Paper short abstract:

The film BUILDING SPACES is a sensory ethnography that explores how knowledge creation is the outcome of researcher’s material practices shaping their sensory environments. It is an artistic-filmic exploration of the mutual shaping of technologies, spaces, and epistemic practices.

Paper long abstract:

What does research feel like? How does the place where knowledge is created shape the knowledge itself? And what knowledges remain neglected because we cannot transform them into words?

This work from the field of Science and Technology Studies explores how knowledge creation in social sciences is the outcome of researchers’ material practices of shaping their sensory environments. It is a study of epistemic practices that focuses on the sensory in the form of a visual ethnography. It becomes clear: Research is a sensual affair – a practice, a feeling, a constitution of spaces.

From the perspective of feminist new materialism, the empirical part in the form of the film BUILDING SPACES accompanies four international social scientists through their academic lives and makes practices visible that have so far remained unnoticed. In the increasingly precarious labor system of academia, spaces are built through mundane, material practices that make research possible – so the argument goes. Eventually, it is about the expression of an experience: research, whether artistic or academic, is always a search, an emotional balancing act, a material craft. The knowledges that emerge are situated – they are enacted in the arrangement of sensory contexts.

Combined format: Since the entire film lasts 30 min, I would embed short parts of it in my presentation, which would then last 20 min. Since I have submitted the entire film as a Making & Doing Contribution, there could be the opportunity to see the entire film in a different setting.