Sociology as 'other': representing sociological knowledge within a national security context

This paper evolves from my experiences of working within an applied defence and national security research environment and the gradual, often challenging journey in learning how to best represent sociological knowledge within this culture. More specifically, I write this paper as a reflection of the most recent of my ontological (mis)adventures regarding my research on suicide terrorism. In this analysis, I was working with Durkheim's typology of suicide. It was suggested to me that I should plot Durkheim's typology on a graph, with a view that visual schemas would assist my audience to better 'take in' and apply the information of my written analysis. This issue, which comes up repeatedly in my work with qualitative texts, led me to reflect upon the 'otherness' of sociologists within a positivist research environment where visualisation techniques are integral to scientific understanding. This paper problematises the idea that sociological knowledge should be formalised through mathematical or computational models, it explores the limitations of textual sociological analyses outside academia, and it discusses issues of ‘translation’ of sociological meaning from written to image forms.