Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 4b
Capturing the intangible
Wednesday 8 September, 2 - 3.30pm
'The elusiveness of life: limits can be conditions too' - Hayder Al-Mohammad (University of Kent)
Reconsidering Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’, Stanley Cavell arrives at ‘whirls of organisms’ as a more faithful way of rendering the constitution of persons as grounded in what they do and not what there are. Where philosophers tend to obsess about the 'forms' in ‘forms of life’, in this paper I am more interested in 'life' and ponder whether it is something which can manifest itself before a researcher conducting ‘fieldwork’ and sharing in the experiences of others or if it can be made tangible or accessible in theoretical investigations. Unlike many other objects of inquiry, ‘life’ does not seem to be locatable in an object, event or phenomenon, rather it permeates the world around us. In pointing to the epistemic and methodological difficulties of attempting to bring ‘life’ to prominence as an area of investigation, I hope to show that such difficulties are part of the phenomenon itself and are as much conditions as they are limits to any such investigation.
''The Feeling of Fleeting Things': researching everyday encounters with animals' - Becky Tipper (University of Manchester)
Encounters with creatures can be an important aspect of everyday life. In this paper, I look particularly at interactions between humans and those creatures who are not their own pets, drawing on my ethnographic research into human-animal engagements in a British suburban neighbourhood.
In this neighbourhood, humans regularly encounter creatures in their gardens and in the public spaces of the local neighbourhood: gardens are replete with wildlife, such as birds, frogs, hedgehogs and insects, and the local park is inhabited by squirrels, ducks, geese and other birds. These everyday encounters are often fleeting and elusive by nature – they occur by chance, can be momentary and ephemeral, yet (to varying degrees) they can be significant. Sometimes they are a mundane and taken-for-granted part of daily life, but sometimes they are moving or enchanting, and may matter profoundly to people.
When people discuss these experiences, they may similarly prove elusive, hard to pin down in words or almost inarticulable. I suggest that to understand them requires listening carefully to the silences and cadences in the recounting; and attending to the intangible, experiential and emotional dimensions of such encounters.
The fleeting, momentary, inexpressible and intangible may be especially at issue in human-animal relationships (where the relationship necessarily transcends language and unavoidably raises questions about the possibility of meaningful connection across the species boundary with a non-verbal Other). However, I also suggest that attending to the these issues has consequences for understanding the momentary, intangible and fleeting aspects of everyday life more broadly.
'"Who do you think they were?" Family histories and placing people in the past - investigating absences' - Dr Wendy Bottero (University of Manchester)
Abstract to follow.
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