In January 2025, the Palgrave Social Sciences team launched a new book series to support, encourage and facilitate excellence in interdisciplinary research in the social sciences and beyond: Advancing Methods for Interdisciplinarity in the Social Sciences. Our aim is to foster a spirit of crosspollination, inviting researchers to reflect on how research methods and methodologies can travel across research communities to inform collaborative and innovative approaches.
The series is currently accepting new submissions for monographs and edited collections on qualitative, quantitative, and mixed research methods that can be applied across various disciplines and fields.
Interdisciplinarity Matters Now
Social sciences researchers are often tackling questions that defy disciplinary boundaries: climate change, global health crises, digital transformations, migration, social inequality, to name a few. Addressing these complex challenges often requires new practices that enable dialogue and collaboration across fields.
As calls for interdisciplinarity grow louder, both demanding and inspiring new methodological interventions, guidance often lags behind. The ‘Advancing Methods for Interdisciplinarity in the Social Sciences’ series aims to fill this gap, offering a dedicated space for scholars to share experience-led, reflexive, and applied guidance for rigorous and impactful interdisciplinary research.
First Publications: Setting the Tone for Methodological Innovation
The launch of the series was marked by two publications in 2025: Using the Delphi Method to Establish Expert Consensus: A Practical Guide and Discourse Theory, Critical Discourse Studies and Corpus Linguistics.
The Open Access book Using the Delphi Method to Establish Expert Consensus: A Practical Guide, by Anthony Jorm, offers a rigorous yet accessible guide to implementing the Delphi method to establish a consensus across the broad range of social, psychological, health and environmental sciences. Discourse Theory, Critical Discourse Studies and Corpus Linguistics by Katy Brown brings together Poststructuralist Discourse Theory, Critical Discourse Studies, and Corpus Linguistics, demonstrating how theoretical and computational approaches can be integrated to enrich discourse analysis. Together, these books set the foundation for the series’ focus on methodological pluralism and high-impact practices.
Looking Ahead: Expanding Horizons in 2026
The transdisciplinary ethos of the series is set to deepen in 2026 with exciting new titles inviting scholars to rethink methods in various socio-cultural and scientific contexts, including:
- Relational Research and the Reimagination of Academic Inquiry: Constructing New Horizons in Knowledge, Methodology and Beyond, edited by Celiane Camargo-Borges and Margaret Slaska, explores the potential of relational research as a creative and participatory mean to produce knowledge, bringing together insights from social construction, intersectional feminist frameworks, decolonial practices, queer theories, and queer worldmaking.
- A Practical Guide to Mixed Methods Critical Discourse Analysis by Paul Saurette, Matthieu Grandpierron, Kelly Gordon and Robert Marinov offers a A-Z roadmap about how to design, undertake and communicate the results of a mixed methods approach to critical discourse analysis in the social sciences.
- Researching Sensitive Topics In Social Science by Amy Burrell shows how to develop a research project that focuses on sensitive issues, such as sexual health, sexual habits, drug taking, mental health, eating disorders, or domestic violence, while addressing challenges in recruitment and data collection in a sensitive population.
These forthcoming works reinforce the series’ commitment to methodological creativity, critical interventions, and practical applications.
Who is involved?
The series boasts an international editorial board, with expertise that spans sociology, criminology, STS, education, psychology, and politics:
- Aek Phakiti, University of Sydney, Australia
- Amy Burrell, University of Birmingham, UK
- Bridget Harris, University of Monash, Australia
- Chris Fould, Anglia Ruskin, UK
- Dawn Knight, Cardiff University, UK
- Gloria González-López, University of Texas at Austin, USA
- Ivan da Costa Marques, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- James Beaufils, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
- Jonathan Wyatt, The University of Edinburgh, UK
- Juan Piovani, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina
- Lesley Gourlay, UCL, UK Lois Presser, University of Tennessee, USA
- Michael Chataway, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
- Naveen Thayyil, IIT Delhi, India
- Nikki Fairchild, University of Portsmouth, UK
- Phil Murphy, Middlebury Institute, USA
- Roger Norum, University of Oulu, Finland
- Seyyed-Abdolhamid Mirhosseini, Hong Kong University, Hong Kong
- Simon Hayhoe, University of Exeter, UK
- Wayne Fife, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Submit your proposal
We invite researchers and interdisciplinary teams to contribute to this growing dialogue. If you are interested in discussing a book idea, please reach out to publisher contacts Marion Duval (marion.duval@palgrave.com), Clelia Petracca (clelia.petracca@palgrave.com), or Rebecca Longtin (rebecca.longtin@palgrave-usa.com).