Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 6b
Participating in sensory worlds
Thursday 9 September, 11.30 - 1pm
'Licence to thrill: ethnographic imagination in multidisciplinary research' - Griet Scheldeman (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.