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Paper short abstract

This paper proposes 'aporetic devices'—multimodal practices combining idiotic disruption with poetic attunement— for ethnographic work that resists premature closure. Drawing on fieldwork in neurosurgery and speculative prototyping, it develops 'sketchy logics' as a way of thinking from the middle.

Paper long abstract

Ethnography in a polarised world faces pressure toward premature position-taking: declare your framework, know what you will find, be engaged. This paper proposes a different set of (dis)positions, drawing on the figures of the idiot and the poet (Wilkie and Michael 2024). The idiot slows thought, troubles our authority to possess the meaning of what we know. The poet attunes us to the richness that consensual critique forecloses.

Through three sites of multimodal ethnographic craft— sketch-based fieldnotes in neurosurgical operating rooms, collaborative prototyping at the Speculative Realities Lab, and building AI-based ethnographic side-kicks—I develop "aporetic devices" as practices combining idiotic disruption with poetic attunement. These devices cultivate a capacious imagination, holding multiple possibilities open until something unanticipated emerges. I call this "sketchy logics": provisional, responsive, comfortable with its own revisability. It is how ethnographers can learn by embracing vulnerability, by thinking "from the middle"—"not rooting itself in the soil of a truth that it would unfold, nor aiming for an ideal that would give thought its vocation" (Stengers 2017).

To disengage—to say "no thanks" to the posturing labour of engagement—is not to withdraw but to hold space for the richness of the world. Such spaces cultivate interdependence, not only between practitioners but with the beyond that holds them.