Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the potentials of biosensing technologies in the construction of new methods and conceptualisations of ethnographic fieldwork. We draw on two projects conducted with children in Manchester, UK: one focusing on urban sound art and the other on local air quality and climate change.

Paper long abstract:

Sensor technologies are becoming ubiquitous elements of everyday life, as we find them increasingly embedded in environments (movement, sound, temperature, air quality sensors) and worn on bodies (heart rate, electro-dermal activity, acceleration, body temperature sensors). The rapid integration of these technologies into human life processes suggests that the near future will hold a convergence of the biological, the digital, the sensual, and the social. This paper explores the potentials of biosensing technologies in the construction of new methods and conceptualisations of ethnographic fieldwork. How can sensor technologies expand the purview of ethnography beyond the narrow bandwidth of the human senses? How might these technologies enable new forms of ethnographic participation and social imagining? We address these questions through two projects conducted with children and young people in Manchester, one focusing on urban sound art and the other on local air quality and climate change. These projects involved the experimental use of wearable biosensors and environmental sensors in conjunction with GoPro body cameras, sound recording equipment, and social interventions in public space. Rather than seeing these technologies as prosthetic extensions of human perception and consciousness, we are interested in how sensors can physically and directly mediate the sensorium and render access to sensory data beyond the limits of human language and cognition. Our speculative experiments with these technologies gesture towards future possibilities for ethnographic fieldwork that plugs directly into the biosensory intensities and fluctuations of social bodies in real time and space.