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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to consider what safeguarding responses to discriminatory abuse and hate crime might learn from existing research on restorative justice and to drive practice development based on available evidence. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is based on a scoping review of literature using four academic databases and reference harvesting. This comprised a critical appraisal of 30 articles, which were thematically analysed to appreciate the benefits and challenges of restorative justice responses to hate crime and how this might inform safeguarding responses to discriminatory abuse and hate crime. Findings: The analysis identifies four domains where learning can be drawn. These relate to theory on restorative justice; restorative justice practices; perspectives from lived experience of restorative justice and hate crime; and an appraisal of critiques about restorative justice. Originality/value: This paper connects the emerging evidence on restorative criminal justice responses to hate crime to the "turn" towards strengths-based practices in adult safeguarding. Although this provides a fertile environment for embedding restorative practices, the authors argue certain precautions are required based on evidence from existing research on hate crime and restorative justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between crisis and experience, concentrating on 'excentric positionality' in relation to the shared world, as presented in the work of Helmuth Plessner. A by-product of the 1920s Weimar Germany, Plessner's philosophical anthropology, it is argued, presents us with a forgotten blueprint for transitive and compositional approaches to the social world. Instead of the familiar 'crisis of experience' used to diagnose 'what has gone wrong', it allows us to re-learn how to work with 'the experience of crisis' itself. The latter holds the key to a different type of approach based on 'xeno-communication'. This type of communication utilizes the productive potential of crisis in its uncertainty and hesitation before a decision, showing a way to extend and enlarge experience itself. Cultivation of these 'excentric' dynamics in turn suggests new 'excentric methodologies' based on a more flexible fit between concepts and the worlds they are meant to describe. 'Excentric methodologies' constitute a type of experience-based, analytical response to the shared world. They work with phenomena across spaces and problems, analytically utilizing their joint emergence from the fundamental imbalance and discontinuity characteristic of the human environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Audio recording interviews, focus groups, and naturally occurring interactions have been utilised by social researchers for decades. Yet, the use of audio recordings as a tool to elicit participant responses has received less attention in social science research. This is despite heightened interest in non-traditional techniques such as the use of visual methodologies, and arts-based methods. In this article, I describe how I advanced a known method, vignettes, into an audio narrative to explore perceptions of sex work. This article reports on the methodological rationale for the novel use of audio vignettes, and the capacity they have for memory retrieval, eliciting reflections on lived experiences, and for providing richer attitudinal data. By drawing on 'accessibility theory', this article argues that audio vignettes are a powerful elicitor of attitudes. Furthermore, I claim that audio methods as I define them, can enhance the social scientists' toolkit and that, what I term 'audio sociology' needs further development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies in design research and science and technology studies (STS) have investigated how speculative thinking might be applied in empirical contexts. A unifying feature of speculative approaches has been an interest in futures as mediated, shaped and conditioned by science and technology. Yet concrete methodological conditions of speculative research events remain under-explored. There is a need for a more nuanced understanding of speculation 'as it works'. While speculation does not constitute a unified method or analytical grid with a defined set of elements, speculative research is not innocently playful or free of methodological constraints. Speculation denotes here philosophically driven knowledge production conducted with research participants on science, technology and futures. Based on experiences of two social science and two design research cases in cellular reprogramming and genomic engineering, we illustrate and theorize our methodological observations on what takes place in speculative practices with participants. Drawing on Whitehead's and Stengers' conceptual work on experiential practices of knowing, we develop the concept of 'the gap' to describe the mode of speculative engagement that shapes concrete relations and positioning in research events. Contingent and situated, the gap of speculative action builds on openness, uncertainty and hesitation. Achieving the gap is the aim of speculative engagement and also a methodologically elusive, risky part of the study process. The concept of the gap helps illustrate what researchers ask from participants in the name of speculative openness, and how participants position themselves in these encounters. It allows us to highlight how participants, in turn, invite researchers to reposition themselves and demand experiential involvement that may reconfigure the course of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]