The Routledge Companion to Military Research Methods

This volume is concerned with the practices of conducting research on military issues. As an edited collection, the book brings together an extensive selection of authors whose chapters engage with a core concern about the process of conducting research on military issues from a range of perspectives. The military issues, and the research questions they raise, are wide-ranging, from the practicalities of doing research with military personnel, through to the challenges of visualising military activities. Each chapter in this volume: • Describes the nature of the military research topic under scrutiny and explains what research practices were undertaken and why. • Discusses author's research activities, addressing the nature of their engagement with their subjects and analyse what the method or approach under scrutiny actually did that was distinctive because of the military context or subject of the research. • Reflects on the author’s research experiences, and the specific, often unique, negotiations with the politics and practices of military institutions and military personnel before, during and after their research fieldwork. This volume will not only provide a focussed overview of methodological approaches to critical studies of the military and military institutions and processes of militarisation and practices of militarism, but will also, importantly, account for a growth in qualitative military research which is carried out beyond the intellectual confines of military research institutions. This definitive single volume coverage of how critical military research is being undertaken by social scientists and humanities scholars today, acts as a comprehensive guide for future research.

Alison J Williams is Lecturer in Human Geography at Newcastle University. She has researched and published on the geographies of military airspaces, the role of unmanned aerial vehicles in contemporary warfare and the geopolitics of US air power in the interwar Pacific. She has extensive experience of conducting archival and elite interview research as well as participant observation, observant participation and ethnographic research at a number of UK military bases and events. Rachel Woodward is Professor of Human Geography at Newcastle University. She has extensive experience of researching the military and is an internationally recognised expert on the geographies of military landscapes and the sociologies of military life. Her recent research has focused on military memoirs, and her research has been funded by a number of ESRC Standard Grants. K. Neil Jenkings is a Senior Research Associate at Newcastle University. He is a qualitative methodology specialist and has worked with Alison Williams and Rachel Woodward on a variety of ESRC-funded military research projects. Matthew Rech is a Teaching Fellow in Geography at Newcastle University. He completed his PhD research on the everyday geographies of military recruitment and the spaces and places of militarism in Geography at Newcastle University