Sybille Lammes
The entries grouped under ‘Engaging and distributing’ share an interest in how engagement and distribution can be understood as important parts of methodological processes. The theme of engaging prompts us to think how we are involved with our research material, requiring us to consider how different actors, including both ourselves and our research subjects, are implicated in the process of doing research. Indeed, it spurs us to think how such involvements can be managed to provide new methodological opportunities. Distributing is inevitably linked to engaging, as when we acknowledge a multifaceted engagement in our approach, it leads us to consider knowledge production as dispersed and disseminated. And similarly, new modes of distribution can become an opportunity for methodological innovation rather than being the mere dissemination of already produced knowledge.
Engaging and distributing have always been of methodological concern. However, we are drawing attention to them here because of the new opportunities afforded by changes in research infrastructures including the rise of ubiquitous computing, social media, digital games, changes in user interfaces, initiatives relating to open data and open access, the growing opportunities and political drive towards participation and collaboration and increases in computational power. Some authors in this section discuss processes of engagement and distribution by focusing on a specific case, while others show us more general strategies. All work from the principle that engagement gives rise to processes in which positions, shapes and networks of knowledge production become distributed, transformable and mobile. They show how this rethinking has crystallized by considering: media archaeology (Parikka); mobile media (Büscher); net-research on political movements (Rogers); sensing atmospheres (Engelmann and McCormack); collaboration in data-sprints (Venturini, Munk and Meunier); phenomenological film analysis (Marks); and ethical approaches in play studies (Sicart). Hailing from diverse inter- and trans-disciplinary backgrounds, all authors ask questions pertinent to how methods can be sensitive to the ways in which we as researchers engage with our research materials, be it in the field of media studies, play studies, STS, design studies or critical geography. They shed light on how such engagements can give rise to, and inter-relate with, new modes of distribution and knowledge production.
The reflections in this section relate to an ongoing re-evaluation of how we as researchers can engage with and recognize distributed relations between ourselves and ‘our’ research materials in a constellation that Sasha Engelmann and Derek McCormack call ‘the materiality of spacetimes’ (that is, the spatio-temporal relations brought into existence in the bringing together of things, other people, the social, technical and natural environment). As we engage with research, we might recognize that the shape of our research field shifts and disperses through this engagement. Even more, our research also continually invites us as researchers to shift, shape and reconsider our position as researcher. If we accept this invitation, our methods will emerge in a reciprocal process of hybridization, in which our position as researcher is co-produced through what we engage with and (re-)distribute.
If, for example, we use a method like Digging, as Jussi Parikka proposes in his contribution, we will make use of the affordances of the instruments that we use for digging into the ground – a spade, a trowel, a pick – engaging with them and acknowledging their agency and affordances in how they contribute to what we want to achieve. Yet as they serve us, we serve them, hence hybridizing instruments, bodies, objects and subjects. Because of this fluidity or ‘flux’ (Hayles 2002), we cannot understand a method as a fully stable or a priori established thing. Instead, the capacities and qualities – or character – of a method are brought into being through the uses it invites us to employ and through the ground we want to cover by using ‘it’.
One well-established way to recognize the co-production of methods, things and fields has been to pay attention to how we as researchers are materially situated within our research networks and to reflect consciously on how our modes of engagements unfold while doing research. What was learned from the reflexive turn in this respect is that there is much to be ascertained by situating ourselves in our research contexts, whether it concerns research about fan-culture, games, a design company, a political movement or the use of technologies in daily life.
Ways of making our situatedness visible to ourselves and others through reflexivity have been advocated in anthropology, gender studies, STS and other fields in the social sciences and humanities (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2009; Ateljevic, Harris, Wilson and Collins 2005; Davies 1999; England 1994; Woolgar and Ashmore 1988; Hughes and Lury 2013). These approaches underscore that researchers should pay methodological heed to processes of becoming involved with the research ‘materials’ that they engage. This recognition especially comes to the fore when engaging in vivo with research fields and real-time experiments ‘in the wild’, either virtual or physical (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2009; Ateljevic et al. 2005; Davies 1999; England 1994). After all, ‘live’ situations ask the researcher to constantly, consciously and directly adapt to how events unfold. It, therefore, becomes even more important that one constantly adapts to new research circumstances and that new connections with actors and other material come into being during the process.
Methods are tangibly dependent on what we encounter – and how that invites us to develop new strategies. We need to think on our feet, constantly translating methods from where we stand and what we (unpredictably) touch and engage with. In critical geography, for example, experimental projects require methods that account for our involvement in such experiments and the alternative knowledge produced by untried – and often interdisciplinary – encounters (Last 2012; McCormack 2013; Thompson 2015). These projects can be as diverse as the experimental architectural artistic practices discussed by Engelmann and McCormack, experimental work on sensing (Gabrys 2012), dance (McCormack 2008), art-labs (Jellis 2015) or art exhibitions (Paglen 2008).
More generally, over the last 50 years situatedness and reflexivity have been widely acknowledged in different disciplines as hybridizing modes of methodological engagement for what Celia Lury calls compound methods. Yet, as Karen Barad observes (1998), situatedness and reflexivity do not always lead to critical reflection. They can, for example, be used to tie knowledge production to problem solving and to a restricted notion of accountability to society, without acknowledging the hybridity of research and considering our partial position as researchers in the society to which we are accountable. Preferring refraction or diffraction to reflexivity to emphasize a more critical approach to research, feminist scholars such as Karen Barad (2014) and Donna Haraway (1988) argue that it is important to show how we as researchers are situated within our research in a strategically political way. Such an approach counters hegemonic epistemologies that use a sharp distinction between the researcher as active ‘agent’ and research subjects as passive and ‘raw’ material which have been described as positions linked to masculine and white ideologies of domination (Haraway 1988) and based on false dichotomies like culture/nature. The basic starting-point for these alternative critical approaches is to acknowledge our positionality as researcher and pay attention to how it shapes our approach and outcomes, as well as how methods come into being through an engagement with our research field. When researchers engage with their research materials, a process unfolds in which delineations between researchers, methods and others, can become increasingly untenable, or at least open to change and differential distributions. The essays in this section of the book present us with ways to acknowledge such processes and offer new approaches to make this a productive part of research methods.
Understanding methods as processual, allows us to explicate how the knowledges that methods can produce emerge in and through their distribution. Or as Monika Büscher maintains in her chapter, it enables us to underscore that methods are always (in) movement. With a background in mobility studies, Büscher draws attention to how mobile methods implicate movement on many levels, both in terms of participation and distribution. She maintains that it would be a mistake to understand mobile or moving methods solely as a situation in which researchers look for new approaches to research mobile media, such as car-navigation (Brown and Laurier 2005), social media apps such as Grindr (Licoppe, Rivière and Morel 2016) and many more mobile technologies. Moving methods are, for Büscher, rooted in a deeper understanding of reality as processual and ‘becoming’. Furthermore, and maybe as a consequence, when a researcher engages with methods from this perspective it means they acknowledge that their approach can be moved itself, sometimes even pushed into making interdisciplinary translations with and via newly produced domains.
Such ‘moving’ attitudes towards research are of course intimately connected to how research methods foreground processuality by being transformative and dependent on the engagement of researchers and other actors. This engagement can also include the multisensory affects that are felt and performed when doing research. We might be bodily moved, to paraphrase Büscher, and this process includes more senses than just the eyes that we use for reflection, observation and visualization. Accounting for the multisensory as part of our method is a rather novel perspective and very little work has been done on this so far, in part because senses such as touch or smell (McLean 2012; Quercia, Schifanella, Aiello and McLean 2015) often go beyond words, yet can be made intrinsic to our methods. It is precisely these possibilities that Engelmann and McCormack address in their chapter, describing experiments of sensing the atmospheric as a ‘complex relationship between experience, technique and technology’. Also, film scholar Laura U. Marks engages with the multi-dimensionality of the senses and affect when she proposes in her contribution a phenomenologically informed method for film analyses, describing this as involving an examination of the bodily and non-cognitive dynamic engagements of researchers with the films they investigate.
Movement can also be linked to play, as play is not only a kind of movement (as, for example, in the play in a piece of machinery), but also moves us into other kinds of dynamic approaches to research. In his contribution, ‘Playing with ethics’, Miguel Angel Sicart maintains that play, which he approaches as dynamic and relational, is fundamental to how we understand changeable relations between play, ‘playthings’ (Sicart 2014: 70), players and researchers. Sicart argues that this relationality has consequences for how methods of playing address the fluid connections between the ‘game’ and the engaged position of the player. He draws attention to the ethical dimensions of this approach. After all, being playful means that we embrace risk and danger as part of our methodology. In Sicart’s view, when we want to study play we should always aim to ‘have access to the reflective work that players do when engaging with moral challenges’ and make this part of the dynamics of methods for play.
The contribution from Tommaso Venturini, Anders Munk and Axel Meunier ‘Data-sprinting’ is a substantiation of Büscher’s argument that moving methods need not only pertain to the physical mobility of researcher and research, but might also involve a deeper understanding of how research moves reality – in their case political reality. Rooted in Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) (Callon 1999, 1986; Latour 1996, 2005; Callon, Lascoumes and Barthe 2009; Law 2009), the method of controversy mapping embraces ‘radical uncertainty’ and an interdisciplinary approach in which the public are engaged as actors, echoing Sicart’s advocacy of the value of engaging players in research. The data-sprints they describe are a method in which researchers engage with research ‘subjects’ and vice versa; they are intensive gatherings in which public controversies are addressed, situations par excellence where social ‘realities are in the making and capricious’. The authors explore the ways in which positions between researcher and researched hybridize. Relatedly, Richard Rogers’ chapter shows how digital methods enable researchers to engage within distributed networks, in his case, the Internet. In his essay, ‘Issuecrawling’, the ongoing engagement of the researcher with its field is recognized in a detailed ‘manual’ on the moves, methods and steps Rogers took when researching relations between right-wing populist websites.
Many authors in this section share a keen interest in how research questions play out in our contemporary mediatized and often digitalized culture. This emphasis on the digital is in no way a coincidence, as such new digitalized ‘networks of control’ (Galloway 2004) have made possible new forms of engagement and distribution. Described as interactive (Coleman 2010), processual (Berry 2015), playful (Sicart 2014), accelerated (Cubitt 1999), or hybrid and convergent (Jenkins 2006; Chadwick 2013), such shifting networks or assemblages invite researchers to acknowledge the significance of diverse form of distribution for moving methods.
This is not to say that prior to the digital age no such distributed approaches existed or were needed, only that contemporary media have furthered the need for the development of (situated and) distributed methods. In a kind of methodological recursion, researchers are increasingly drawn to the use or doing of digital media to study them, and this doubled reflexive engagement has produced new research methods that emphasize the significance of the processual and incorporate the networked possibilities of research methods.
The subfield of digital methods (see also Gerlitz, this volume) is an influential example of how the digital era has given rise to new networked approaches. Broadly speaking, digital methods are a series of methods that are digital in themselves – as opposed to being digitized – with a strong emphasis on web-based techniques to follow digital traces so as to allow the capturing of the action of distributed networks (Rogers 2009). An example is the crawling technique used by Rogers in his chapter, the method he uses to map distributed networks of political connections on the Internet. Other methods that have been developed in this subfield include scraping (Marres and Weltevrede 2013), controversy analyses (Marres 2015; Venturini 2012) and diverse methods for analysing the multiplicities of ‘real-timeness’ (Weltevrede, Helmond and Gerlitz 2014). Yet other methods have also emerged that might not neatly fall under the denominator of digital methods, but are still intimately related to new digital phenomena, including mobile methods that make use of digital audio-visual devices for more and other purposes than what Rogers would call a ‘digitized’ recording method (2009), for example digital ethnographies (Pink et al. 2015) that include participant-observations of the use of mobile phones and navigation devices (Wilmott 2016; Hjorth and Pink 2014), or (auto)ethnographic methods for researching digital games (Witkowski 2015; Cuttell 2015; Taylor 2009). All these methods share an interest in accounting for the engaged and distributed relations between researchers and digital research materials and methods.
Engaging and distributing as tropes in research not only draw attention to how researchers participate in and are involved with their research materials and shape and share their research objectives through them, they also prompt us to acknowledge the relational dynamics of digital and non-digital things and assemblages. Engagement nudges us to develop adaptive and reflexive methods for producing and visualizing results. It also stimulates us to recognize the manifoldness of methods, asking us to consider knowledge production as a co-production, emerging in relations with other actors in the assemblage as well as ourselves, such as players, citizens, and also other things and species (Haraway 2003, 2013).
As a consequence, our research can often seem ‘messy’ (Law 2004). Methods only come into being as part of complex and dynamic assemblages that can at times confuse us. In the networks that we spin, we have to deal with the play in and of translations, or in Latourian terms with hybridizations that are constantly shifting, undergoing redistribution, depending on what we do, where we stand, and where we wish to go. In fields such as ANT, cultural studies (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2009; Ateljevic et al. 2005; Davies 1999), (digital) media studies (Hess 2001; Pink 2008) and critical geography (Wittel 2000), we have seen a proliferation of new approaches that try to recognize such dynamics. The chapters in this section seek to recognize this complexity by working from an understanding of researcher and researched as not fixed but in flux. In these fields, engaging and distributing are key to how we consider and acknowledge the translations of knowledge that come into being through a critical involvement between researchers, other actors, methods and things.
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