ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the wider Whites Writing Whiteness project and Qualitative Longitudinal Research (QLR). WWW is a qualitative, documents of life based, QLR project. It is a truism that sociology came into existence as a means of investigating social change at a systemic level within capitalism, industrialisation and imperialism. Rather than taking individuals or families or organisations as its unit of analysis, the WWW project draws on Elia's ideas about figuration and develops this as domestic figuration. It also analyses Schreiner's letter-writing over time as an extension of her theorising, using a project-designed Virtual Research Environment (VRE) and its publications contribute to theorising letters and epistolarity. It does so by investigating letter-writing and letter-exchanges in a wide range of social networks over this period. It is from this porous character and representational trickiness of letter-writing that its capacity to act as an index of social change derives.
