Seeing, feeling, and showing ‘bodies-in-place’: exploring reflexivity and the multisensory body through videography

Abstract

This paper considers the challenge of representing embodied, multisensory experience of ‘bodies-in-place’ through film, an audio-visual medium. The first section, ‘Seeing bodies’, sets the context within a more general ‘return to the senses’ in the social sciences, and particularly within ethnographic fieldwork, in order to reconnect place and sense through mobile encounter. ‘Feeling bodies’, the second section on sensory reflexivity and positionality, considers the ensuing question regarding how researchers themselves are emplaced in embodied, ethnographic contexts. We argue for ways that the multiple senses of reflexive ‘bodies-in-place’ can be evoked or conveyed through multimodal (audio-visual) media, like film, especially through dialogue in accompanying screenings. The third section, ‘Showing bodies-in-place’, examines multimodal videographic practices that emerged whilst conducting interviews, ethnographic observation and impromptu videographic experiments in the field. The final section, ‘Showing bodies’, builds from those emergent practices to offer a series of practical methodological suggestions and provocations for future research to solidify the case for the utility of a reflexive haptic videography within fieldwork.

Keywords:

• Videography
• reflexivity
• senses
• ethnography
• haptic
• qualitative methods

Notes

1. See http://www.pitturbanstudiesinsingapore.wordpress.com for details.