Sensory Ethnography Explained by Sarah Pink | Research Methods

[00:00:06]okay hello everyone my name is Sarah pink and I'm from lbur University today I'm going to talk to you about the question of what is sensory ethnography now sensor ethnography way I this this image here is of my new book called doing sensor ethnography ethnography that was published last year and the talk is based around the ideas that I present in that book now the way I see sensory ethnography is that it's a rethinking of ethn it's not a redoing or reinvention of ethnographic methods it's a rethinking of ethnographic methods in a way that tends particular particularly to sensory perception sensory experience and the categories that we use to talk about our sensory experiences so it's not simply ethnographic research about the senses and I think that's a mistake that some people might make initially would I present the idea of sensory ethnography it's not ethnography of the senses it's an ethnography an approach to ethnography and an ethnographic methodology that's influenced and guided by understandings of the senses now this lecture is going to give you an overview of how this field is emerging and some of the types of research methods that it imploy I see it as an emergence research field the book is based on a drawing together of the lot of the researches that Rec recently be done attending to the senses but I think it what it signifies is a beginning for this field as well and the book in itself is an attempt to pull those existing works and some ideas about cens ethnography together to Define what's happening there as a field of research practice now I want to talk to you a little bit I want to give you an introductory story now there's a link here to an article that I'm going to refer to um this is really for people who are going to be viewing this online or for any of you who'd like to actually read this original Short article from New Scientist but um what happened was a few months ago my partner came home with a copy of New Scientist and he handed it to me and it was folded open at the review of a new book which is which is link is to now the review of the book was the book was is called see what I'm saying it's by a perceptual psychologist called Lawrence Rosenblum um but what I when I later thought about the encounter with that magazine I realized at the very sight of it and my first subsequent tactile encounter with it gave me a sense that I was about to read a particular type of magazine popular magazine so just by looking at it and then initially feeling it I really started to get an idea about it um it was glossy but floppy when I when I saw it and I held it the pages was smooth um the um the C the image in the review was in color so it wasn't a classic academic article at all and um I imagined that the photograph was probably taken from the original book that the review was on um the caption for the photograph which is a picture of a visually impaired cyclist says that the cyclist relies on hearing where most others use site now New Scientist also smells like a magazine and um now this particular magazine now I'd read it several times and I was starting to write about it the smell had kind of diminished a little bit but um it's my initial encounter with it reminded me of when you get too close up to a Sunday supplement magazine and you can kind of smell the ink in a way that again smells different from academic books and academic journals so um it had a particular scent now the reviewer of this book see what I'm saying um who's himself a professor of Neurology describes the book as an accessible book that uses examples of firsthand experiences to demonstrate how he says the five senses do not travel along separate channels but interact to a degree that few scientists would have believed only a decade ago now interestingly this idea that the senses are so interwoven interdependent is not only the domain of biological neurological scientists but also it's part of the work of philosophers of perception and it's increasingly seeping out into the work of social scientists who really seeking out these fields oh interestingly also it's kind of moving out into the popular imagination as well in Popular Science in terms of being published this review being published in this magazine as well so it's a very interesting question and issue but it's particularly interesting for social scientists um and certainly for ethnographers because we're interested in trying to account for the idea of other people's experiences how can we actually understand other people's lives and experiences we need a theory to help us to do this we also need a methodological appreciation what I'm calling multisensor reality and those are the ideas that are inform in what I called a sensory ethnography so I'll talk a little bit more about some of those ideas in a minute but I wanted to try to initially present them to you through this idea of actually how we think about a magazine when it's passed to us how do we actually start to interpret it before we've even read what's in it it's how it smells how it feels what it looks like the colors the whole multier experience of actually engaging with something a material object which we're actually going to read words in later now first I want to backtrack a little bit and say what is ethnography why do we even need a sensory ethnography what's the what is the point in kind of defining another type of ethnography okay so you probably while I was getting water had time to read the slide um Karen O'Reilly is actually one of my colleagues at lbro has about what I think is very useful minimum definition of ethnography is an iterative inductive research that involves involves in design through the study drawing on a family of methods involving direct and St contact with human agents within the context of their daily lives and cultures watching what happens listening to what is said asking questions in producing a richly written account that respects the irreducibility of human experience that acknowledges the role of theory as well as the research's own role and that views humans as part of object part study now I'm not actually going I'm not disagreeing that kind of definition at all but what I want to argue for a sensory ethnography is that it goes beyond this and number of ways so first it's un informed by this understanding the intern interconnected senses secondly it tends to incorporate what we call in well what we call Innovative methods is um quite maybe a debated topic but it incorporates methods amongst which I would call Innovative to go and it goes beyond listening and watching and it uses multiple media thirdly it g goes beyond the use of writing in ethnographic representation looking towards Arts practice and also other methods of representation now let's I want to try to put it in context again to also answer the question of not only what is n c ethnography why sensy ethnography and what I think we've seen between the 1990s up to now really is this whole series of layers of the rethinking of ethnography so in the 1990s or late 80s ethnography became reflexive and anybody who did ethnography was meant to rethink the ethnography through the idea of the their own being reflective about their own role in the research process and engaging with their work in quite new and different way ethnography also became gendered we needed to engage with our rol as our roles as ethnographers as gendered beings and our encounters with research participants as gendered encounters and look at the inter subjectivity of our gendered relationships with the research participants now as we went on then visual methods and media became increasingly popular in my book doing visual ethnography I tried to work through the idea of ethnography as being visual so rethinking ethnography as a process that involves visual images visual methods and visual media so um ethnography has also become digital people have started to do ethnography online but also other elements of ethnography that engage with digital media digital methods and the whole kind of dimension of Our Lives is involved with the digital so doing the sensory ethnography it's kind of what I see as another layer which we build on these different understandings of ethnography it's not instead of of visual embodied digital sensory ethnography at all it's an embodied form of ethnography we must we always have to recognize our gendered identities as we do ethnography um it engages with visual methods and media it engag with engages with digital media and it's essentially a very reflexive approach to ethnography as well so it's a way of building on our existing understandings of how we do ethnography and what's important when we do ethnography and rethinking those um through a new set of ideas now as part of these changes also we've developed new ways of understanding the products of ethnographic methods now some of these shifts I found particularly interesting so we've gone from the idea that we go and collect data we go to a place to do ethnography we collect that something that we think is that we Define as data and we bring it away with us and we do something do it called analysis two the idea that when you go to do ethnography you collab at with people you work with research participants and together you produce knowledge you might the idea might have been that you could also take that knowledge away and do something with that knowledge once You' got it called analysis as well but more recently some rather interesting ideas have developed especially in anthropology thinking about rethinking the idea of ethnographic knowledge as a form of knowing in practice so you learn with research participants at what about what they do and how they think you learn to know with them and you learn to know as you're engaging in activ activities with them and that says learning to know in similar ways to the ways that they know and trying to use those experiences and those ways of knowing as ways to inform your work as an ethnographer now a third move has been what we might call a move Beyond text now this has taught us to pay attention to what we might call the tacet the unspoken the nonverbal aspects of the way we do ethnography now in a sense this has been a move from writing to more engagement with documentary film more engagement with use of video as a research method use of Photography towards new engagements with Arts with arts practice I think the important point about this is that we're starting to recognize that when you do ethnography you're not only learning about the things people can say to you you're not only learning about the things you can watch it's not just about watching things people do and making notes it's not just about interviewing people and making recordings of what they say but it's also about trying to understand the things that they do and the ways that they do things that Express things that cannot be expressed in spoken words so how do we actually learn about those dimensions of life that people don't ever talk about um but they have ways of experiencing and communicating about that aren't necessarily verbal and fourthly I want to put cens ethnography in this context of Shifting agendas in which acade are becoming closer links between academic research and applied research and public research so we have a move or I what I hope is going to be a closer relationship between applied ethnography public ethnography and academic ethnography but it also means that academic ethnographers and ethnographers working outside Academia are looking for new ways of engaging with both their research participants but but also with different types of audience their public audiences as well as academic audiences and maybe policy audiences what are the best ways to communicate ethnographic findings to public audiences and academic audiences other ways of communicating findings that don't depend on the spoken word on the spoken lecture okay so then the next question why rethink ethnography is sensory one of the things that's kind of driven my own work driven me to do this in my own work has been a theoretical impulse towards rethinking ethnography as sensory think there's been what's been called by the Anthropologist of the sensus David has the sensory turn across disciplines which has really produced new understandings of experience practice and knowledge and thinking of these is multisensory involving all the senses and understanding the senses is interconnected which means the conventional focus on observing listening reading and writing is not enough for ethnographic practice there's also methodological demand and that new Innovative methods are being developed and there seems to be a need to understand the sorts of knowledge they produce through a paradigm that recognizes the sensory experiences that they involve um thirdly in terms of public applied and knowledge transfer type of activities as I said before there is this urge or this need to engage with non-academics and wider publics to to represent the finders of ethnographic research and ways that really go beyond the conventional methods that we already okay so the principles for sensory ethnography I'm not going to go into these in any depth I mean because they're written out quite a detailed way in the book um but essentially there are three kind of key principles that I've been working with first is the idea of implacement so a sensor ethnography kind of Rises to the challenge of rethinking How We Do ethnography and thinking about our relationship with our research participants and their environments in terms of the concept of implacement which looks at the Mind Body environment relationship so the ethnographer is not just embodied the ethnographer is in placed the ethnographer is in a particular relationship between their mind body and the environment that they're working in and they're engaging with other people within that environment who are also similarly in placed secondly the idea of the interconnected senses um which is as I was saying before it's very much about the idea that the senses are interconnected and interwoven we can't necessarily separate them out in terms of the way we experience but when we talk about our sensory experience we divide them up into sensory categories so smell sound touch hearing and vision um in other cultures the same set of sensitive categories isn't necessarily always used so this is very much a modern Western set of categories um the third principle is the idea of knowing in practice and knowing things and knowing ways that we can't necessarily Express in words a sensory approach to ethnography I hope seeks to to investigate those ways of knowing and also seeks ways to represent them represent our ethnographic work okay practicing sensory ethnography how do we do it um the two areas I've focused on in the book are rethinking participant observation rethinking the interview and also as I said before rethinking um visual research methods through through the idea of of multisensor reality um today I'm just going to talk briefly about how we might rethink participant observation and the interview um and this also means kind of changing the ter terminology around a little bit so we move from participant observation to multisensory participation um and then I'm going to look a little bit about the Innovative methods that people have developed which you might think of as methods that are specifically kind appr appropriate to a sensory ethnography like walking with others eating with others and generally sensing things with other people um rethinking the interview I think involves rethinking the interview as a multisensory event which is a little bit different from the way the interview is usually been written about um but on the other hand it also involves us thinking of the interview as a method that we can use to probe the sensory categories that people do use to express their sensory experience in in a verbal form so sensory ethnography doesn't eliminate or you know that we shouldn't use verbal communication but it it tries to situate it okay so from POS observation to multisensory participation now this understands then participation producing these multisensorial and in placed ways of knowing and it's very much about a shift away from the idea of visual observation being kind of the privileged approach in ethnographic research and of course reflexivity is a precondition to this work now the shift that I'm want to emphasize it takes a it's a move away from conventional approaches to ethnography which have tend to understand and I would actually found a quote um of this that um Paul Atkinson has put it this way the visual is the most important mode of understanding the visual I don't think is necessarily the most important mode of understanding it's a situated mode of understanding and it's part of a whole complex of multisensory ways of understanding that work together so the idea of multisensory Po participation instead Builds on the phenomenological arguments that experien is multisensorial and it's not dominated by nor reducible to the visual now in some ways the idea of multisensory participation is not not doesn't actually challenge the idea of participant observation or doing ethnography in the way developed by Carol O'Reilly but it involves new forms of understanding engagements with participants now those three key elements that I've identified and I go to give you an example of each of these one is what I call the serendipitous Sensory Learning of being there which is when you're involved in long-term research and you're involved for example in an event and something happens that you weren't expecting and you learn through sensory experiences the second is the idea of apprenticeship which is been very been very long term in ethnography I mean ever since ethnographers started do ethnography theyve become apprentices with people they've started to do research with um most recently this has become very popular as a sensory method and also joining others in embodied activities like walking and eating now the serend Century Learning of being there that one of my favorite examples of this is um when I was involved in a slow City event as part of my research about slow City movement in the UK and I participated in setting setting the food up for the events drinking the coffee which was special coffee that was sold locally there um my whole experience of of of it of drinking the coffee in the event and then later smelling the same coffee wafting out of the shop that it was sold in in the town um helped me to link up the sensorial experiences that the movement the slow City movement was promoting with the way that they were actually developing them them within the town so it was a very interesting experience of realizing that my own tastes and smells and eating the food and sharing it with people were a particular research method that helped me to trace the way that the movement was actually working with foods and smells in the town okay running out of time now okay this this slide this ethnographer sensory Apprentice um there's a series of examples along the bottom there are references at the end of the slides um the idea of being an apprentice in ethnography involves learning with engaging in the same practices as the people who you're trying whose experiences you're trying to learn about it's a very self-reflexive process it's also very obviously a multisensory process we learn through all of our senses and doing this as a sensory ethnographer involves attending to the sensoriality of those experiences trying to document them in some way and use your own sensory knowing you're knowing how you know things through touch how you know things through smell Etc is a way of understanding how other people who you're learning from know ways walking with others again there's a series of references here here which are given at the end of the slides the idea of walking with others being in rhythm with them and learning about how they experience particular environments it's becoming a an quite interestingly established research method um for people especially for researchers who interested in the senses it offers us a lot of opportunities for actually achieving that way of being as I've called it in place in an environment with people as you move through it with them and learning from that second thing I wanted to think about was the idea of rethinking the interview as a multisensory event now traditional approaches to the intervie interview have um really focused on the interview as a conversation and I'm sure that you'll be hearing talks about the interview and it being conceptualized conversation at this very conference now the interview indeed is a conversation and it's also an often analyzed using conversation analysis but I think that we need to start thinking about the interview in a way that goes beyond that and actually recognizes that the interview is a multisensory event in which the interviewer and interview person who's being interviewed are sharing an environment together they might be drinking a cup of tea together they're communicating in many ways that don't involve just talking and this isn't just about doing an analysis of gestures and hand movements and how people actually move their bodies when they're talking together it's very much more about thinking the interview itself as a multisensor encounter it's part of specific environment um and it's it's actually also involves sets of embodied practices now the second point I wanted to make about the interview is that interviews also give us fantastic opportunities to learn about how people use sensory categories and I put a clip here from an interview on the slide to give you a sense of when I was interviewing this lady how we'd actually spoken about we talk I was asking her about how she knows the things that she's washed in her washing machine are clean now and as we go through the discussion she talks about what they look like if they've got stains on them if they feel nice um and if they smell nice and those are the different senses that she identifies that she uses when she's evaluating her laundry to know know if it's clean or not it's not just about looking at something it's a whole experience that involves all of the senses and I and the interview I think gives us an opportunity to explore with research participants how they use those categories to Define different elements different aspect and evaluate things in their everyday lives okay representing sensor ethnography or is it non-representational now as I said before and I've nearly finished the I think this is the last one as I said before the um whole idea of part the idea of a sensory ethnography is an ethnography that doesn't just depend on verbal and written words to communicate so if we're going to do ethnography in such a way that attends to things that can't be spoken we need to find ways to communicate that type of ethnography now that's not totally new people have been using anthropological film or ethnographic film to communicate about ethnography for a long time and that's very much part of this um but some very interesting ideas and works are emerging emerging now also including collaborations with artists now I really wanted to end with point that this is really an emergent field there are lots of exciting new opportunities to respond to the challenges are finding ways to communicate that are comprehensible to scholarly and public audiences about sensory ways of knowing in other people's worlds now there's a whole series of examples there in the last chapter of my book and also that I've put a link in for people look at this online as well to the website of someone who's Christina Lama's work which I think is particularly interesting in the way that she's been using audiovisual media to communicate about sensory experiences of of patients and in clinical hospital contexts but some up this is my last slide okay um so sensory ethnography I think is the latest in a series of revisions of ethnography that respond to theoretical developments and also in this case done a a public and applied research agenda so I'm sure there will be other reinkings of ethnography this is definitely not the last one but it's one I think that responds in particular to to to current theoretical methodological and applied practical issues um it acknowledges the interconnectedness of the sensors and the importance of doing research that goes beyond watching listening and writing it reflexively uses what we call Innovative methods and multiple media in research and in the communication of research to diverse audiences and it also creates new possibilities for interdisciplinary collaborations but it is still an emergent field of practice there was one last slide which is to look to the Future um I think interest in this area is grow considerably but there's a very kind of active kind of literature that's developing this area but there's been surprisingly little reflection on the use of sensory methods in this literature I think it's an emergent field of methological interest and I think a lot more discussion is needed so if you do go and do some sensory ethnography don't just report your findings but document and reflect on your methods and contribute to the development of this field and write about it and express to other people in some way how you've managed to do sensory eth Faith okay thank you I did say to to all the people who are watch his presentations