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- Convenors:
-
Angela Marques Filipe
(Durham University)
Órla Meadhbh Murray (Northumbria University Newcastle)
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- Discussants:
-
Tiago Moreira
(Durham University)
Ayo Wahlberg (University of Copenhagen)
- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract:
We explore the use of experimental methods and/or multimodal ethnographies across topics in STS (including health, wellbeing and climate). Through unconventional approaches that engage with lived experiences and living environments, we chart new horizons and forms of knowledge-making in the field.
Long Abstract:
In recent years, there have been calls for new modes of knowledge production and research that not only reflect a broader range of experiences and interlocutors but also help addressing complex dimensions of lived experiences and living environments. Alongside this, there has been a shift towards more engaged accessible, and distributed forms of knowledge-making in STS and in health research, specifically (Filipe et al., 2017; Erikainen et al. 2022). How do we experiment with and situate our work in relation to different methods and modes of inquiry in these fields – whether co-creative, speculative, institutional, participatory, or autoethnographic? How might experimental and sensory methods engender new discussions that legitimize a plurality of knowledges and ways of being in the world?
This panel invites presentations on the use of sensory, ethnographic, and experimental methods across topics in STS, broadly conceived, and those with a thematic focus on health, wellbeing, and our living environments. We welcome submissions from those who have used (1) sensory methodologies, such as sensory ethnography (Pink 2009), participatory taste workshops (Kelley 2023), and sound-recording walk-shops (Moreira 2023), as well as those working with (2) experimental forms of ethnography, including assemblage and multimodal autoethnography (Wahlberg 2022, Filipe 2024) and institutional ethnographies (Smith 2005; Smith & Griffith 2022). We are particularly interested in work that seeks to reimagine the “experimental” and open up the canon of “methods” in research, as informed by neurodivergent, crip, feminist, decolonial, and global STS scholarship. If we are to ‘make and do transformations’, then how do we that in our knowledge-making practices, by thinking, sensing, and designing research differently?
We will consider traditional papers as well as unconventional formats combining text with multimedia and/or interactive learning activities (e.g., poetry, song, animation, play, creative workshops). We have plans for a dual publication format on the topic.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Daniela Manica (Universidade Estadual de Campinas)
Long abstract:
The expertise of the Social Sciences has been challenged in new ways. Its communication strategies and experimentation with other languages, inter/transmediality, as a practice and as a subject for reflection, can contribute to meeting these new challenges. In this paper, I present results of the research "A world of stories: feminist anthropology of science and technology in Latin America" (Fapesp, 2022/05943-0), which is dedicated to a double movement of experimenting with sound language through the Mundaréu podcast, and reflecting on issues linked to feminism and multimodality.
The research questions involve: How do we communicate results, dispute meanings, talk about the research done in Latin America with a wider audience than the scientific one? How do we exploit the transmediality of sound, text and image through podcasts? How is the feminist perspective negotiated in the context of research? What are the impacts of directly hearing the voices, emotions and silences of the feminist scholars themselves? To what extent does scientific/technological development meet collective, popular and local priorities, connected to politically situated perspectives?
Our research team has mapped out research in the field of the anthropology of science and technology produced in Brazil, Colombia and Argentina, with anti-racist, intersectional and decolonial feminist perspectives. I will present the main themes and research agendas we found in the survey carried out throughout 2023, as well as the methodological challenges produced in the encounter between these researches(ers) and our communicative approach in disseminating them through the Mundaréu podcast.
Emma Peltier (Université Catholique de Louvain) Agie Galicy Totolehibe (UClouvain)
Long abstract:
The paper presents an experimental method for anticipating the housing conditions of minorities (sex, gender, race, disability) in the Brussels region.
The Brussels region is facing a housing crisis (decrease in new construction, scarcity of land, increase in demand for social housing, increase in single-parent families, increase in energy prices, dilapidation) that is affecting the most vulnerable people (gender and racial minorities, people with disabilities, the elderly). In 2020, the health crisis has exacerbated existing inequalities. During the period of confinement, housing became a whole, at once a place to live and work, to convalesce, to isolate, to care for or to suffer violence (Tillous, 2022 ; Bernard and Salembier, 2020).
By combining care studies and future studies, the CTRL+H research proposes several exploratory scenarios for the housing conditions of minorities in Brussels in 2050. These scenarios are based on a mixed qualitative survey (interviews, inhabited plans, lived neughborhood map, observation, focus groups) carried out with residents and field workers in 7 collective housing complexes.
How does the production of exploratory scenarios designed using a feminist approach renew studies on well-being and housing?
This method is original in several ways. It approaches housing through the prism of care and well-being. It draws on the combined expertise of residents and institutional players (caretakers, mediators, social workers, neighbourhood workers). Where feminist perspectives are in the minority in foresight methods (Milojević and Inayatullah, 1998), it uses an empirical survey to develop exploratory scenarios that take account of the issues of power and inequality.
Lauryn Mannigel (Arizona State University)
Short abstract:
This paper discusses how the 'political potential of people's scents' (Mannigel 2021) can be harnessed to develop experimental and participatory practice-based methods aiming to facilitate public discussions on social and cultural belonging through smell.
Long abstract:
How might researchers reimagine the “experimental” when it comes to subjective experiences? Building on experimental and interdisciplinary practice-based research (Smith and Dean 2009), this paper presents the methodological development of my contribution to an ongoing collaborative art/science research project with Christy Spackman and Byron Lahey, both from Arizona State University (ASU). Our research team explores how community-identified smellscapes, combined with insights about built environments, craft perceptual experiences that interrogate the visceral sense of belonging among citizens of Mesa, Arizona. Methodologically, we aim to explore how co-produced methods for detecting, capturing, and discussing smells can highlight the cultural, social, and political dimensions of olfactory perception.
Olfactory perception is inherently political, as it is influenced by and influences social and cultural behaviors and structures. This capacity to either strengthen or undermine connections among individuals exemplifies what I refer to as 'the political potential of people's scents' (Mannigel 2021). Building on this concept, I will explore how this potential can be harnessed to develop participatory practice-based methods aiming to facilitate public discussions on social and cultural belonging through smell. I will discuss the design and implementation of my community-informed practice-based research approaches that mix socially engaged art, media art, sensory ethnography, queer and feminist theory, and sensory studies.
The presentation format will immerse the public in my embodied experiences of developing and conducting participatory practice-based methods. It will blend traditional paper text with a multimedia slideshow featuring sound and images, complemented by a brief interactive dialogue activity.
Fredy Mora Gamez (University of Vienna)
Short abstract:
I use experimental methods combining ethnography and digital tools to explore alternatives narratives of migration. I argue for a potential line of inquiry exploring the (dis)encounters between STS and decolonial feminisms, to reflect on how we envision and imagine the future of STS research.
Long abstract:
Building on STS critical research in the field of border/migration, I use experimental methods combining ethnography and digital tools to explore alternatives narratives of migration. How to gain a better multimodal understanding of those relations unknown by borders? How to make graspable those lived experiences that fall beyond our understanding of borders and migration? And how can STS and digital methods participate in this transformative process?
For partially answering these questions, I pay attention to a set of frequent material practices in contexts of migration control: handcrafting by people on the move. I thereby present/demonstrate 2 ongoing digital experiments tracing the trajectories of handicrafts and the lived experiences of different actors around them. Based on preliminary ethnographic work, I draw on the feminist decolonial work of Maria Lugones and her notion of "Tantear", a productive unknowing that allows individuals to make sense of themselves, each other, and their praxis beyond predetermined understandings or fixed visions of their identities and the future. I articulate this notion to reflect on the politics of STS, the relations we build in the field, and the tensions of transforming the way we understand “knowledge-making” in contexts of migration control, among other topics.
STS informed digital experiments with handicrafts, I claim, allows “tantear” back and forth in time and space beyond borders. I therefore argue for a potential line of inquiry exploring the (dis)encounters between STS and decolonial feminisms, to reflect on how we envision and imagine the future of STS engaged research.
Merle Ibach (Leuphana University)
Long abstract:
In response to calls for transformative knowledge-making practices in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and ethnographic research, this paper examines the camper van as both an ethnographic tool and an epistemic thing within the study of DIY maker cultures. Based on a four-year field study of DIY maker communities in Northeastern Germany, the paper demonstrates how the author's van became an inventive method (Lury/Wakeford 2012) that turned the very invention of its problem into a method.
The narrative unfolds in three distinct yet interconnected sections. Firstly, the author discusses her van as ethnographic tool (Jungnickel 2014), that becomes a physical manifestation of the researcher's engagement with the field, embodying the researcher's presence and facilitating interactions with participants. Secondly, the paper explores the van's significance in transcending traditional academic dichotomies. It elucidates how the van served as an epistemic thing (Rheinberger 1997), shaping her understanding of the field and emphasizing the importance of embodied engagement in knowledge production. Thirdly, the paper conceptualizes the van as an immutable mobile (Latour 2017) transporting not only physical materials but also knowledge across geographical and disciplinary boundaries. Its mobility allows the researcher to navigate between different locations and contexts, shaping their research agenda and insights.
The paper offers a nuanced exploration of the van's multifaceted role in shaping the author's research journey. By foregrounding the materiality of their research practice, the paper contributes to broader discussions within knowledge production and ethnographic methods.
Hilman S. Fathoni (Monash University)
Long abstract:
In this presentation, I speculatively explore the possibilities (and limits) of thinking and doing energy future(s) otherwise, drawing on my long-term and experimental ethnographies in rural parts of Eastern Indonesia. In doing so, my work aims to unsettle the developmentalist narratives around “modern energy” and “energy poverty” as these themes intersect with rural poverty, community livelihoods and sense of well-being in the Global South. I will begin by unpacking the ontological underpinnings on which such modernist views of energy rest, while also engaging critically with the kind of future vision that they engender. Such a futuristic claim often frames energy as a technocratic panacea for the twin problems of climate and development that many Southern communities are facing, in an apolitical, dispassionate and dematerialized manner. Bringing together insights from design ethnography and pluriversal politics to development, I take part in a set of collaborative visual and sensory ethnographic techniques that attunes closely to the historicity as well as singularity of people’s everyday energy experiences. Experimenting with these multi-modal materials provides a space for co-reflecting and co-imagining together with my research participants, while nevertheless raising further questions that remain difficult and at times elusive to answer. Who gets to experiment? Whose experimentations matter? And for whom these experiments are intended? I then discuss the ethical and moral dilemmas that emerge from such a collaborative pursuit, and how these ambivalent dynamics can give us a glimpse of how our future(s) with, against and beyond modern energy will possibly look and feel like.
Noel (El No) Chung (University of Cambridge)
Long abstract:
Food delivery platforms, hailed for their infrastructural role during the COVID-19 pandemic by mediating delivery of food for immobilised populations, continue to proliferate in many cities across the globe, making ordering food using a mobile app everyday urban practice. This seemingly seamless experience of app-enabled food delivery that many take for granted is in fact realised through the joining up of heterogeneous practices of human and more-than-human entities, forming an infrastructure (Star, 1999). Focussing on the South Korean food app Baemin and its food couriers, my research inquire into the ongoing recreation of this emergent, vital urban infrastructure and the kinds of (dis)connections and movements it generates. Studying the mutual shaping of infrastructure and mobilities requires methods that allow the following of digital and material traces of food delivery with Baemin. To facilitate moving with the research subject, I have conducted a distinct mobile ethnography that combines autoethnography as a courier, walkthrough analysis of the worker-facing app, interviews, and smartphone GPS tracking of couriers’ delivery activities. Drawing on 10-month fieldwork in Seoul, I offer reflexive accounts on the collaborative and incremental process of knowledge co-creation through a series of mobile dialogues. The plurality of methods and data, while empowering, is also overwhelming, posing ethical, logistical, and analytical challenges. Therefore, I also seek to share unmet aspirations and gather thoughts on what would have been otherwise approaches. And yet, I highlight the generative quality of collective mobile ethnography, turning chaos into unforeseen understandings about the mobile lives of couriers and infrastructure-making.
Prakriti Prajapati (Penn State University)
Long abstract:
The Indian water policy discourse is highly polarized and the key intellectual debate among experts remains whether large water infrastructures are the key to solving India’s most challenging water problems, and what kind of expertise must inform water governance. In July 2016, a committee to restructure India’s federal water technocracies (hydrocracies) released its recommendations, stoking debates over how restructuring them ought to meet India’s pressing water challenges. While there is ample literature supporting the recommendations, there is little understanding of the fiercely resistant stance of the hydrocracies. This research is built on a premise that the debate missed out an important perspective beyond the paradigms of large-scale infrastructure and technical solutions i.e. the trans-local institutional relations of expertise and work, and hydrocratic subjectivities that persist despite shifting policy ecosystems. To-date, the Indian hydraulic state lacks any institutional ethnographic study.
The key focus of this institutional ethnography is the lived experience of state hydrocrats at work, from early years of education and training to the mid and senior-level positions. This paper draws on the standpoint of Indian hydrocrats about how they produce state-legitimized (colonial and modernist) knowledge on water, are trained and recruited, and carry out everyday work in coordination with others, to make visible the ruling relations embedded in these processes. In doing so, this research sheds light on the hidden cracks within the Indian hydraulic state where the light can get in and inform transformative action. Thereby, ensuring that state water institutions better serve those they are supposed to.
Michelle Pentecost (King's College London)
Short abstract:
This talk shares work in progress from Trajectories, a qualitative sub-study of the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI).
Long abstract:
This talk shares work in progress from Trajectories, a qualitative sub-study of the Healthy Life Trajectories Initiative (HeLTI). In partnership with the World Health Organisation, HeLTI is a consortium of randomised controlled trials in China, Canada, India, and South Africa that aims to provide gold standard evidence of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a multicomponent life course intervention from preconception to early childhood for the prevention of childhood obesity and optimisation of reproductive health and early childhood development. Working closely with HeLTI South Africa, Trajectories engages experimental methods for transformative knowledge-making through integrating multidisciplinary and social science approaches. In this talk I discuss the opportunities and challenges of our work, which includes institutional ethnography that uses biosocial models to work collaboratively with trial scientists, and novel qualitative longitudinal methodologies that actively broker new experimental forms of engagement with trial participants. I discuss the HeLTI- Trajectories collaboration as an important experiment both in the epidemiological sense and, drawing on the work of Fitzgerald and Callard, as a site of experiment as practice and ethos, or in the words of the panel abstract, an opportunity for “reimagining the experimental.”
Kelly Fritsch (Carleton University) Eva-Marie Stern (Univerity of Toronto) Suze Berkhout (University of Toronto)
Long abstract:
In this presentation we explore the ways artistic spaces and curatorial sensibilities can enhance experimental methods in sensory ethnography, facilitating transdisciplinary conversations and generating new ways of materializing knowledge. Discussing the practice of creating “pop-up” galleries as part of the Frictions of Futurity and Cure in Transplant Medicine project, we turn to the pop-up gallery as an emergent and experimental space where the presence of the unexpected, unfamiliar, and out-of-place offer opportunities for new and layered ways of making meaning and knowing that disrupt conventional disciplinary boundaries of science and technology.
One pop-up gallery sits in the patient and family lounge on the transplant ward of a hospital; another pop-up gallery fills the gathering hall of a national transplant conference. Textile-based fabric art pieces transform familiar hospital materials—gowns, linens, scrubs—into visual artworks that “do illness.” Simultaneously research-creation and public disability arts engagement, we analyze how the pop-up galleries in the Frictions project reveal tensions that surround the ways that knowledge in medicine is made il/legitimate. This leaves us to consider how we move from knowledge as a revelatory force to knowledge as transformative while remaining embedded within the structures and spaces of science and art. Like many categories, the labels of art and science order social worlds and knowledge communities. Here we explore what happens when the expected domains, spaces, and materialities of these categories are transposed and consider what futures materialize when transplant medicine is brought into conversation with multimodal artistic practices and curation.
Justine Conte (York University)
Long abstract:
This paper considers how we might disrupt neoliberal production in the research process. Disruptions can occur when an expected flow of progression is interrupted by an unexpected event, and in the research process they can indicate aspects of the broader world that were overlooked or were not accounted for by the researcher. These interruptions are valuable precisely because of their unexpectedness and can potentially identify overlooked phenomena in the research itself when considered as part of the research process. Considering such concepts as "weak theory" Sedgwick (2003), Stewart (2008) or "low theory" (Halberstam 2011), this paper intends to examine both the frustration of disruption and also how welcoming disruptions into the research process can benefit both the research and the researcher. Disruption can inspire the interrogation of not only an individual's research process and objectives, but also of the structures and networks of collective relation that research and the people involved in the research process exist within. Using the method of schizoanalysis, I will be considering how the sometimes individualistic nature of conducting research methodologies can make disruption more difficult to deal with and will be considering how certain kinds of disruption may be associated with failure. I am positioning disruption as an opportunity for reassessment rather than a failure to account for or deal with unexpected circumstances. This paper will be considering how the messiness and malleability of lived experience must coexist with the regimented structures of research processes.