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There is no doubt that this is an exciting time for social research methods. The world is changing and so too are the methods used to understand it. Methods have always been areas of scholarship that researchers can engage with the social world in potentially emancipatory manner. Given the increased interdependence between data and method in the digital era, critically interrogating methods and methodologies is as urgent as it has ever been.

The problem of being part of the social systems which we also want to study epitomizes the social researcher’s permanent empirical paradox: how can social research enable social phenomena to be adequately understood and explained whilst at the same time being constantly changed and disrupted by, and within, the very phenomena being examined? How are we to continue to try to understand the social as it, itself is constantly changing? What methods and methodologies both help and hinder our quest to understand the social in the making, in the past, present and future? What can we learn about the kind of social research methodology that has been discussed by authors across the world over time?

These are the kinds of questions which have fuelled this journal since it began and continue to do so today.