The future of sensory ethnography

Liz de Freitas, Project Co-I and Professor in the School of Education, Adelphi University

This project is focused on rethinking the shape of ethnography, under new digital regimes and posthuman anthropologies, making sensible (visible, tangible, auditory) the complex affective atmosphere associated with school buildings (within corridors, auditoriums, parking lots, bus routes). The ethnographic work ‘in the schools’ started with reviews of school architectural plans and policy vision statements, scoping public texts in search of community concerns about school facilities, as well as theoretical reading/thinking on the limits of current social science research practices. Working with young people at the schools has involved developing their capacity to attune (relay, reformulate, resist) the various intensive flows in this environment, which we insisted did not ‘belong’ to them in any traditional sense of possession. This project is an attempt to think the ecological nature of sensation and map the collective dispersal of sensation across digital smart architectures.

Where does language fit into sensory ethnography? We listen to the tentative voices of young people at the school, as they hesitate to express themselves, and whisper their ideas about space, place and belonging; it’s as though there is a discursive fog of muttered meaning, circulating below our own threshold for hearing, a soupy asignifying sound that reverberates across their speaking bodies. Audio recordings collect their anguish, and yet refuse any semantic mapping. What are they saying? Our devices strain to record. They seem to be materializing words in alternative modalities, recognizable to them, but sent out into the space like little packaged secrets. Words come out like tossed pebbles that zigzag down and out of sight in the murky depths of the institutional atmosphere. Their whispers refuse to fill the space, enticing all listening bodies to come closer and stretch their senses beyond what might feel comfortable. This is a politics of counter-speech - quiet, intimate, proximal, close, secretive, opaque, not to be heard by all, without offering the comfort of contextual information, clarity of meaning or an identifiable speaker.

Language here has become a posthuman element in the shape-shifting ecology, a way of manufacturing pathways and passages, a mode of ex/communication that operates through opacity, so that young people can compile some sort of collective protection from the scopic eye of control. In a 2022 chapter I co-wrote with Maggie Maclure and David Roussel, exploring the surrealist impulse in sensory ethnography, we write:

“We take it as axiomatic that ethnographic practices are inherently problematic, linked as they are to ‘colonial specularity’ (Bhabha, 1994, p. 122) and its collusion in the ‘humanising’ projects of anthropology, even in the recent ‘ontological turns’ toward animism (Povinelli, 2016) and pluriversality as ethnographic concepts (Blaser & de la Cadena, 2018; Escobar, 2020). The yoking of sensation to participation through multisensory ethnography can be understood as an attempt to democratise the asymmetrical relations imposed by the scopic regime of colonialism (Pink, 2010). But we would argue that, despite these precautions, sensory ethnographic practice has tended to preserve the ‘panoptic immunity’ of the liberal subject (MacLure, 2011, 2013), who exercises the prerogative to interpret the sensations of self and others by rendering them visible, transparent, and positioned without reciprocal obligation. Kirby (2011) also seeks to recast “the question of the anthropological – the human – in a more profound and destabilizing way than its disciplinary frame of reference will allow.” In other words, if sensory ethnography has a future as a posthumanist methodology, it may have to pass through the disciplinary thresholds of ‘description’ and ‘interpretation’ and become unrecognizable to itself, entering into new zones of confluence with experimental design research, non-rational modes of knowing, and speculative fabulation.” (de Freitas, Maclure, Rousell, 2022)

In our workshops with young people in the school we affirm the use of speculative fabulation in contorting architectural software purposes (typically bland, corporate, disembodied modeling software) to serve instead a collective remaking of learning environments. Inspired by anthropologists playing with pixel and program (Wanono, 2013), and eco-cognitive media theorists (Hörl, 2019), we bring a design research approach to the workshops, in collaboration with Ling Tan from Umbrellium and her “superpower” phone app sensors. We open up and interrogate the conventions of ethnographic practice, yet we are still determined to create a gestural diagram – a mapping experiment – that does justice to the flow of intensity across the lived architecture.

As a project that affirms experimental research, I wonder what posthumanist disciplinary boundaries emerge through our new “investigate aesthetics”? Discipline here is not intended as a governance policy, but the more affirmative meaning of the word – sustained attention, rigorous practice, passionate attachment. Fuller and Weizman (2021) describe investigative aesthetics as a new kind of social science that is also an activism and a form of critical journalism – is that what we are doing? Does our investigative aesthetics leverage art and design in rigorous ways?

We have also operationalized techniques of mapping controversy across the building site, tracking the traces and documented residue of power and invested interests. We follow the money and the ‘matters of concern’, we follow the minor gestures, and the power moves of key players. But will our work ever achieve the visibility that the forensic architecture projects have found, internationally? Perhaps the sad truth is that we are desperate to draw attention to something that goes painfully unexamined in the social sciences, that being the material and sensory contours of school buildings, something that is shifting beneath our very feet as we all enter zoom rooms and online learning platforms. The ‘brick and mortar’ buildings left behind, have always been seen as simple enough ‘containers’ meant to envelope young people and keep them from divergent or errant trajectories. We are learning that they are so much more.

This sensory ethnography does not hesitate to gather data. Following the insights of poet and place philosopher Édouard Glissant, we gather in archipelagic ways. Glissant turns to the practice of errantry, a mode of gathering that is not the heavy-handed “comprendre” in which learning is a kind of “grasping” and naming the other. We hope to gather ‘together’ and sustain this current sense of dispersal, not as ‘ground’ but as “errantry”, a wayward movement that stretches well beyond the negative positioning of ‘exile’, a gathering nomadicism that yet escapes the arrow and circular modes of nomadic subjection and imperial knowledge seeking. Glissant speaks of the “crowd” as both rain cloud and peaceful smoke, a gathering that dwells in murmur (Glissant, 1997, p.9).

References

Bhabha, H. K. (1994). In a spirit of calm violence. In Prakesh, G. (Ed.)., After colonialism (pp. 326-344). Princeton University Press.

Blaser, M., & de la Cadena, M. (2018). Pluriverse: Proposals for a World of Many Worlds. In de la Cadena, M. & Blaser, M. (Eds.)., A world of many worlds (pp. 1-22). Durham: Duke University Press.

Escobar, A. (2020). Pluriversal Politics: The real and the possible, Translated by D. Fyre, Durham, London: Duke University Press.  

de Freitas, E., Rousell, D., & Jager, N. (2019). Relational architectures and wearable space: Smart schools and the politics of ubiquitous sensation. Research in Education [special issue on “biosocial imaginaries in education”], 107(1), 10-32.

Fuller, M. & Weisman, E. (2021). Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts, commons in the politics of truth. Verso

Glissant, E. The poetics of relation. University of Michigan Press.

Hörl, E. (2018). General ecology. In R. Braidotti & M. Hlavajova (Eds.), Posthuman glossary. London: Bloomsbury.

Kirby, V. (2011) Quantum anthropologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

MacLure, M. (2011). Qualitative inquiry: Where are the ruins?. Qualitative Inquiry, 17(10), 997-1005.

MacLure, M. (2013). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International journal of qualitative studies in education, 26(6), 658-667.

Pink, S. (2010). The future of sensory ethnography/the anthropology of the senses. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 18(3), 331- 340.

Povinelli, E. (2016). Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Wanono, N. (2014). From the grain to the pixel, aesthetic and political choices. In A.

Schneider, & C. Pasqualino (Eds.), Experimental film and anthropology (pp. 183–198). London: Bloomsbury Press.