The topic lists below are indicative rather than exhaustive. All tracks welcome proposals engaging with emerging debates and innovations that continue to (re)shape research methods. Full descriptions of each Community, including complete topic lists, community ethos, and interactive formats, are available on the Conference website
Qualitative and Interpretive Community Track
This track focuses on qualitative and interpretive research as methodological practice, encouraging reflexive engagement with research design, analysis, interpretation, and ethics.
Indicative topics include:
- Qualitative and interpretive research designs, including work in progress
- Methodological frameworks and epistemological reflections in qualitative research
- Practical challenges in qualitative analysis (e.g. coding, quality, transparency, reflexivity)
- Digital and computational tools in qualitative analysis, including language models
- Feminist, Indigenous, decolonial, creative, arts-based, and visual methods
- Participatory, relational, and care-centric research practices
- Methodological innovations and comparative reflections across qualitative approaches
Case-Based Methods & Comparative Methods Community Track
This track brings together scholars developing or applying case-based, comparative, and configurational approaches, with a focus on research design, causal inference, and methodological integration.
Indicative topics include:
- Innovations in case selection and comparative research designs (e.g. nested designs; micro–meso–macro comparisons)
- Multimethod data collection in small- and intermediate-N research
- Process tracing, causal mechanisms, equifinality, and theory testing
- Set-theoretic and configurational methods (QCA, CNA, Analytic Induction)
- Case-informed mixed methods and integration with quantitative approaches
- Concept formation, calibration, and measurement across contexts
- Comparative historical analysis and the role of time
- Uses of AI in case-based and comparative research
Statistical and Computational Approaches Community Track
This track focuses on computational, statistical, and data-intensive approaches to social research, including their theoretical, ethical, and epistemological implications.
Indicative topics include:
- Computational text analysis: innovations on machine-learning applications, topic-modelling, and other modelling techniques.
- Large Language Models (LLMs): development, evaluation, and applications
- Multilingual, cross-cultural, and historical computational research
- Causal inference methods: innovations on DiD, IV, regression discontinuity, and other causal inference techniques.
- Network analysis, social systems, and information diffusion
- Multimodal social data (text, image, audio, video)
- Digital data collection, measurement, and data quality
- Human–AI interaction and socio-technical systems
- Algorithmic accountability, ethics, fairness, and governance
- Theory, epistemology, and reproducibility in computational social science
- Computational social science
- Social complexity and agent-based modelling (ABM)
- Urban complex system
Mixed Methods Community Track
This track brings together scholars working with mixed methods research (MMR), focusing on integration, design reasoning, collaboration, and innovation.
Indicative topics include:
- Integration in mixed methods research (design-driven and analysis-driven)
- Inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning in MMR
- AI-supported, visual, and creative approaches in mixed methods
- Building and managing mixed methods research teams
- Reflexivity and researcher positionality in MMR
- Applications of mixed methods in feminist, intervention, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary research
- Methodological challenges and critical reflections in mixed methods practice
Methods and the Global South Community Track
This track focuses on Methods Excellence from the Global South, highlighting methodological innovation rooted in Global South contexts, with particular attention to ethics, epistemic justice, and locally grounded understandings of research impact.
Indicative topics include:
- Context-driven methodological adaptation and innovation
- Epistemic justice and ethical co-creation of knowledge
- Redefining impact and research valorisation
- Pedagogies for methodological excellence in the Global South
- Case studies of transformative research practice
- AI and digital methods: promise, risk, and positionality in global research
Research Methods Teaching Community of Practice Track
This track brings together scholars engaged in the teaching and learning of research methods across disciplines and educational contexts.
Indicative topics include:
- Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in research methods education
- AI in the research methods classroom
- Innovative assessment, experiential learning, and ungrading
- Teaching methods across modalities (online, field-based, classroom)
- Supervising student research as methods pedagogy
- Teaching the “invisible” aspects of doing research
- Decolonising and Indigenising research methods curricula
Final note and participation guidelines
Authors do not need to “fit perfectly” into a single Community. The topic lists are intended to guide self-selection, not restrict submissions. Proposals that cut across Communities, challenge established boundaries, or explore emerging methods are especially welcome.
Participants are expected to engage actively with the Papers submitted by their co-Panelists and to contribute as discussants. During the submission process, authors may indicate whether they would be willing to act as a Panel chair for a relevant methodological area. Please note that Panel chairs must attend the Conference in person.
Upon notification of acceptance and allocation to a specific session, and as the Conference approaches, authors will be encouraged (but not required) to share with other session participants any materials that may support discussion. This may include a draft paper, a short synopsis, presentation slides, previous related work, or other materials reflecting the content of the presentation. Sharing such materials in advance is intended to facilitate constructive exchange and richer discussion during the session, while remaining fully flexible to different stages and formats of work.
The Conference proceedings will be published. All Paper (co-)authors who wish their Paper to be included in the proceedings will receive further instructions in due time. The Conference features 2 awards: a “Best Paper award” and an “Early career best Paper award”. Specifics (nomination criteria, procedure etc.) will be communicated in due time.
Authors must disclose the use of generative AI or AI-assisted technologies in their research or writing. Disclosures should specify the tool used and the nature of its application (e.g., proofreading, data visualization, etc.). AI cannot be listed as an author; presenters remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, and integrity of all content.
Shape the Future of Methodology
Register Today!