Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on ethnographic research as member of a multi-disciplinary public health project. I discuss some of the ways in which the problem of making air pollution visible for scientific researchers led me to examine the emergent, dynamic and performative spaces in-between research practices.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I draw upon ethnographic research carried out as member of a multidisciplinary public health project studying the relationship between air pollution and health. I begin by describing some of the assumptions which shaped my initial research proposal, both my own and those shared by the scientists on the project. I will then highlight two ways in which my movement between different research practices, as a multi-sited and collaborative project, encouraged particular explorative and experimental 'off-shoots'. These offshoots shaped both the contours of my own ethnographic inquiry and the subsequent theoretical focus of my analysis. The first off-shoot I discuss emerged within the first few months of my field work commencing: the problem of studying 'air pollution' as a multidisciplinary object of research for my informants, and its concomitant intangibility in terms of traditional ethnographic modes of inquiry. This initial finding encouraged me to re-consider the collaborative process of studying air pollution and to focus on the movement of things (particularly data) between researchers rather than the epistemological differences which ensue. The second development relates to this problem of researching a non-material form. Scientists materialised air pollution in visual ways in order to share research findings and to enliven air pollution as a shared research object. I will present some of these visual forms in my analysis to explore their performative capacities, not only for scientists in the project, but as ethnographic data, made active in the process of writing up.