Sensory encounters and mobile technologies

Abstract

In this chapter we examine the idea of the sensory encounter as a route for researching everyday family life with digital technologies. To develop the discussion we reflect on a series of organised encounters with and in the mundane words of other people, which have been explored or created in our research into mobile media in intergenerational and transnational families based in Melbourne, Australia. We draw on research that has explored participants’ relationships with technologies in everyday contexts, and where video has been engaged as a medium through which encounters with sensory experience and knowing are made possible and imaginable. We discuss how video and our engagements with material and technological artefacts of everyday life can play a key role in generating collaborative encounters between researcher and participant, through which normally unspoken and invisible, sensory and emotional ways of knowing are revealed. Sometimes these encounters enable understandings of sensory or unspoken ways of knowing or doing everyday tasks that surprise participants and researchers. They also enable new ways of sharing sensory and unspoken knowing with viewers, who likewise become co-implicated in encounters through video.