Methodological Sensibilities Research Articles

Swirling, splashing, slowing: Towards gentle volumes

‘Volume’ is increasingly mobilised as a conceptual framework through which to engage, embrace and interrogate space in three-rather than two-dimensional terms. This includes attending to heights and depths and acknowledging that social and political lives do not play out across a flat surface. Whilst ‘volume’ literature is burgeoning, we argue that there is a need to take into account the politics of gentler iterations of the three dimensional. At present, work on volume in political geography is often articulated through the lens of state and military actors, and practices of conflict, control, and violence. Inspired by recent work in geography exploring ‘gentleness’ as both analytic frameworks and methodological sensibility, this paper complicates existing understandings of volume by foregrounding the gentle. In doing so, it makes two key contributions. First, it brings the analytic and sensibility of gentleness to bear on volume, providing a means to reapproach volume through terms that exceed state-centric accounts. Second, it interrogates the geopolitics of the gentle as it is found, circulates and is comprised in heights and depths, everyday spaces and unexpected practices alike. Through the case studies of Tibetan prayer flags and a rain playground, the article reconsiders the forceful and transformative politics of gentle/gentler volumes.

When Computers were New: Shifts in the Journalistic Sensorium (1960s–1990s)

In an attempt to escape the presentist and pro-innovation biases that sometimes taint (digital) journalism studies scholarship, this article proposes an oral history of newsroom computerization before the boom of the Internet, from the early 1960s to the late 1990s. Our work is informed by three theoretical and methodological sensibilities: (1) a plea for genealogical approaches of “new” technologies made by scholars at the intersection of media history and STS, (2) an interest in reframing journalism history as the history of newswork, (3) an overall sensibility for the materiality of journalism, which leads us to study the history of newsroom computerization through the lens of shifts in the journalistic sensorium. Drawing on interviews with newsworkers active during the key decades of the 1960s to the 1990s in the province of Quebec, Canada, our findings show that they primarily remember computers as personal tools (and not as newsroom-wide transformations) that were easily incorporated to their work habits. Furthermore, we show how the introduction of computers affected the senses of journalists doing work: newsmaking sounds, feels and moves differently with computers. Altogether, we argue that these transformations have epistemological consequences, as newswork shifts from analogue craft to screenwork.

Facts and Sensibilities: What Is a Psychoanalytic Innovation?

Psychoanalytic innovation is easy to recognize but difficult to define. There is a dearth of literature exploring the nature of innovation in our field. My main thesis is that psychoanalytic innovation can be of two types. Psychoanalytic innovation of the first order is about new discoveries concerning facts related to the psyche, development, transference relations, or psychopathology. It usually emerges as a development of insights from canonical psychoanalytic theory; offers an original explanation for a choice of empirical psychic phenomena hitherto unexamined; is perceived as creative and useful when it succeeds to reconceptualize the relations between the patient’s past, unconscious dynamics, and the transference relations; often resembles poetic expression; and registers a truth we knew but did not yet put into words. When it is of the second order, psychoanalytic innovation challenges either methodological or philosophical assumptions held by psychoanalysis, without pretending to replace existing theories. It constitutes a “sensibility” that its adherents strive to incorporate into the existing corpus. I distinguish between two types of sensibilities: cultural -philosophical sensibility represented by the relational approach; and methodological sensibility represented by infant research, and neuropsychoanalysis. In the last part of the paper I analyze psychoanalytic progress pointing to its merits and shortcomings.

The social life of Learning Analytics: cluster analysis and the ‘performance’ of algorithmic education

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that methods used for the classification and measurement of online education are not neutral and objective, but involved in the creation of the educational realities they claim to measure. In particular, the paper draws on material semiotics to examine cluster analysis as a ‘performative device’ that, to a significant extent, creates the educational entities it claims to objectively represent through the emerging body of knowledge of Learning Analytics (LA). It also offers a more critical and political reading of the algorithmic assemblages of LA, of which cluster analysis is a part. Our argument is that if we want to understand how algorithmic processes and techniques like cluster analysis function as performative devices, then we need methodological sensibilities that consider critically both their political dimensions and their technical-mathematical mechanisms. The implications for critical research in educational technology are discussed.

How to Conduct a Practice-Based Study. Problems and Methods. By Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento, Italy. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, Northampton, MA, USA, 2012, 241 pages

How to Conduct a Practice-Based Study. Problems and Methods. By Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento, Italy. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK, Northampton, MA, USA, 2012, 241 pagesThe aim of Silvia Gherardi's book is to develop the readers' methodological sensibility. She does so through a presentation and discussion of the work of scholars, who use a practice-based approach in organization studies. In order to develop this methodological sensibility, she poses four basic questions: 1) which types of questions have the scholars posed?, 2) how have the scholars sought answers to their questions?, 3) what further questions remain?, and 4) how should future research be set up?In this review I first present the structure of the book. Thereafter I focus on selected chapters. These are Chapter 2: How ordinary work is practically accomplished. The chapter is chosen because of its overall centrality of the relation between work, organization, and practice. Also selected is Chapter 3: Sensible knowledge and knowledgeable bodies. The chapter is chosen because it acknowledges the body and its senses as integrated part of understanding work.A well-structured bookThe book is structured within nine chapters. Each chapter has an informative title, which gives an overview of the content of the book, focusing on 'learning to talk in practice,' 'technological environments,' and 'knowing the rules.' Each chapter follows this structure:* A clear introduction to the content and aim of the chapter;* Two to five condensed positioning statements, like: 'Too often, in fact, it is forgotten that work activities are performed by a body, by its psycho-physical capacities, and that bodies are different sexed. Gender relations are therefore part of working practices' (p. 6);* A box with examples from classical empirical studies;* A summary;* Notes elaborating on the text, references to further reading, touching upon relevant discussions.This structure worked fine for me; the examples presented in boxes as 1-2 pages gave body to my thoughts and invited ongoing discussions with the text. The boxes were also refreshing for establishing rhythm in the reading. Empirical examples are also used across chapters. This links the discussion between chapters and supports the argumentation in the book. The many statements and summaries used in the book gives on the one hand a good overview; on the other hand, it makes the reader more dependent on Gherardi's reading of the classical studies.How ordinary work is practically accomplished?'What do people do when they work? When they work is that all they do? How does work differ from non-work?' (p. 6). Posing these questions Gherardi invites the reader to consider practices as working practices. Building her theoretical position on phenomenology (Alfred Schutz) and symbolic interactionism (Everett Hughes), she argues that work must be understood as a 'situated activity.' This is empirically illustrated by a wellwritten example on how a delivery boy uses many skills in his work; he uses his body, his senses (breathing the polluted air), his communicative skills, his technology skills, etc. Gherardi's choice of a practical study to illustrate her theoretical position is perfect. The job as a delivery boy would normally be understood as a banal job, but in the analysis it becomes clear how many skills the job demands. Gherardi hereby invites the reader to go into dialogue with the text.I will also draw attention to Gherardi's understanding of 'practical knowledge.' Her main argument is that knowledge does not reside in the heads of people, but is anchored in the material world. In short form Gherardi characterizes practical knowledge as follows: A pragmatic stance (being able to take decisions); a specific temporality; an anchoring in materiality; an anchoring in discursive practices; a historical- cultural anchoring (p. 25). I find Gherardi's argument that knowledge is anchored in the material world convincing. …

Two Ethnographic Researchers Embark on a Narrative Journey

In this article two ethnographic researchers present a life story that emerged, almost against their will, as one of 120 in-depth interviews with Israeli Druze. The ethnographic study was designed to provide understanding of Israeli Druze society today through the discovery of thematic patterns. One interviewee, however, simply refused to follow the loosely structured interview format and told her story. Hana's story about the importance of her father in her professional success, and about her struggles to abide by the tenets of her religion, shed new light on the ethnographic data and taught these two researchers some new methodological sensibilities.

Documentary Criminology: Expanding the Criminological Imagination with “Mardi Gras—Made in China” as a Case Study (23 Minutes)

This paper explores the central role of documentary filmmaking as a methodological practice in contemporary criminology. It draws from cultural criminology to develop emerging, open-ended practices for conducting ethnographically inflected audiovisual research that crafts sensory knowledge from aesthetic experience. First, it demonstrates how documentary criminology is an ethnographic practice that embraces audiovisual technologies to inflect, render, and depict the aesthetics of material, sensory, and corporeal experiences of crime and transgression as knowledge production. Second, it explores a particular type of lived experience that John Dewey terms “aesthetic” to demonstrate the sorts of tangible and intangible entities that documentary criminology can interpret, record and depict as knowledge. To demonstrate this approach, the article employs a variety of examples from cultural criminology and from the documentary Mardi Gras: Made in China. The final part of the paper turns to an analysis of Mardi Gras: Made in China itself to illustrate the overlap of theory, methods, and reflexive practices of documentary criminology within four broad aesthetic domains: temporality, topography, corporeality, and the personal. The inclusion of documentary within an open-ended methodological sensibility, both as a mode of analysis and as a means of producing sensory knowledge, can expand the criminological imagination. Mardi Gras: Made in China (23 minutes select scenes) from David Redmon.

Worlding cities through their climate projects?

In recent years, the built environment has emerged as a critical target of climate change intervention for urban governments around the world, engaging developers, professionals, activists and communities in a range of new eco-urbanism projects. While important contributions have been made, this paper suggests that critical academic and policy debates on urban climate politics have so far paid insufficient attention to the sheer divergence in urban experiences, concerns and public–professional responses elicited through such experiments worldwide. By juxtaposing architectural and other eco-housing practices from diverse cities on three continents—Kyoto (Japan), Copenhagen (Denmark) and Surat (India)—this paper aims to conjure a more cosmopolitan research imagination on how climatic solidarities may emerge in the face of multiple urban differences and inequalities. Towards this end, the paper mobilizes assemblage urbanism as a set of methodological sensibilities towards issues of knowledge, materiality, multiplicity and scale-making within situated and contested processes of urban ecological change. Drawing on the politics of thick description favored by assemblage thinking, I deploy situated ethnographies to suggest that eco-housing projects in Kyoto, Copenhagen and Surat engage professional and public actors in variable world-conjuring efforts, potentially opening up new micro-arenas for the articulation of more attractive, sustainable and just urban futures. While shaped by inequalities of power, resource and knowledge, such eco-housing assemblages, I suggest, also serve as spaces of collective experimentation and learning, in and beyond the particular city.

The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology studies?

There is in science and technology studies a perceptible new interest in matters of ‘ontology’. Until recently, the term ‘ontology’ had been sparingly used in the field. Now it appears to have acquired a new theoretical significance and lies at the centre of many programmes of empirical investigation. The special issue to which this essay is a contribution gathers a series of enquiries into the ontological and reflects, collectively, on the value of the analytical and methodological sensibilities that underpin this new approach to the make-up of the world. To what extent and in what sense can we speak of a ‘turn to ontology’ in science and technology studies? What should we make of, and with, this renewed interest in matters of ontology? This essay offers some preliminary responses to these questions. First, we examine claims of a shift from epistemology to ontology and explore in particular the implications of the notion of ‘enactment’. This leads to a consideration of the normative implications of approaches that bring ‘ontological politics’ to centre stage. We then illustrate and pursue these questions by using an example – the case of the ‘wrong bin bag’. We conclude with a tentative assessment of the prospects for ontologically sensitive science and technology studies.

The ‘philosophical grasp of the appearances’ and experimental microscopy: Johannes Müller’s microscopical research, 1824–1832

Romantic Naturphilosophie has been at the centre of almost every account of early nineteenth-century sciences, be it as an obstacle or as an aid for scientific advancement. The following paper suggests a change of perspective. I seek to read Naturphilosophie as one manifestation among others of a more general concern with the question of how experience enables the subject to acquire knowledge about objects. To illustrate such an approach, I focus on Johannes Müller’s early work. Here one finds two contrasting images of microscopical observation, its set-up, and the observer: the embryological study of 1830 demands a ‘philosophical grasp’ of the appearances. In contrast, the investigations of blood of 1832 are presented as a series of controlled experiments. I argue that an interpretation of this contrast in terms of an appropriation and casting aside of Naturphilosophie is not altogether convincing. Instead, both images of microscopy are manifestations of a more general problem, namely, the problem of exactly how subject and object came together in experience. I show how this concern not only shaped the methodological sensibilities particular to Müller’s embryology and the investigation of bodily liquids but also provided the epistemological principles and the target for his sense-physiological experiments. It bound Müller’s work together with Naturphilosophie and linked Naturphilosophie with other contemporaneous projects in philosophy. All of these enterprises sought to contribute to ongoing debates about how experience allowed the subject to acquire knowledge about the world.

On cybersocialities. Networked communication and social interaction in the wired city of Blacksburg, VA, USA

In this article, the methodological sensibility that will lead to the consideration of the new forms of cybersociality is first advanced. With the term cybersociality one refers to the new expressions of “being together”, sharing emotions, and communicating in the networked social environments. It refers to the way that humans have to empathise and enter in touch with their community, and it takes into account the synergy between real interaction and virtual communication. With this term is introduced into the debate on cyberculture a discourse on fun, release and vitalism, and the forms of sociality which characterise the new dynamics of social relationship. Then, to illustrate this approach, the social interactions in the wired city of Blacksburg are analysed. After a general description of the city, three different groups of users are analysed, with a comprehensive sociological approach, to see how they actually use the new forms of network communication. To conclude, certain guiding ideas of this study are revisited and two hypotheses put forth for research concerning the growing complexification of urban and social territory due to technological development as well as the development of “S-lines”, lines of sociality.