysing higher frequency series. This poster provides a methodological introduction to persistent homology and offers a series of examples of the new insights offered. Examples are drawn from submissions in the DATA70302 Topological Data Analysis module. Data sources include Google Trends, Mobility Data, Epidemiology case numbers, and others. Each example provides the launch point for further research, and is presented as an illustration of the value of thinking about the information contained within data on dynamic social systems. Gideon Olanrewaju, University of Manchester - “Divergent Voices in a Shared Inquiry: Design-Based Research, Displaced Teachers, and the Future of Development Knowledge Production” Development research has long grappled with a methodological paradox: those closest to the realities of crisis are typically furthest from the processes through which knowledge about crisis is produced. There have been repeated waves of reform, from participatory action research through the ‘decolonising methodologies’ turn, yet extractive knowledge of production persists in fragile settings. More recently, Design-Based Research (DBR) has emerged as a methodology whose commitments to practitioner co-design, iterative adaptation, and locally grounded design principles may create conditions for dialogic knowledge generation. At a time when development scholarship confronts questions about its own future, this poster presents a doctoral study operationalizing this possibility: a Technology-Assisted Lesson Study model for Assessment for Learning among displaced community teachers in Maiduguri, northeast Nigeria. The study positions this intervention not as a technical mechanism but as a dialogic encounter, one in which displaced teachers’ contextual knowledge, expressed through Hausa- and Kanuri-mediated reflective cycles, enters into productive tension with the normative assumptions of Western-origin assessment frameworks. The poster argues that when displaced practitioners become co-designers rather than research subjects, the resulting knowledge is neither extractive nor merely consultative but constitutive of a shared inquiry whose methodological implications extend beyond education into development research more broadly. Oluwatosin Ajibola, University of Manchester - “A Socio-Legal Methodology for Investigating Black Maternal Health in England” This research employs a mixed-methods approach to investigate how immigration, welfare, and healthcare laws and policies operate as structural determinants of maternal morbidity and mortality among recent Black migrant women in England. This research integrates the examination of statutory laws and policies with empirical narratives to demonstrate their practical application. It centers on conducting semi-structured interviews with recent Black migrant women who have accessed maternity services in England within the last five years, capturing lived experiences of navigating legal, welfare, and healthcare systems, ensuring their voices are acknowledged and validated, thereby actively confronting the medical system's historical tendency to disregard Black women's pain. Furthermore, focus group discussions will be conducted with professionals in law, policy, and maternal health advocacy to gather institutional perspectives. This approach aims to triangulate findings and enhance the study's credibility by illustrating how practitioners engage with and enforce laws and policies concerning Black pregnant women. By comparing written laws and policies with real-world practice, this research bridges the gap between law and medical ethics, aiming to produce actionable policy recommendations that promote substantive health equity in the English maternity system. Rafaella Konstantinou, University of Liverpool - “Strategic Stakeholder Management and Greenwashing in the Fashion Industry” This research explores how fashion brands manage stakeholder relationships in response to greenwashing concerns. The fashion industry has faced growing scrutiny due to the misalignment between sustainability claims and actual environmental practices, raising significant managerial and ethical challenges. Existing research largely focuses on marketing practices or consumer perceptions of greenwashing. Yet, how firms strategically engage stakeholders to address and mitigate these risks remains underexplored. Drawing on Stakeholder Theory and the Power–Interest Matrix, this study adopts an interpretivist qualitative approach to examine how firms identify, prioritise, and engage stakeholders with varying levels of influence and interest, including NGOs, regulators, and investors. Seeking to understand how managers interpret and respond to stakeholder expectations, regulatory pressures, and sustainability demands, the research explores how these shape corporate communication and stakeholder engagement strategies. Primary data will be collected through semi-structured interviews and the analysis of corporate communications (LSEG Transcripts & Briefs database). Using multiple qualitative data sources, the study develops a deeper understanding of how strategic stakeholder management is constructed in response to greenwashing concerns. The study contributes to stakeholder theory by linking stakeholder prioritisation with organisational responses to sustainability-related risks. Shivani Mishra, University of Liverpool - “How Do You Review a Moving Target? Conducting an Integrative Literature Review on AI in Supply Chains” Reviewing artificial intelligence research presents a methodological challenge that systematic reviews were not designed for: the literature moves faster than the review process. This paper reports on the design and execution of an Integrative Literature Review (ILR) examining how AI is deployed at cross-functional interfaces within supply chain operations, a domain where publication volume doubled between 2021 and 2025. Drawing on Whittemore and Knafl's (2005) ILR framework, adapted through Cronin and George's (2020) guidance for management research, this study makes three methodological choices worth examining. First, it uses Web of Science as the primary database with Scopus cross-validation, testing the sensitivity of corpus composition to source selection. Second, it adopts a deductive-inductive coding approach , using theory (Dynamic Capabilities View, Relational View) to anchor the coding scheme while remaining open to emergent themes. Third, it develops an original regime vocabulary (AIR, DGR, RCR) during the synthesis stage, demonstrating how conceptual frameworks can be built inductively from thematic comparison rather than imposed prior to analysis. The presentation reflects critically on what worked, what didn't, and what an ILR can and cannot do when the field under review is still forming.
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