Timescapes 10 Festival to celebrate groundbreaking study into family life a decade on

The Timescapes 10 Festival will showcase a decade of major advances in qualitative longitudinal methods, 10 years on from the conclusion of the Timescapes study into family life and relationships.

Organised by the Timescapes Archive and the National Centre for Research Methods, the prestigious festival will take place at the the University of Southampton and online from Monday 5 September to Friday 16 September, with a packed line up of international symposia, panel sessions, video provocations, sandpits, and demonstrator events. 

The Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Timescapes study was the first major qualitative longitudinal study to be funded in the UK, and explored how personal and family relationships develop and change over time. Relationships with parents, grandparents, siblings, children, partners, friends and lovers were the focus, with researchers from five universities, including the University of Leeds, investigating how these relationships affected people's well-being and life chances. 

Setting out to advance Qualitative Longitudinal (QL) research, archiving and the re-use of QL data, the study created a network of empirical projects, a secondary analysis programme and a range of training and capacity building activities, including an archive of QL data: the Timescapes Archive. A unique, specialist resource for QL data curated for the purposes of reuse, and a satellite repository for the UK Data Service, the Timescapes Archive continues to flourish, having tripled its data holdings and developed a new 'Big Qual' teaching and training dataset that is internationally available and free to use. 

Groundbreaking projects produced new insights into the dynamics of personal relationships and family life, ‘walking alongside’ individuals and family groups as their lives unfolded. This allowed the exploration of how personal lives intersect with the broader sweep of historical change, capturing the intricacies of biographical and intergenerational processes.  

This is the first international Festival of its kind and is hosting some of the most prestigious international thinkers to showcase a decade of advances in qualitative longitudinal methods.

Registration for Timescapes 10 is now open and for a fee of £10, delegates can enjoy a range of informative, thematic events that are taking place across the two weeks of the conference. 

These include sessions with archives such as UKDA, Mass Observations and the Timescapes Archive, as well as presentations and training delivered by senior international and interdisciplinary scholars. 

Register on the University of Southhampton’s event page.  

Dr Kahryn Hughes, director of the Timescapes Archive and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, says the festival will showcase state-of-the-art research. 

She said: “This is the first international Festival of its kind and is hosting some of the most prestigious international thinkers to showcase a decade of advances in qualitative longitudinal methods,  qualitative secondary analysis and qualitative archives.  

“There is a new event for every day of the 10-day festival, each one bringing together academic leaders presenting state of the art research on a particular theme or topic. This online festival is aimed at academics at all career stages.” 

Confirmed keynote speakers include: 

• Barbara Adam, Professor of Sociology, University of Cardiff 
• Bren Neale, Professor of Life Course and Family Research, University of Leeds 
• Mike Savage, Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics 
• Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology, University of Southampton 
• Mr Masud Khokhar, University Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds 

For more information and the full programme of events, visit the Timescapes 10 event page.