Vital Signs is an international and interdisciplinary conference organised by Real Life Methods. It will provide a major forum for the discussion of approaches to researching real lives in complex worlds.

We are using the concept of ‘real lives’ in an open way to stimulate debate about how research methodologies and methods in the social sciences and beyond can rise to the challenge of producing knowledge and understandings that are 'vital' and that resonate with complex and multi-dimensional lived realities.