ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the book’s distinctive response to the challenge of achieving anti-essentialist methods for social research. An introduction to anti-essentialism is offered for researchers who recognise the significance of such thinking and are looking for ways to operationalise it in their empirical work. The critical potential of relational method is explored. This not only moves away from accounts trapped in the self-evidence of essentialised categories; but also emphasises dialogue with the empirical rather than allowing a fall into the idealisms of detached theory. The book’s focus on diagramming is introduced. It is argued that diagrams in social research are often implicit in texts. They also only too easily reify description into categories of an essentialist kind. The chapter then starts the process of considering the design of diagrams that fulfil relational non-essentialist principles. As part of this, a central claim is presented – that research is its own activity and involves the creation of worlds other than those of the researched. This recontextualisation involves a process of rupture: using the artifice of relational method to break with essentialist categories. The relational method that informs and is developed in subsequent chapters, Dowling’s Social Activity Method, is then introduced.
