We are delighted to announce a one-day workshop for PhD students and early career researchers engaging with the work of Margaret Archer. It is the first event of a new network intended to support people working with her ideas and to build a community around them. The workshop is free to attend, lunch is included, and a limited number of travel bursaries are available.
Archer’s work has had a profound impact on social theory, from conceptual debates about structure and agency to her later work on reflexivity and the nature of our times. Much of the most interesting engagement with it now happens in doctoral and early career research, where her concepts are put to work on empirical problems she never addressed. The workshop is designed to bring that work together, in a setting where unfinished ideas are welcome and the aim is to help each other move forward.
We invite papers which put Archer’s work to use, rather than papers about her work as such. Possible themes include:
- Designing research with the morphogenetic approach: framing a project in terms of morphogenetic cycles, deciding how to periodise, and what analytical dualism means in practice when working with interview, documentary or quantitative data.
- Researching reflexivity: studying the internal conversation and the modes of reflexivity empirically, and the methodological problems this raises.
- Archer in your field: how her concepts travel into education, management, health, social work and other fields where much critical realist research now happens, and what is gained or lost in translation.
- Responding to critics: how to answer the objections you meet from supervisors, examiners and reviewers working from other traditions, and where you think those objections land.
- Extending Archer: applying her work to problems she did not address, such as digital platforms, AI, climate and the politics of crisis.
Papers framed around a problem you are stuck on are as welcome as papers reporting findings, and we would particularly encourage them.
We define early career as anyone who has not yet secured a permanent post, including PhD students, postdoctoral researchers and colleagues on fixed-term contracts. We encourage interdisciplinary perspectives and contributions from fields such as philosophy, anthropology, education, management and political science.
Format. Papers will be presented in small panels of 15 minutes each, with plenty of time for discussion. Work in progress, including thesis chapters, is very welcome. The afternoon will include a session on the practicalities of working with Archer in a PhD and a discussion of what the network should do next.
Submitting. Please send a 300-word abstract to mark.carrigan AT manchester.ac.uk by 30 November 2026, with a sentence on your career stage. Colleagues who would like to attend without presenting are also very welcome, and can register via the same form.
Travel bursaries. We have a small number of bursaries of up to £100 towards travel. Priority will go to presenters who do not have access to institutional funding. If you would like to be considered, please indicate this on the form with an estimate of your costs.
