Seeing in the Dark: Embodied Cognition in Amateur Astronomy Practice

Abstract

We add to research on embodied cognition by investigating the observational practices of amateur astronomers. Specifically, we take an interactionist perspective and examine how the body is recruited, moment by moment, as a resource for producing and communicating meaning during field activity. The data corpus is a set of ethnographic video records and field notes on the routines of a community of astronomers, especially small-group interactions during planning, searching for, observing, and confirming sight of a celestial target. Within this space, our analysis highlights how different modalities of embodied action and reasoning (gestures, tool use, gaze, touch, and others) were deployed and coordinated throughout the process of observing a celestial object and how those emerged in the transactions among participants. Our findings rehearse many issues and topics in the contemporary literature (e.g., gesturing for measuring or representationally) but also reveal important, novel forms of embodied action and reasoning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics practices (e.g., training the eyes in averted vision and inscribing a celestial scene onto one’s hand). More broadly, these findings further affirm the power of interactionist analyses of knowing and learning while also surfacing areas in which expanded theorizing is needed to account for the full set of cognitive phenomena we observed.

Acknowledgments

We deeply thank all astronomers who participated in this study, particularly the Club Astronomers community. We also thank four reviewers and two editors for their thoughtful and extensive comments and suggestions. Finally, we thank Christopher Hernández—an undergraduate student in the UTeach program at The University of Texas at Austin—for his illustration in Figure 2.

Funding

The early work reported on in this article was supported in part by a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Spencer Foundation, to which Flávio S. Azevedo is greatly indebted.

Notes

¹ We use pseudonyms to refer to the names of people, organizations, and observation sites that we studied.

² Preserving optimal lighting conditions is essential to observational practice, and violations of the norm are seriously frowned on, often openly and directly. This is because the eyes adapt to the low lighting conditions; bright light sources will dilate eye pupils, which require time to readapt.

³ Drawing on findings from neuroscience and other disciplines, Downey (2007) went on to speculate what such visual prowess might do to restructure the master capoeirista’s perception in daily life, beyond the practicing grounds of capoeira. This is the common problem of transfer of learning, a topic beyond our concerns here.

⁴ Given our emphasis on the materiality of action, it is ironic that the camera was marketed to people interested in paranormal activity.

⁵ This is indeed common in ethnographic work, as Emerson et al. (2011) explained: “We continue to distinguish these forms of in-process analysis and analytic writing from the full-bore processes of coding and memo writing that best occur after a substantial amount of field data has been collected” (p. xi).

Additional information

Funding

The early work reported on in this article was supported in part by a Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Spencer Foundation, to which Flávio S. Azevedo is greatly indebted.