Paper short abstract:

My presentation discusses a method for embodied research in participant observation. Through the lens of assemblage, which maps different nods in an affective sensescape and the flows in and in between these nods, the researcher becomes plugged into the very assemblage she wishes to study.

Paper long abstract:

My PhD project, Calling out, sensing in, is an ethnomusicological study on women's emotional sensations when singing kulning - an all-female tradition of herding calling. I am interested in what happens when something is felt and what constitutes emotional events. The aim is to elucidate what, and how emotional sensations are felt when singing kulning. The study uses ethnographic methods such as participant observation and different techniques of interviewing. A key approach here is that the participation also means participate body-emotionally. In traditional (male) stances on epistemology and scientifically correct ways to conduct research, the researcher should be emotionally neutral and disembodied. Firstly, I think that the idea of a disembodied researcher is a delusion; bodies hold agency in knowing.

Secondly, I will argue that when affective and emotional sensations are studied, the researcher should allow her/himself to know and understand through bodily, sensory states. How else could we understand the emotional encounters which we study if the process of knowing is not also embodied?

I will use the concept of assemblage to map a sensescape in which I, the researcher, am plugged-into. I will do this mapping using fieldnotes as assemblage, describing what happens both during the act of singing kulning, both what happens in, or to, the singer and in/to me as a researcher with many "I's", what produces an affective event. My presentation will discuss assemblage as a method of embodied research, and a possible way to take assemblage into analyses and transcriptions.