New imprint/series from Punctum Books!

The world is messy. A method is a rigorous way of getting messy in the world.

The Advanced Methods imprint/series begins from the premise that it is not only possible but necessary to develop new methods that make unprecedented onto-epistemic cuts in the bodily, institutional, and political fabric of the world. Despite much criticism of method since Feyerabend, there remains no more effective intervention in the hierarchy of knowledges than the development of new research methods. Indeed, methodology is a key site of struggle in the politics of knowledge. This imprint publishes short works that bridge critical theory and experimental practice, offering new practical and conceptual frameworks for radical methodological intervention. Its guiding thread is the organization of critical philosophical thought around the concrete practicalities of method.

Books published by the Advanced Methods imprint will offer concrete techniques, protocols, strategies, and implementations along with rigorous critical and philosophical contexts for understanding their implications. They will put forward new models that combine approaches from the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences in unexpected, innovative, and challenging ways, as well as reexaminations and unearthings of forgotten or misunderstood methods of the past. Recognizing the power and responsibility of researchers to shape the world and the future, we call for flexible and effective instantiations of queer methods, black methods, indigenous methods, posthumanist methods, new materialist methods, audiovisual methods, embodied methods, postcritical methods, action methods, auto-experimental methods, and more.

In what form can contemporary methods be articulated? A set of instructions? A collage of diagrams, charts, and photographs? Poetic evocations? Conceptual frameworks? What balance can be struck between concrete and abstract, positive and negative, rational and affective, to achieve a maximum of onto-epistemological transmission in book form? The Advanced Methods imprint aims to expand the form and content of research within and beyond the university.