Figure 3.6.1 Sensory ethnography of the social order of traffic. A motorbike is audibly wishing to overtake in tight space. (Photo: Cosmin Popan, reproduced with permission.)
Monika Büscher
reality is movement
Bergson 1960[1919]: 319
Mobile methods have been developed to gain deeper insight into critical features of contemporary life, such as the growing global dependence on fossil-fuelled transport, manufacturing and energy systems; the secret flows of offshored finance; environmentally and conflict-related mass displacement and migration; the cultural lure and political economies of tourism; and the present absences and absent presences of digital communications. They often leverage the potential of new mobile technologies, from digital notepads to body-worn cameras, and perhaps because of this are often understood as mobile in a literal sense, requiring researchers to physically ‘move along with, be with, sense with’ their research subjects (Merriman 2013). Yet, as Merriman argues, the ‘newness’ of these methods is questionable, as is their emphasis on literally mobilizing researchers to study mobile subjects and objects. Mol and Mesman in their study of orderings in a neonatal ward provide an example of how mobile methods in this sense can get ‘stuck’: ‘[W]hat about the pieces of paper that travel from the ward to the dispensary? J couldn’t enter the hospital’s postal system with them, for its plastic tubes were . .. far too small for human bodies’ (Mol and Mesman 1996: 422–423).
Literally moving with the subjects and objects of research can be difficult when they are too small or too vast, too slow or too fast, too complex or immaterial to follow. Research subjects might not be human or material objects on the move, but animals, diseases, ideas, atmospheres or whole mobility systems. Think of data in wireless networks, global flows of people, goods, finance, or resources, or the movement of emotions within a crowd or a dispersed media public.
But the contemporary motivation to make methods mobile for research arises in the context of the new mobilities paradigm, a transdisciplinary analytical orientation that sees the world, the social, the material, their rhythms, histories and futures as they are made in and through movement, blocked movement, stillness (Sheller and Urry 2006). It thus springs from a deep appreciation of ‘how reality is movement’ (Bergson 1960[1919]), as mobilities research, along with feminist, actor-network, and non-representational theories, ethnomethodology and process philosophies recognizes the emergent nature of reality, the way in which social and material phenomena are made and made durable in and through the inter- or intra-actions of many human and non-human agencies. Yet, mobile, inventive or ‘live’ methods (Sheller 2015) still struggle with the fact that ‘the mobile flies for ever before the pursuit of science’ (Bergson 1960[1919]: 317). This is, in part, because narrow interpretations of what ‘mobile methods’ might, or even should be, have constricted the analytical leverage sought and found (Merriman 2013). But many researchers have been moving methods in ways that make moving methods and methodologies open up new avenues for multiple mobile transdisciplinary forms of science. The examples below provide an impression of how moving as method and methodology can slow science to attune to the mobile and generate new analytical momentum for methodological assemblage.
Moving researchers might ‘prioritise “being there” . .. to understand phenomena’ (Fincham, McGuinness and Murray 2009: 171), but this does not have to be conceived as an exercise in finding more ‘authentic’ ways of ‘bringing back the data’. Instead, it can be developed as a way of creating deeper understanding of ‘how places, spaces and subjectivities are constituted in and through motion’, where moving as method might entail sensory ethnographies (Figure 3.6.1), experiencing and reflectively practising movement alongside others, and finding new ways of articulating the mobile in a collaborative research encounter (Brown and Spinney, in Fincham et al. 2009: 130). This does not necessarily even require physically going along with participants.
Laurier (in Fincham et al. 2009) shows how ‘being there’ vicariously, by inviting research subjects to document their journeys with a camera installed in their cars, can be a technique for moving alongside the mobile to study (im)mobile becoming. Laurier’s concern is with the practical achievement of place, space, subjectivity, especially the doings, obligations, and responsibilities of ‘passengering’. His approach seeks to increase the richness and agility of insight, by not being there in person (as another passenger). To understand naturally occurring conduct in a way that respects its situated performativity, the ‘absent presence’ of recording devices operated by research participants allowed lived practices of passengering to be performed and captured in vivo. But again, the aim of moving with the mobile is not to ‘bring back the data’ for positivist expert analysis, but to foster the patience needed to analytically exhibit social and material becoming and to show how, in the mundane everyday practices of movement, and the specificities of doing passengering and driving, socio-material realities and subjectivities are made.
Figure 3.6.1 Sensory ethnography of the social order of traffic. A motorbike is audibly wishing to overtake in tight space. (Photo: Cosmin Popan, reproduced with permission.)
Relatedly, albeit in a rather different way, studying archival records of past experiences of driving with an explicit analytical orientation to the mobile can be seen to leverage moving across different historical accounts as a method to mobilize sensitivities to the performativity of movement and enable a deeper understanding and richer description of emergent and interconnected pasts, presents and futures (Merriman 2013). And moving with the rhythms of early twentieth-century postcard exchanges by combining multiple methods, ranging from historical ethnography of material culture to textual analysis can enable researchers to enter into past ‘interweavings of personal mobilities and creativity in the uptake and shaping of a new communications technology’ (Gillen and Hall, in Büscher, Urry and Witchger 2011: 34; see also Coleman, this volume).
The methodologies described above use literal, vicarious or analytical agility to apprehend mobile becoming, or the way in which places, spaces, subjectivities are made in lived (im)mobile practice. This moving as method is intrinsically multi-scalar, concerned with realities made of movement at different scales, exploring the micro-interactive orders of passengering as well as planetary effects of CO2 emissions. In his study of planetary mobilities, Bron Szerszynski (2016) moves through a wide-ranging review of research in physics, biology, palaeontology and environmental sociology to trace how a ‘sublunary far-from-equilibrium planetary becoming’ makes realities in the multi-scalar movements of micro-particles, animals, technologically augmented anthropogenic mobilities such as planetary jet streams and ocean gyres, as well as interplanetary mobilities. He makes a move towards connecting the different scales of lived lives and geophysical processes and finds that through these mobilities Earth is ‘self-organising over deep, geological time and thereby creating its own unique history and set of powers’ (2016: 614). Together with a more empirical focus on the mundane practical achievement of socio-material orders, and of place, space, subjectivity in motion at different scales, rich reflections on the ethico-episteme-ontology of mobile becoming become both possible and necessary. Such personal and societal considerations resonate deeply with calls for more circumspect ethico-episteme-ontologies of research, such as that issued in feminist theorist Karen Barad’s investigation of the agential realism of position, potential and momentum at the quantum physics heart of the universe (Barad 2007).
Researchers interested in how realities are constituted in and through the work of movement and its opposites of blocked movement or stasis at different scales have ‘moved across’ disciplines and ‘moved in’ to other disciplines as well as multiple lived contexts in which phenomena manifest, because ‘getting’ the multi-scalar mobile requires transdisciplinary, live, collaborative, experimental, critical and creative approaches. Artist Jen Southern’s work on ‘comobility’, for example, was produced by moving her investigation with geographical positioning systems (GPS) into sociology, making new theoretical and methodological inroads, crossroads and vantage points for analytical and inventive endeavours that mix these disciplinary perspectives. Her investigations of an emerging ‘new sense of comobility, of being mobile with others at a distance’ (Southern 2012: 75) proceed reflexively through literary explorations (St Exupery), learning to fly, engaging with pilots, reindeer and their herders, developing a ‘comobility app’ and studying its uptake and shaping in everyday life, and working with mountain rescue dogs and handlers, and searcher kite fliers through participant observation (Figure 3.6.2). The co-mobile realities made by connecting GPS satellites with the feet, hooves and paws that bring position to life on the ground are not entirely new but deeply consequential transformations and transpositions of relational connectedness.
In doing mobilities research, many researchers find themselves moved – by atmospheres, affects and injustices, and they react to this not only with rational analysis, but also emotional and creative modes of analysis; indeed, they may use moving as a method, placing their body into contexts as ‘an affective vehicle through which we sense place and movement, and construct emotional geographies’ (Sheller and Urry 2006: 216). David Bissell’s work on quiescence, passivity, lethargy, tiredness, hunger and pain, for example, provides a much needed counterpoint to an emphasis on mobility in mobilities research (Bissell, in Fincham et al. 2009), for example. One of the most haunting examples of the moving potential of moving methods is Harry Ferguson’s mobile ethnography of social work and his description of ‘moving scenes from social work’ (in Büscher et al. 2011: 78–80). Quoting from an inquiry report on ‘Baby Peter’, he reminds readers of the death of a 17-month-old boy. Peter died as a result of over 50 injuries, received at his home while he and his carers were under the supervision of social services in a borough of London in 2007. Ferguson contrasts the way in which social workers are blamed for their failure to exercise rational judgement at innumerable junctures in this case with a moving ethnographic analysis of the anxiety and fear that can undermine that very capacity of reasoning when visiting homes where children are abused. The social workers he accompanied were often met with deception, strategic obstructive placement of matter (dirty clothes, chocolate smears on children’s faces), animals (large dogs) and aggressive human bodies, as well as a threatening atmosphere, which clouded their perception. Ferguson argues that by moving along with practitioners, mobilities research can trace the emotional geographies that so clearly have an impact on professional practice, and challenge institutional practices to provide more support for the mobile and deeply moving work of social work.
Figure 3.6.2 Jen Southern ‘Searcher’ (2015), taking frames from rescue dog-mounted video up into the sky to explore connections between GPS satellites, grid coordinates, mountain rescue practices. (Photo: Jen Southern, reproduced with permission.)
But emotions can also become the subject of more metaphorically moving methods, using textually based discursive modes of following phenomena of affect. Sara Ahmed (2004) moves through websites, government reports, political speeches and newspaper articles to ‘feel her way’ around the manifestation, naming, doing and doings of specific emotions: pain, hate, fear, disgust, shame, love, queer feelings and feminist attachments. She is moving with the circulation of emotions, because ‘emotions after all are moving, even if they do not simply move between us’ (p. 11). She traces the cultural politics of emotion to show how emotions circulate and powerfully transcend the personal: ‘words for feeling, and objects for feeling circulate and generate effects: they move, stick, and slide’ and, in the process, they ‘create the very surfaces, boundaries and distinctions’ that connect and divide societies. Ahmed shows, for example, how hate works by ‘sticking “figures of hate” together, transforming them into a common threat, within discourses of on asylum and migration’ (p. 15). Emotions such as pity, fear, disgust, shame, she shows, are deeply political.
Moving methods that enable emotional immersion, analysis, mapping, or a tracing of the political performativities of emotions can generate important insights. However, being moved, also has – and in my view should have – normative momentum.
In her book Staying with the Trouble, Haraway (2016) discusses examples of troubles worth moving with. However, making normative moves while in the company of troubles can be a fraught undertaking and put people off, for very good reasons. For example, despite the prospect of 11 billion people on Earth in 2100,
many feminists, including science studies and anthropological feminists, have not been willing seriously to address the Great Acceleration of human numbers, fearing that to do so would be to slide once again into the muck of racism, classism, nationalism, modernism, and imperialism.
2016: 6
Moving responsibly, or response-ably within such quagmires, she argues, means to set aside these fears and ‘think together anew across differences of historical position and of kinds of knowledge and expertise’ (2016: 7). That is certainly a necessary part, but considering the abysses that such thinking needs to span, thinking is not enough.
Moving as method and methodology as practised by artists, designers and social scientists like Southern and others, including myself, suggests other modes of more hands-on and collective engagement that are useful, including literally ‘moving into’ troubles, such as those surrounding the surveillance potential of digital tracking technologies (Büscher, Hemment, Coulton and Mogensen, in Büscher et al. 2011). This involves becoming engaged in their design, and contested collective experimentations with prototypes, which is likely to reveal the emergence of unintended consequences in ways that can not only be felt directly, but that also make it possible to critically-creatively address these. Working with critique is often most productive when the grounds for change are contested vigorously and visions of how problems and challenges (as well as opportunities) should be addressed are translated into experimental but ‘inhabitable’ futures that allow collectives to ‘move in’ to explore unintended consequences (Figure 3.6.3). This makes it possible to reversibly move forward, sideways or back with innovations in – as Latour would put it – a simultaneously more radically careful, and carefully radical way. Other examples include Malene Freudendal-Pedersen and her colleagues’ methods for sharing responsibilities for urban planning more widely (in Fincham et al. 2009).
Pivotal to such interdisciplinary engagements with practitioners, designers, policy-makers, planners and others beyond the academy are methods that can move people to be passionate, respectful and open to multiple forms of expertise, interests and motivations. They require new capabilities for negotiating the multiply emergent and unknown over the longue durée, contesting power, considering intergenerational justice and responsibility. Moving methods have close affinities to engaged, inventive, live methods and public sociology endeavours that share these ambitions (Sheller 2015). They add sensitivity to how reality is mobile, and could be otherwise. If reality is made in the work of movement, blocked movement, stasis, it can be made differently.
Figure 3.6.3 Moving with the troubles of digital tracking. Discovering unintended consequences of digital tracking technologies in networked risk governance and emergency response by experimenting with prototypes developed in the BRIDGE project www.bridgeproject.eu/en. (Photo: Monika Büscher 2014.)
This (highly selective!) discussion traces the emergence of moving methods. These are not radically new methods constitutive of a new methodological paradigm. They seem to have taken shape in many different settings and seem to be coming together as a proposition to move methods onwards as well as sideways and into discoveries of new reversibilities, into deeper depths, and new collaborative engagements, because the troubles found in the world need more circumspect, critical, creative, collective, contested research. Even if still ‘the mobile flies forever before the pursuit of science, which is concerned with mobility alone’ (Bergson 1960[1919]: 317), moving as method and methodology can enrich an analytical orientation to movement, blocked movement and stillness and enable multi-scalar, critical-creative research.
Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. London: Routledge.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Southern, J. (2012). Comobility: how proximity and distance travel together in locative media. Canadian Journal for Communications, 37(1): 75–91.
Szerszynski, B. (2016). Planetary mobilities: movement, memory and emergence in the body of the Earth. Mobilities, 11(4): 614–628.