Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 6b
Participating in sensory worlds
Thursday 9 September, 11.30 - 1pm
'‘Researching the Material’: a Sensorial Approach to Shoe Design' - Naomi Braithwaite (Nottingham Trent University)
This paper stems from current doctoral research exploring the creative practice of a number of independent British shoe designers. Using an ethnographic method of interviews and participatory observations this research offers an understanding of creative practices as an emotional, embodied and sensorial experience for its practitioners. Shoe design exists as a dialogue between practitioner, material and form, overseen by the sensory realms of sight and touch. It is the designer’s eye that is drawn first, seduced by the gloss and sheen of a material, from here the designer connects with its tactile nature and visualises how the raw material will transform into the structure of a shoe. Touch is not just a reactive process, but, a proactive one through which new creative ideas transpire. The paper will argue that it is the sense experience that seizes and acts upon the body of the individual designer and in turn stimulates their creative thought. To fully understand this sensorial process, an ethnographic method that relies predominantly on observations is insufficient. The paper will thus trace the researcher’s journey through a shoe design and making course. It will be argued that in order to understand design as sensory and embodied, one must experience it emotionally and physically by ‘learning to do’. Applying this method will contribute to the interpretation of design as sensorial.
'‘Common-sense’ research: Senses, emotions and embodiment in researching stag tourism in Eastern Europe' - Thomas Thurnell-Read (University of Warwick)
In this paper I will draw on my experiences of conducting my doctoral research on all-male premarital stag party tourism from Britain to Krakow, Poland. The research therefore concerns the performative and embodied aspects of hegemonic male behaviour that are encouraged and enacted in highly gendered tourist leisure spaces. Central to the process of gaining an ethnographic insight into the stag tourism phenomenon was a willingness to centre sensory, emotional and embodied data in the participant-observation research process. Methodological reflections, therefore, recall the effects of conducting research in a setting which is mediated by the consumption of alcohol and collective drunkenness and pervaded with sensory (the thump of nightclub base speakers, the drunken cheers of stag group participants, the smell of vodka) and emotive (feelings of elation, amusement and disgust) stimuli. Particular importance can be given to the benefit of mutual ‘common-sense’ experiences in building rapport between researchers and their participants. Further, the research topic gave rise to an unusual pace of research, oscillating between moments of intense involvement in the research setting and periods of rest, recovery and reflection. The paper concludes with discussion of some of the potential pitfalls of incorporating such data into theoretical and conceptual frameworks which can often act to deny or minimise the lived experiences of both researchers and participants.
'Licence to thrill: ethnographic imagination in multidisciplinary research' - Griet Scheldemar (Lancaster University)
As anthropologist on a multidisciplinary project that investigates how people move around in cities, I find myself in the world of transport, with transport and urban planning researchers as colleagues. Transport may not sound the most thrilling topic. Its familiar building blocks ‘people, cars, bikes, buses, roads, traffic lights, and timetables’ do not allow for much diversion. Yet look closer and you discover a throbbing mix of people, practices, ways, routes, encounters and conversations. Alas, blink once and the vision - people and their movements- is clouded again by questionnaires, counts and surveys, trusted tools of the transport trade. It finds safety in numbers and straight lines: distance, duration, connecting routes. For a discipline which studies motion it embraces a surprisingly static view.
In this paper I relate my exploratory attempts to introduce movement, in practice and imagination. So I, on my own and with others, walk and cycle. As we negotiate traffic, surfaces and seasons, our feet, legs, arms, lungs, eyes, ears and nose continuously remind us that numbers and straight lines have very little to do with moving around.
The anthropological practice of fieldwork, that allows me to bodily, sensorially and cognitively explore movement in different urban environments, is a privilege not found in other disciplines. With this comes a responsibility. Not only do I have the licence, I feel I have the duty to thrill. By engaging in practice and with ethnographic imagination, we can make life so present it cannot be ignored.
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