Live Methods as creative resistance: Crafting a PhD and solidarity in the neoliberal university

The call to revisit Les Back and Nirmal Puwar’s landmark 2012 work Live Methods prompted us to consider the legacy of this text at Goldsmiths college, where the editors and many of the contributors were writing from in 2012. We are PhD students in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, a space where Live Methods has left a marked influence through practices of teaching, learning and research. At Goldsmiths, the 2021–2023 academic years saw an extensive and deeply unpopular ‘restructuring’ process imposed on the college community by senior management, with staff unions responding through extended industrial action. This article reports on PhD student solidarity and creative resistance during that time. We discuss how the ‘Live Methods manifesto’ was used as an intervention on the picket line and as a critical resource for fostering resistance against the neoliberal restructuring of our university. This creative resistance was deeply rooted in the solidarities and affective infrastructures of support that grew out of our weekly Sociology graduate student seminar, ‘Crafting a PhD’. In this article, we present a multimodal account of these events, including narrative and audiovisual material. A decade on from the publication of Live Methods, with the neoliberalisation of UK universities intensifying, we argue that the manifesto’s call for sociologists to embrace a creative and critical orientation towards research is more vital than ever. Live Methods is a resource not only for research, but for inspiring creative resistance and sustaining our collective projects of learning and life within the university.