Emma Davidson

Emma Davidson is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy and Qualitative Research Methods at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She is Co-Director of both the Binks Hub and the Centre for Research on Families and Relationships. Her work sits at the intersection of qualitative methodology, social policy, youth studies, and community-engaged research. Her methodological work has two central strands. The first focuses on Big Qual research. She is co-author of Big Qual: A Guide to Breadth-and-Depth Analysis, which makes a key contribution to working carefully with large, complex and diverse qualitative datasets. The second focuses on creative, arts-informed and participatory methods through her work co-leading the Binks Hub, where she explores how co-creative forms of knowledge can be shared, valued and used as evidence in policy and practice. Across these strands, Emma is interested in how qualitative research can attend to complexity, temporality, relationships, lived experience and social change.

Keynote Talk: The art of slow research

Universities are increasingly shaped by cultures of speed: compressed funding timelines, demands for productivity and impact, and pressures to move quickly from research questions to measurable outputs. Yet meaningful community-engaged research often requires something different. It needs time to listen, to build relationships and trust, to experiment, and to allow questions and collaborations to develop in unexpected directions. Drawing on my research with the Binks Hub at the University of Edinburgh, this presentation explores the possibilities and challenges of practising slow research within the contemporary university. I consider slowness not simply as taking longer to do research, but as a deliberate, relational and reflective approach to knowledge production. Using examples from qualitative research collaborations with community organisations in Scotland, I explore what becomes possible when research is understood as a process and an experience, rather than simply a product. The presentation argues that slowness can create space for more creative, ethical and potentially more impactful research. But it also asks a more challenging question: who is actually able to work slowly now? In a context of precarity, shrinking resources and intensifying workloads, slow research should not simply become another individual responsibility. If we really do value careful and collaborative community-led research, we also need to consider the institutional conditions that make it possible.