Attentive Observation: Walking, Listening, Staying Put

Abstract

In this article I suggest that a renewed emphasis on “attentive observation,” as both a form of radical empiricism and a source of imaginative insight, might contribute towards building a more nuanced conception of fieldwork that is better attuned to the multisensory and multispecies textures of material geographies. I focus on interactions with nature, landscape, and nonhuman others in an urban context but my argument has wider connotations for concerns with embodied methodologies, critical phenomenology, and slower forms of research.

Key Words:

• critical phenomenology
• embodied methodologies
• evidentiary materialism
• multisensory geographies
• soundscapes
• walking methodologies

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

—Simone Weil¹

The magic is always in the detail.

—Theodor Fontane²

On my regular running route through the Kreuzberg district of Berlin I pass one particular apartment building with a light over its entrance porch that attracts nocturnal insects. I always check what is there and if it is noteworthy I submit the record to a scientific project for the Berlin-Brandenburg region that collates many thousands of individual records into a larger database. My original observation then becomes a cartographic dot that forms part of an elaborate citizen science project that has been developed in collaboration with the city’s natural history museum and a network of environmental organizations.³ Of course, this is more than just a biodiversity mapping project: it is a kind of collective enrichment of ordinary urban spaces. It is an illustration of attentive observation in action.

In this article I contrast attentive forms of observation with more passive modes of sensory experience or spectatorship. I want to emphasize how noticing seemingly minor or mundane things can enlarge the scope of geographical thought. But how might greater attention directed toward the marginal or unexpected elements of everyday spaces enrich our understanding of “the field” within geographical research? Both “the field” and various kinds of “fieldwork” have been a sustained focus of critical attention within the geographical literature since the 1990s, drawing on successive waves of feminist, postcolonial, poststructuralist, and more recently queer insights.⁴ In particular, the figure of the embodied observer has loomed prominently, more recently supplemented by multisubjectival readings of agency, space, and subjectivity that encompass an array of nonhuman elements.⁵ Here, I want to focus on some of the limits and complexities of the human subject in relation to a series of “field settings” that relate to different facets of the geographical imagination sparked through walking, listening, and staying put. I use the term observation in a broad sense to denote a multilayered interaction with space that clearly exceeds the visual realm and extends to the shifting parameters of consciousness, memory, and experience.

A heightened curiosity toward ostensibly mundane or marginal types of socioecological constellations can serve as a critical starting point for a wider reflection on the status of human perception within empirical research. I find the term constellation helpful here in emphasizing an unbounded conception of agency that can nevertheless hold onto the cultural and historical specificities of human intentionality.⁶ A fine-grained form of evidentiary materialism can be polyvocal yet also skeptical toward more amorphous ontological frameworks. But what are the conceptual and methodological implications of paying closer attention to everyday spaces or situations? What trains of thought might flow from slowing down or interacting more carefully with the world around us? How, in other words, are the affective and material domains intertwined? How can the human sensorium become more attuned to a multisubjectival reading of ordinary spaces?

In this article I stress the significance of attention as part of a wider reflection on patience, observation, and heightened modes of subjectivity. I derive the term attentive observation from the French horticulturalist Gilles Clément, who is best known for his emphasis on the independent agency of nature in landscape design (see Gandy 2013). Following Clément, attentive observation can be described as a modified variant of the botanical gaze; it is a mode of perception that involves stopping, looking, and searching, often accompanied by tactile or olfactory interactions with specific plants (see Clément 2004). An interest in more careful modes of observation also emerges from a sense of frustration expressed by Clément and others at the rise of various kinds of “generic ecologies” within architecture, design, and other fields that ignore the intricacies of place, context, or ecological relations (see Gandy 2022). In interdisciplinary terms we could characterize attentive observation as an elaboration of Walter Benjamin’s interest in “botanizing on the asphalt” as part of a wider enrichment of the material field that brings the arts and sciences into a form of sustained dialogue; the practice of attentive observation connects with existing paradigms within ethology, natural history, still-life painting, and other fields, but is not reducible to them.⁷ Attentive observation involves a readiness to notice elements of rupture or disturbance in more habitual or “commonsense” readings of ordinary spaces as an entry point into engagement with strands of feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory.⁸ In this sense we might connect attentive observation to interest in forms of affective disorientation that unsettle the “taken-for-granted” worlds of everyday experience that are in turn routinely constitutive of existing power relations.

A renewal of interest in the methodological significance of enhanced modes of attentiveness is clearly present within the emerging field of multispecies ethnography (see van Dooren, Kirksey, and Münster 2016). The geographer Sage Brice (2018, 136), for instance, has deployed what she terms “observational drawing” as part of a more-than-human approach to fieldwork that goes beyond questions of representation, thereby generating a productive tension between degrees of technical skill and modes of attunement with nonhuman others. The word observation has etymological roots in the Latin observatio encompassing codes of conduct as well as forms of perceptive acuity. The figure of the observer emerges in relation to a series of scopic regimes that encompass not just an evolving technological apparatus of perception but also the dynamics of subject formation under successive phases of modernity (see Crary 1990). Rather than a continuous state, attentiveness is related to specific moments of stimulation or surprise, which in turn enhance our ability to recall experiences through heightened forms of sensory alignment (see Stewart 2007; Ernwein and Matthey 2019).

Over the last thirty years or so there has been growing concern with a pervasive culture of distraction. This is not the first historical juncture to experience comparable anxieties: Consider, for example, the widespread apprehension over sensory overload and new forms of architectonic estrangement in the early decades of the twentieth century (see, for example, Vidler 2002; Duttlinger 2007). Recent decades have seen a confluence of concerns from critical pedagogy, social psychology, media studies, and other fields. Insights from cultural history and memory studies have drawn attention to new landscapes of aesthetic consumption that are intended for “inattentive viewers” with little connection to place or collective memory (see Boyer 1992, 189). The “distracted gaze” has become a pervasive characteristic of the (late) modern human subject in the face of multiple demands for their attention. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler ([2012] 2015) has highlighted the progressive commodification of human attention, whereas the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai introduces the term “stuplimity” to denote a mode of cultural (dis)engagement that combines astonishment with boredom (see Ngai 2005). Implicit within Stiegler’s formulation is a sense that attention denotes a form of care, empathy, and heightened subjectivity (see De Preester 2021). In a comparable intervention, the sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2016) highlights the significance of human attention as a form of social and cultural “resonance” that contrasts with the incessant demands of global capital. For Rosa, late modernity is marked by “pathologies of desynchronization” emanating from multiple sources of disaffection and disorientation. Implicitly, in the writing of Boyer, Stiegler, and others, we find a cultural affinity between notions of attention and authenticity that marks a mode of resistance against the algorithmic manipulations of consumer capitalism.

We can trace concerns with attention earlier still. The value of attention is present within the “civic humanist tradition” as a utopian strand emerging within European social and political thought that gathers momentum with the revival of Aristotelian philosophy in the early modern period (see, for example, Pocock [1975] 2016). Of course, the model of active citizenship under this idealized formulation had a highly restricted conception of participation in civic life. What is of interest, however, is an emerging concern with “lack of attention” as a counter current to an engaged or participatory mode of living. In 1963, for instance, the sociologist Erving Goffman refers to “civil inattention” (84) as a form of everyday indifference that is not unrelated to Simmel’s classic invocation of the blasé attitude adopted by the modern city dweller (although it is worth recalling that Simmel’s original argument was actually oriented toward a defense of cosmopolitan modernity). More recently, Goffman’s concern with inattention has been invoked in contrast with growing interest in marginal elements of urban nature such as roadside weeds or other “minor ecologies.”⁹ Human attention itself has been recast as a precious resource that can be drawn on to produce enhanced modes of creativity and subjectivity (see Terranova 2012; Phillips 2019). Indeed, an emphasis on “alertness” and “paying closer attention to the world” has been characterized as an integral part of a critical cultural praxis (see Dillon 2014, 17).

In the first part of my article I reflect on “the field” as a focal point for contrasting forms of attention. I then turn to the significance of walking practices within varied modes of embodied research. In the next section I slow down to consider the role of listening and soundscapes within field-based research. Next, I stop moving altogether to focus on the minor details that emerge from sustained forms of stillness and concentration. Finally, I reconsider the limits to the human sensorium in the light of various modes of filtering that restrict possibilities for perception and imagination.

Reconsidering the Field

A renewed emphasis on attention serves to problematize existing conceptions of the geographical field as both a material and disciplinary terrain. The practice of fieldwork involves “going out there,” in Doreen Massey’s (2003, 71) words, in order for the researcher to come into closer contact with her object of study, which in turn raises questions about the multiple spatialities of knowledge production (see also Katz 1994). The complex historiography of field-based studies reveals a wider epistemological tension between “outside” and “inside” marked by the oscillating status of “field space” and “lab space” (or conceivably “study space” if we were to extend our notion of methodological interiority to include archives, libraries, and other settings).¹⁰ My article is concerned with a putative “outside” in two main ways: first, those spaces that lie beyond a more restricted private or interior realm, in an embodied setting that is exposed to various types of atmospheres in their broadest sense; and second, the need to move beyond narrowly empiricist understandings of what “the field” constitutes in relation to both its structural origins and also its connection to critical epistemological or interpretative paradigms. With this second sense, the meaning of a “constitutive outside” connects with Sara Ahmed’s interest in a queered reading of phenomenology. Ahmed reworked Husserlian philosophy to encompass orientations toward objects and others that extend to the geopolitical and ideological contours of space (see Ahmed 2006). A decentered interpretation of the field takes on special significance in this context as a counterdiscourse to simplified or rationalized readings of ostensibly ordinary spaces.

Within fields such as conservation biology there have been concerns that an overemphasis on field-based studies risks placing research outside the most significant developments within the bio-physical sciences (see Gaston 2010). The historians Helen Anne Curry and James Secord (2018) note, for instance, “the substitution of computer modelling and remote sensing for field observation in ecology and conservation or evolutionary biology” (535). Similarly, the increasing use of DNA barcoding for taxonomic research shifts attention away from the whole organism in its original setting towards fragments of code or more abstract conceptions of biodiversity as little more than genetic churn (see Waterton 2017). Such a view clearly resonates with avant-garde variants of the eco-modernization thesis that play down the significance of extinction and irreversible forms of biodiversity loss (see Gandy 2022). A generalized retreat from the field marks a loss of contact with what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007, 4) refer to as the “bright, pulsing world of everyday experience” in their history of scientific objectivity. At the same time, however, Daston and Galison stress the long-standing presence of a “collective empiricism” that unsettles conventional historiographies and opens up possibilities for rethinking relations between field-based observations and a variety of evaluative or representational contexts.¹¹

Can we disentangle a more nuanced emphasis on observation from a more restrictive conception of objectivity? A renewed emphasis on evidentiary materialism has been driven in part by the perceived limits to linguistic constructivism and a growing focus on postpositivist epistemologies. An emerging interest in “radical empiricism” à la William James and Alfred North Whitehead can be distinguished from what might be regarded as “mere empiricism” rooted in atomistic conceptions of knowledge, meaning, and ultimately causality (see, for example, Stenner 2011; Debaise [2015] 2017). “The great mistake,” notes Ingold (2017), “is to confuse observation with objectification” (23). Ingold is making both an etymological and epistemological distinction here in his insistence on the value of careful forms of observation: the sensory realm clearly encompasses far more than a field of measurement or instrumentation.

The persistence of observational paradigms in fields such as citizen science provides a scientific lineage to nineteenth-century natural history, the early-modern scientific revolution, and Aristotelian materialism. By tracking evolving modes of subjectivity we can avoid reductionist or teleological accounts of scientific method. The gradual augmentation of human sensory capacities spans multiple forms of amplification, magnification, and transduction (see Ihde [1976] 2007). The shifting coordinates of the human sensorium range from ground-level immediacy to multiple forms of reconstruction and representation.

The practice of observation underpinned the emergence of geography as a modern academic discipline through its connections with forms of territorial reconnaissance. At what point, though, can we discern a divergence from more instrumentalist tropes within existing forms of empirical research? Does the Humboldtian legacy denote an innate ambivalence between these strands of research practice or merely an aestheticized dimension to European colonialism? Humboldt’s intellectual lineage to romanticist conceptions of nature as articulated by Schelling and Goethe does not extricate his scientific legacy from its wider geopolitical context (see Ogborn 2018). So when do more nuanced or critically reflective modes of geographical observation emerge? In 1956, for instance, Carl Sauer noted that: “Geography is first of all knowledge gained by observation” (295–96). But what exactly did Sauer mean by observation? In response to the growth of area studies Sauer made a distinction between “derived data” and “experienced observation” (294). Evidently, Sauer’s interest in embodied modes of observation was neither empiricist nor determinist as indicated by his brief engagement with phenomenology in the 1920s (see Hepach 2021). Yet his reliance on the use of “vantage points” for landscape interpretation held no substantive connection with any culturally or historically situated conceptualization of human subjectivity (see also Sundberg 2003). The practice of attentive observation holds an ambiguous status within the emerging epistemological disputes between positivism and Marxism from the early 1970s onwards, along with the resurfacing of phenomenological approaches within humanistic geographical traditions. Indeed, recent reappraisals of phenomenology within geography have highlighted the subjectivist excess of some of the earlier conceptual appropriations (see Hepach 2021; Kinkaid 2021). A critical reappraisal of observational practice within geographical fieldwork, along with a reevaluation of the scope and limitations of the human sensorium, clearly moves beyond a narrow focus on the historiography of the discipline and connects with a wider set of intellectual developments.

How might the epistemological contribution of observation be enriched or reworked? There is a need to cultivate “the art of noticing” whereby the researcher should “look around rather than ahead” (Centemeri 2017, 162). We should pay greater attention to the margins to allow elements of serendipity or surprise to suffuse the research process. But how does the practice of observation relate to different modes of mobility (and nonmobility), sensory inclusions and exclusions, and the operation of cognitive “layers of noticing”? As Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1962) notes: “In order to relate it [attention] to the life of consciousness, one would have to show how a perception awakens attention, then how attention develops and enriches it” (26–27).¹²

Merleau-Ponty ([1964] 1969) frames perception as reciprocal and intersubjective, extending to a multiplicity of “bodily entities,” in a formulation that clearly transcends earlier forms of idealist reductionism à la Husserl (see Abram 1997, 38). At the same time, however, Merleau-Ponty’s delineation of a distinctive human sensorium tends toward a certain ahistoricism that renders the epistemological dimensions to the field somewhat obscure. In this article I want to stress the distinctiveness of a geographical contribution to the ongoing evolution of critical phenomenological approaches to ethnographic fieldwork to highlight the intercorporeal dimensions to attention, perception, and ethnographic encounters. The precise parameters of ethnographic fieldwork have been quite robustly defended by anthropologists, sociologists, and others, but the boundaries between different types of observational practice are not clear cut. The geographer Karen Till (2005, 11), for example, describes her own research practice as a form of “geo-ethnography” that is rooted in a methodological synthesis between history, geography, memory studies, and other fields. For the geographer John K. Wright (1947) the spaces of the unknown—he uses the term terrae incognitae—constitute “all that lies hidden beyond the frontiers of geographical knowledge” (4). What Wright refers to as the “peripheral zone” (he uses a singular formulation) serves as a source of “wonder or curiosity,” which prefigures the emergence of richer variants of the idiographic tradition in the 1970s, including possibilism, phenomenology, and various humanistic contributions that anticipate elements of the “cultural turn” in the early 1990s. Yet the growth of interest in phenomenological approaches in the 1970s and 1980s left many unresolved tensions in its wake, including the scope and characteristics of agency in relation to the structural and historical dimensions of human societies.

A rediscovery of the empirical realm marks an epistemological starting point for both new materialist literature and the “forensic turn” in the human sciences although these analytical frameworks move in very different conceptual directions: the neo-vitalist interest in “lively materialities” clearly differs from the geo-archaeological swerve towards the production of counterhegemonic knowledge. An emphasis on “material aesthetics” denotes forms of sensing and sense-making that can include nonhuman forms of sensory awareness such as plants or fungi and even extend to novel forms of “synthetic data” produced by new kinds of instrumentation and analysis (see Gabrys 2019; Fuller and Weizman 2021). The status of the field remains a contested ontological zone as well as a distinctive setting within which methodological experimentation can bring knowable objects of study into being.

Walking

Our starting point for considering an enriched empirical realm is the growth of interest in walking methodologies, which have recently become the focus of intense discussion in anthropology, geography, and related disciplines.¹³ For the philosopher Frédéric Gros ([2011] 2015), there is an innate creativity to thinking on the move: “Here is the thought about the thing itself,” suggests Gros, “without the scrambling, the fogginess, the barriers, the customs clearances of culture and tradition” (20).¹⁴ For Tim Ingold (2010), the physicality of walking is an innate dimension to the production of knowledge as traveling on foot brings together movement, thought, and consciousness. Although the philosophical association between walking and thinking becomes more prominent under European romanticism it is clearly very present within many Indigenous, premodern, or non-European cultural traditions.¹⁵

Cultures of walking have a multibraided history. During the nineteenth century we find a divergence of leisurely walking practices between a growing emphasis on wild(er) spaces of nature and the increasing popularity of the urban stroll. Both these forms of walking present distinctive facets to modernity: the former is associated with previously inaccessible landscapes such as mountains whilst the latter marks a cultural response to the new kinds of spaces produced by capitalist urbanization (see Gros [2011] 2015, 175). But can the specific types of walking associated with the growth of the modern metropolis be meaningfully extended to nonmetropolitan landscapes? Can there be a form of rural flânerie? The increased interest in walking through marginal landscapes marks a blurring of urban–rural distinctions and extends to a variety of utilitarian spaces created by infrastructure networks, industrial installations, and diverse traces of human activity.¹⁶ Above all, experimental modes of walking such as the dérive have been oriented toward the “terrain vague of the abandoned urban periphery” (Careri [2002] 2017, 115). As we trace the twentieth-century perambulatory lineage through surrealism, situationism, psychogeography, and beyond there is an epistemological attachment to the search for meaning in marginal, mundane, and unplanned spaces.

The study of walking is located somewhere between literary criticism, with its interest in the sensory realm of the modern subject, and a variety of ground-level interpretations of cultural and material practices.¹⁷ A range of recent walking studies has emphasized forms of “hypersubjectivity” that encompass distinctive literary influences such as the prose fiction of W. G. Sebald or autoethnographic dimensions to “affective-emotional geographies” (Wylie 2007; Lorimer [2011] 2016, 23). More recently, there have been attempts to articulate more systematic assessments of walking as a research method.¹⁸ The anthropologist Monika Streule (2020), for example, connects embodied dimensions to empirical observation, which she gathers under the umbrella of “mobile ethnographies,” with various kinds of multiscalar analysis. In her research on Mexico City, Streule combines recorridos explorativos, which she describes as a form of “participant ‘floating’ observation” at a metropolitan scale with entrevistas en movimiento based on small-scale “semi-structured interviews on the move” in a formulation that resists any simplistic form of conceptual or linguistic equivalence.

It is not surprise but repetition that guides landscape theorist Lucius Burckhardt’s ([1980] 2006) interest in familiar itineraries. For Burckhardt, observation is rooted in everyday experience rather than disorientation. Ordinary walking practices have also been a particular focus of both de Certeau and Lefebvre’s orientation toward the choreographies of everyday life (see Pinder 2011). Whereas Lefebvre’s interest in movement has an auditory resonance (see below) we find that de Certeau’s ([1980] 1984, 93) defense of the quotidian realm forms part of an emerging critique of omniscient theoretical frameworks under both positivist universality and neo-Marxian determinism. “Escaping the imaginary totalizations produced by the eye,” notes de Certeau, “the everyday has a certain strangeness that does not surface, or whose surface is only its upper limit, outlining itself against the visible.” Or we could add the term “merely visible” because the full spectrum of the human sensorium brings us closer, or at the very least adds forms of spatial complexity or porosity to the kind of flattening surfaces that are only available to the gaze. “The act of walking,” suggests de Certeau, “is to the urban system what the speech act is to language” (97). But where does de Certeau’s linguistic analogy lead? Are we dealing with one or many languages? The conception of walking offered by de Certeau is rooted in the intertwined modalities of meaning and movement from a ground-level perspective that echoes the surrealist André Breton’s insistence that “the street is the only region of valid experience.”¹⁹ But what is implied here by an emphasis on valid experience? What are the implications of placing greater weight on ostensibly unmediated forms of everyday encounter? Implicit here is the search for a certain kind of affective or corporeal authenticity associated with sensory perception. As I outline in the section on “Filtered Intensities” below, however, the human sensorium is heavily influenced by a series of cultural and neurological barriers so that only a fraction of our sensory capacities can ever form part of active consciousness.

Walking can initiate distinctive forms of transgression: the allure of a gap in the fence, the refusal to acknowledge a blocked right of way, or the experimental use of transects or other methods removed from their original scientific context. The anthropologist Lucilla Barchetta (2021), for instance, drawing on her fieldwork in the postindustrial landscapes of Turin, notes the presence of “inaccessible masculine zones.” Barchetta’s fieldwork is marked by a terrain of resistance and transgression that highlights multiple fields of social and ecological marginality. Similarly, the sociologist Calin Cotoi’s (2021, 13) study of the Văcărești wasteland site in Bucharest involves an itinerary through a “tensioned palimpsest” of affective, material, and symbolic spaces. Experimental walking initiatives such as the Rome-based Stalker collective, active since 1995, constitute a “collective subject” moving through the landscape: a human (and quite possibly also non-human) multiplicity of sensory capacities moving through space (Figure 1). The original Stalker manifesto, which makes clear its intellectual debt to Merleau-Ponty, stresses a counterhegemonic dimension to multisensory encounters with marginal spaces.²⁰ As Sara Ahmed (2006) notes: “It might be the very act of attention—of attending to or facing this or that direction, or toward this or that object—that produces ‘a sense’ of a collective or social group” (119; see also Doughty 2013; Hannah 2018). An emphasis on “walking with” is also present in collective forms of political agency (see Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg 2015). Here we find a postromanticist framing of walking as a form of both epistemological empathy and also a route to enriched kinds of research practice; a mode of data collection that holds a more nuanced kind of ethical relation to people, places, and situated forms of knowledge. In terms of walking methodologies, we have come a long way from earlier tendencies, especially within the social sciences, to regard walking as a largely “undifferentiated act” (Lorimer [2011] 2016, 26; see also Sidaway 2022; Mason et al. 2023). The affective and multisensory dimensions to walking have become a renewed focus of interest, including intersections between atmospheres, soundscapes, and other phenomena that unsettle any straightforward emphasis on the individual human subject.

Figure 1. Walking action by the Stalker collective in Rome (c. 1995). Source: Stalker collective.

Listening

For my second observational trope I might be listening while walking but I could just as easily have encountered sound unexpectedly, seeping through walls, or emanating from the street below. For Lefebvre, the notion of active listening is both expansive and metaphorical: it might even be within one’s grasp to hear the city in its totality (Lefebvre [1992] 2004; see also Duffy, Waitt, and Harada 2016). “Sound objects,” as the artist Sophie Arkette (2004) observes, “can be electronically magnified, replicated and scattered like dust over an entire cityscape” (167). Urban soundscapes reveal the porosity of space. Sonic landscapes are marked by multiple configurations of affects, materials, and subjectivities. Soundscapes comprise wave-like elements as well as subjective dimensions that can modulate degrees of awareness or disturbance.²¹ As Jean-Luc Nancy ([2002] 2007) notes: “The sonorous present is the result of space-time: it spreads through space, or rather it opens a space that is its own, the very spreading out of its resonance, its expansion and its reverberation” (13). Or consider the music critic Nate Chinen’s (2020) description of jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s sonic field: “Beyond his own creative resources, the conditions of every concert are unique: the characteristics of the piano, the sound in the hall, the mood of the audience, even the feel of a city.”

The classic delineation of the soundscape à la Murray Schafer emphasizes the contrast between various “natural” sounds and the perceived intrusions of synthetic noise under modernity.²² More broadly, following Schafer, soundscape studies have inclined toward an emphasis on what is pleasing or displeasing as a normative framing of acoustic geographies (see Prior 2017). More recently, Daniel Paiva (2018) relates how geographers have tended to explore sound in four main ways: “as an aesthetic feature, as a part of landscape, as an affective force, or as an element in power structures” (7). By reflecting on limitations to the Anglophone literature, Paiva highlights a series of underexplored dimensions to the auditory realm such as the affective resonance of inaudible sounds and the possibility to bring greater political and economic nuance to the study of urban soundscapes (see also Amphoux 2003). Paiva notes, for example, how urban soundscapes can reinforce specific territorialities as well as augment strategies directed toward greater control over mood, productivity, or other affective dimensions to everyday life.

Urban soundscapes encompass many elements such as birdsong, footsteps, human voices, or the subsonic rumble of distant traffic. Methodological interventions include the use of soundwalks and other embodied approaches to acoustic fieldwork. The pioneering work of the sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp is framed around the practice of “attentive listening,” which emanates outwards from the sounds of the body itself such as breathing or footsteps to gradually encompass other more faint or distant characteristics of the acoustic environment (see Westerkamp 1974). A sensory awareness of “the breathing body” (Abram 1997, 45) marks a direct experience of the self, connecting listening practices with embodied phenomenological insights. Modes of intensive listening include the reordering of sensory and spatial hierarchies so that the contemplative space of the concert hall, for instance, is extended to ordinary spaces outside (see Gallagher and Prior 2017). There is an important distinction to be made between modes of real-time listening and various kinds of recording, transduction, and the technological enhancement of what we might term acoustic memory. “The [technical] apparatus unsemantically ‘listens’ to the acoustic event,” notes Michael Gallagher (2015, 479), “whereas the human ear always already couples the physiological sensual data with cognitive cultural knowledge, filtering the listening act.” As in the case of visual images there has been a huge expansion in digital traces of sound. Indeed, the possibility of an unmanageable accumulation of sound is the subject of J. G. Ballard’s short story “The Sound-Sweep,” first published in 1960, where noise must be safely disposed of at the city limits in an elaborate system of sound-absorbent baffles (see Gandy 2014).

Attempts to study sound reveal tensions between measurable and subjective dimensions to soundscapes. Various experimental approaches have been adopted for the creation of notation systems but even the most sophisticated “sonic stave” can only be an approximate rendition of the complexity of the auditory realm. In Figure 2 we can observe the sound artist and percussionist Merijn Royaards’s attempt to capture the sonic, spatial, and temporal configurations of a fading echo under a railway arch in Northwest London. “The experience of echoes, especially flutter echoes,” notes Royaards (2014, 181), “is exclusive to the location of the listener. Resonating sound here transforms geometry, a visual parameter of space, into something more visceral, musical. A montage of viewpoints in an echo-filled space will exponentially increase its sonic complexity.” The visual rendition of sound developed by Royaards illuminates the tension between the use of measurable parameters and embodied forms of sensory experience. The attempt by Royaards and others to produce a multidimensional sonic stave lies at the boundary between existing representational strategies and the ability of recording devices to capture the spatiotemporal complexity of the human sensorium.

Figure 2. Merijn Royaards, Acoustic score. The notation maps the acoustics of a railway arch in Northwest London (2012). Source: Courtesy of the artist.

The cultural and political facets to sound remain highly context specific. An increasing concern with the impact of excess noise and the search for silence has led to the creation of diverse types of “quiet zones” marked by the relative absence of artificial sound. A prominent example is the “one square inch of silence” project in the Olympic National Park in Washington State, set up in 2005, which is reputed to be the quietest place in the United States. To experience the affective resonance of this remote location one must simply remain still, which marks an appropriate segue to the next part of my article.

Staying Put

With my third observational trope I am not going anywhere. I am going to stay right where I am for as long as my (and perhaps your) patience allows. What does it mean to closely observe things at close quarters over an extended period? How does a state of stillness influence our interaction with the world around us? Consider the immense patience involved in ethological studies of animal behavior or the work of specialist wildlife photographers who must wait for days until a momentary opportunity presents itself. A classic literary evocation of “staying put” is to be found in Georges Perec’s ([1975] 2010) experimental novella An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (Tentative d‘épuisement d‘un lieu parisien), which simply consists of his observations over several days in the Place Saint-Sulpice (see Phillips 2018). Earlier still, in the late 1950s, the situationists had also offered their own variant of a “static dérive” by spending an entire day in Gare Saint-Lazare.²³

What if the challenge is to capture time within time? The tree that I can see from my window is trembling ever so slightly in the breeze but is itself imperceptibly changing its form over time. In Victor Erice’s film El sol del membrillo (Dream of Light) (1992), we encounter the Spanish artist Antonio López Garcia attempting to paint the quince tree growing in the back garden of his Madrid studio (see Figure 3). As López commences work on his canvas over the coming days and weeks the weight of the ripening fruit begins to alter the shape of the tree. The leaves gradually change color as late summer transitions into autumn. The light is in a constant state of flux.

Figure 3. The artist Antonio López Garcia in El sol del membrillo (Dream of light) (Victor Erice, director 1992). Source: Maria Moreno/Alamy.

Many artists have been fascinated by the close observation of specific sites or objects, including the transformation of earth, metal, stone, or other materials. In Hans Haacke’s installation Bowery Seeds (1970), comprising a small pile of earth in downtown Manhattan, the chance arrival of airborne seeds produced a spontaneous ecological assemblage. A close focus on a small fragment of nature is also the subject of Albrecht Dürer’s watercolor Das grosse Rasenstück (The Great Piece of Turf), dating from 1503, in which we see a clod of earth with a jumble of weeds. Although conceived as a technical exercise, the work nonetheless mirrors new forms of aesthetic experimentation at the arts–science interface under the European Renaissance. So accurate is Dürer’s rendition that we can identify at least nine different species of plants long before the advent of modern botany. In a twentieth-century corollary to Dürer’s study, the 1982 Kassel documenta exhibition included a series of interventions in marginal urban landscapes led by Lucius Burckhardt entitled Sichtbar machen (Making Visible) that involved the placing of small signs next to weeds as if they constituted the “urban zone” of a botanical garden (Burckhardt [1982] 2017). For Burckhardt, the scope of imaginative engagement with ordinary spaces is spurred by the self-conscious disruption of habitual forms of indifference (see the section “Filtered Intensities” below). Similarly, the geographer Gerhard Hard highlights the didactic significance of contact with ordinary spaces (that are thereby rendered anything but ordinary). Hard (1996) has emphasized an “everyday hermeneutic” (alltagshermeneutisch) method associated with nonutilitarian appraisals of spontaneous vegetation and other botanical traces in marginal landscapes. Hard (1995) offers a kind of epistemological bridge between field-based studies in the natural sciences and hermeneutic approaches deployed within the humanities. More recently, the ongoing series of site-specific installations by the Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves entitled Seeds of Change (2009–) explores the environmental histories that remain hidden within the urban soil of ports that can illuminate interconnections between global trade and the violent upheavals of European colonialism. In each of her projects undertaken in Bristol, Liverpool, Marseille, Rotterdam, and other cities, Alves simply excavates soil samples to enable dormant seeds to reveal distinctive ecological assemblages derived from specific trade routes, including the botanical legacies of transatlantic slavery.²⁴

An emphasis on slowing down or staying put connects with recent developments in the environmental humanities. The significance of “slow observation” relates to long-term studies of toxic environments, biodiversity decline, and other place-specific phenomena (see, for example, Davies 2018; Nading 2020; Roberts 2021). Indeed, the existence of longitudinal data has become a crucial source of documentary evidence for confirming processes of environmental change.²⁵ The monitoring of toxic spaces such as Louisiana’s cancer alley rests on the painstaking observation of environmental indicators in specific localities. In this case a sustained focus on one site can be read as both a vantage point and an epistemological strategy to elucidate hidden environmental threats. An emphasis on “slow epistemologies” opens up a vital interface between different modes of research practice including the distinctive contributions of citizen science to the large-scale collecting of scientific data (see Lave 2015).

Slowness can be likened to a kind of epistemological loitering; doing things slowly can constitute a form of resistance to the pervasive presence of the “attention economy” based on the need for incessant distraction (see Stiegler [2012] 2015; Stengers [2013] 2017; Mui and Murphy 2020). Slowness can underpin an epistemological strategy that extends from modes of data collection to different forms of analysis, writing, and critical reflection. Staying put or slowing down is also a necessary dimension to note taking. Indeed, the “notebook” has long had a close association with “the field” as part of the cultural apparatus of translation between ethnographic observations and critical reflection. As the biologist Bernd Heinrich (2011) notes, “I have meticulously documented my observations, and this documentation has made the difference between simply being a witness to nature and being one who identifies themes and questions” (38). “When I am in the field collecting information,” continues Heinrich, “I am on the lookout for the nascent, the new, and the unexpected that may spring out of the familiar” (38).²⁶ The research notebook plays a critical role in capturing perceptions or even random thoughts as they occur. The anthropologist Michael Taussig (2011) uses his notebooks as a means to not only record spontaneous insights but also to cross-check the clarity of his own recollections. Similarly, photographs taken in the same location over time can provide a poignant visual record of landscape change. Examples include Camilo José Vergara’s meticulous documentation of changing neighborhoods in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and other U.S. cities. “Photographs function as containers of information,” notes Vergara (1995, xiii), “fragments with which we can imaginatively reconstruct lost neighborhoods. Each picture represents an instant in history. Like sensors dropped in the water by oceanographers to be regularly monitored, successive photographs of the same places serve to track changes over time.”

Filtered Intensities

There is a disjuncture between conscious forms of perception and the full complexity of the human sensorium. In the case of vision, for example, the human brain routinely filters out most sensory stimuli and then fills in the blanks as if we have seen everything. The brain seeks to make rapid sense of what William James (1904, 542) refers to as the “quasi-chaos” of experience. To consciously expand our degrees of perception we must work against the degree of Bayesian inference that preshapes human awareness of the sensory realm (see, for example, Gilbert and Sigman 2007; Mazzucato, La Camera, and Fontanini 2019). As Gros ([2011] 2015) notes, “The eye is quick, active, it thinks it has understood everything, grasped it all” (38). The role of filtering also suggests a point of conceptual dialogue between affect theory and cognitive psychology. To express this conundrum slightly differently, in the words of feminist theorist Teresa Brennan (2004), “When my eye sees what it expects to see, even though it is not there, I have made the image real, given it tangible and physical existence by the force of my imagination” (95). With other senses such as hearing, and especially smell, the more visceral dimensions to the human sensorium can operate faster than cognitive filtering; there is a corporeal immediacy to the phenomenological realm. The figure of the dispassionate or objective observer has been progressively destabilized from the early nineteenth-century onwards, most notably in the wake of Goethe’s theory of color, as new insights into the physiological and psychological dimensions to sensory awareness became established (see Crary 1990, 1999). Similarly, the relative significance of vision within the successive reordering of sensory hierarchies under modernity has also fluctuated in relation to the shifting acuity of the human subject and diverse modes of sensory augmentation, transduction, and representation.

Where does this leave the epistemological status of the unnoticed? It is not that things are necessarily invisible to the naked eye but that they are simply not seen: there is a liminal zone that can be revealed through patient and attentive modes of observation. My own experience of pattern recognition within entomological fieldwork reveals cryptic forms that would otherwise be invisible to most human observers; I am, after all, effectively competing with birds or other predators to detect anomalous symmetries against varied backgrounds of bark, rock, or other surfaces. As the scientific illustrator Jonathan Kingdon (2011) notes:

Artists and scientifically minded humans are not the only animals that seek to lift out significant or informative “form” from the chaos of nature. To survive, every visual predator, whether cat, hawk, or tiger-fish, must repeatedly “see through” the disguises used by their prey. (141)

In this sense the field scientist is constantly on the lookout for what is interesting or important. But how does noticing things scale up conceptually or politically? Is there an implicit expansion of a sensory public realm à la Rancière that holds wider connotations for collective meaning? What kind of theoretical extrapolations might be possible? As we move from observational to interpretative idioms, what is “there” or “not there” is related to forms of prior knowledge, including the opportunity to relate observations to existing classificatory or linguistic systems. Equally, with radical forms of corroboration there are novel opportunities to produce counterhegemonic forms of knowledge. An emphasis on the interface between critical phenomenology and evidentiary materialism moves beyond the realm of the lone observer or more conventional readings of field science. We can locate distinctive constellations of agency and subjectivity in relation to the successive transformations of place, space, and consciousness under (late) modernity. The multidimensional reconstructions undertaken by forensic architecture, for instance, involve many observers—both human and nonhuman—to enhance the perceptual field.²⁷ A multisensory pluriverse comprises a range of sensory stimuli as well as diverse modes of sense-making.

Conclusions

In this article I frame attentive observation as a form of postpositivist epistemological practice that is neither relativist nor universalist. In particular, I want to articulate a conceptual synthesis between new developments in critical phenomenology and an expanded reading of evidentiary materialism that moves beyond a narrow emphasis on the individual human subject. My interest in a renewed materialism encompasses several elements: the distinctive geographical contribution to creative methods, including the use of multisensory ethnographic encounters; a decentering of the human subject that does not displace collective forms of historical agency; and an engagement with counterhegemonic forms of knowledge production such as forensic ecologies, grassroots forms of citizen science, and other investigative interdisciplinary domains. Building on postcolonial and feminist insights we can work with forms of ontological ambiguity or “epistemic disconcertment” (Verran 2023) that resist attempts to simplify the production of knowledge.

An emphasis on attentive observation holds an intellectual lineage to William James, who conceived of the material world as “pluralistic, contextual, and multidimensional” (see Gavin 1992, 2). It is a form of radical empiricism that resonates with the relational ontologies of Bergson, Whitehead, and a number of other twentieth-century thinkers (see Debaise [2015] 2017; Duvernoy 2021). Under the pragmatist philosophy of James there is a commitment to complexity that resists the “false clarity” of what we might term standardized or formulaic scientific method (see Gavin 1992, 2). We can also find echoes of an enriched epistemological realm in the linguistic constructivism of Richard Rorty and his resistance to foundational modes of explanation (see Stoller 1989, 147). For Rorty (1989), the history of knowledge is best understood as a sequence of metaphors that do not disclose access to either the “inner truth” of the human subject or the workings of some kind of external reality. Yet a constructivist vantage point à la Rorty holds an (increasingly) uneasy relation to the range of material complexities that form the focus of a renewed interest in attentive observation. An evidentiary materialism cannot rely on language alone.

Attentive observation aligns with exploratory modes of fieldwork that are nonutilitarian and reflexive in relation to the taxonomic and etymological reach of modernity (in the sense that any language remains entrained within aspects of its own origins). The anthropologist Anna Tsing ([2015] 2017, 22) notes how she encourages students to “make theory emerge from their fieldwork insights” so that material encounters become the springboard for creativity. How can we effectively capture “the field” within geographical writing or other means of communication? How should we convert specific feelings, experiences, or recollections into cogent forms of writing and analysis? The richness of the human sensorium can never be fully captured in linguistic or notational forms; the scope of human perception can only ever be partially alluded to. I prefer to think of doing research “in the open” as an alternative conceptualization to the classic emphasis on “the field.” An emphasis on “the open” operates as an embodied vantage point and as a metaphor for unbounded notions of agency and subjectivity. Framed slightly differently, as the geographer and philosopher Maximilian Hepach (2021, 1290) suggests, drawing on the insights of Günter Figal, it is in relation to “the outside” that the spatiality of perception, along with the entangled dimensions to subject-object relations, is most strikingly revealed.

How should we reconcile the embodied particularities of the human subject with the proliferation of technologically enhanced methods that are routinely used in the field? There are enduring tensions between observation and notional forms of “objectivity” that stem from a reliance on various kinds of recording devices stretching from early use of the camera obscura to the contemporary proliferation of digital technologies (see Daston and Galison 2007; Canales 2016). The augmentation of the senses experienced by the cyborgian observer has become enmeshed in epistemological strategies for the gathering of data or evidence. The boundary between human and machine remains a focal point for methodological reflection in terms of the distinctive role of a thinking and reflecting human subject. Yet our conception of the human subject is problematized in turn by decentered conceptions of agency and the ongoing “epistemic hierarchy of place” (Kohler and Vetter 2016, 282) that suffuses scientific practice.

In building on recent debates about the status of fieldwork, observation, and a putative “outside” for geographical research, I want to emphasize a double materiality that encompasses both the corporeal dimensions to “the field”—broadly conceived—and structural dimensions to the shaping of human consciousness and experience. My emphasis on embodied forms of fieldwork, which extends to diverse nonhuman elements and a variety of socioecological constellations, is not synonymous with either multispecies ethnographies or the more diffuse forms of agency that have become associated with neo-vitalist approaches. There are parallels here with calls for “multiple materialisms” to develop a more nuanced differentiation between human and nonhuman forms of agency (see Lemke 2021). A situated phenomenology can be brought into sustained dialogue with historical materialism to better locate the multisensory dynamics of human culture. The philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels stresses, for instance, how forms of “everyday awareness” (Alltagsbewusstsein) have intersected with emerging forms of class consciousness.²⁸ I am interested in how a postpositivist conception of empirical research illuminates the cultural and historical specificities of the human observer in both ontological and epistemological terms. The question of detail—including more fine-grained sensory interactions with everyday spaces—poses a series of challenges in terms of the degree of analytical resolution that can be achieved under a variety of interdisciplinary approaches.

In this article I have made an excursion through a shifting terrain of ideas. Indeed, my emphasis on filtering, varied vantage points, and different modes of mobility underlines the extent to which experiential knowledge is always a work in progress. A conceptual framework should provide an orientation towards understanding rather than an act of epistemological closure.²⁹ This is not an argument for “qualitative methods” per se, as forms of measurement, sampling, transduction, and so on can all play a significant role in a wider array of methodological approaches that we might gather under the aegis of heightened modes of attention. The augmented human observer can encompass an extended suite of technological or computational means to enhance the scope and resonance of the perceptual field.

A revived interest in phenomenology suggests an alternative lineage through modern geographical thought. In particular, we can revisit earlier understandings of observation, imagination, and embodied dimensions to geographical knowledge to consider how they might be disentangled from narrowly empiricist or utilitarian traditions.³⁰ How might a critical phenomenological approach incorporate posthuman conceptions of agency? What are the philosophical implications of expanding our analysis to nonhuman inhabitants of ordinary landscapes? Recent attempts to extend neo-Marxian insights to nonhuman forms of work or more polyvalent readings of subjectivity are already indicative of emerging conceptual pathways that have wider relevance for epistemological debates in other fields.³¹ For David Abram (1997, 69) there is a “startling consonance” between aspects of post-Husserlian phenomenology and the multisubjectival import of some forms of Indigenous knowledge although we should be cautious in relation to animist variants of universalism that have been refracted through neoromanticist cultural appropriations.

Insights from the environmental humanities highlight the presence of diverse critical standpoints including literature, cinema, and the visual arts. How should we combine these disparate sources with ground-level varieties of sensory experience to produce cogent forms of theoretical abstraction? How, in other words, can we develop research insights out of fleeting or sustained encounters with specific places, situations, or experiences? Almost any act of observation can form the potential basis for critical reflection because dialectical modes of analysis can emerge from multiple entry points. An expansive ethnographic approach can allow for many creative possibilities. As Fredric Jameson (2016, ix) notes: “The coherence of any serious and extended engagement with cultural experience depends on a productive coordination between contingency and theory; between chance encounters and an intellectual project”. Consequently, the singularity of sensory or corporeal experience resists any impulse toward a flattening universality. There is a relational intertextuality that runs through a commitment to attentive observation that is anchored to the animation of criticism itself rather than the search for a putative ground truth.

Acknowledgments

In keeping with the ethos of slow scholarship, this article has taken me quite a while to write. I thank the referees for their stimulating feedback. Thanks also to Stephen Barber, Yasminah Beebeejaun, Maximilian Hepach, Kumiko Kiuchi, and James Vigus for their advice, encouragement, and inspiration. Opportunities to develop my ideas have emerged from various research projects, most notably my recently completed ERC Advanced Grant Rethinking Urban Nature and the space for critical reflection provided by the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Matthew Gandy

MATTHEW GANDY is Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EN, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include biodiversity, landscape, infrastructure, sensory geographies, urban epidemiology, and visual methodologies.

Notes

1 Cited in the documentary film Calx ruderalis subsp. Istanbulensis (Elif Kendir-Beraha, Aslıhan Demirtaş, and Ali Mahmut Demirel, directors 2021). See Weil ([1947] 1952). On attentiveness and linguistic hospitality, see also Ricœur ([2004] 2006).

2 Theodor Fontane (my translation). The original text reads: “Der Zauber steckt immer im Detail.” From letters to Georg Friedlaender. See Schreinert ([1884–1898] 1954).

3 I send my records from 9 Hornstraße to https://www.schmetterlinge-brandenburg-berlin.de/.

4 Key early interventions in the critical appraisal of geographical fieldwork include Katz (1994), Driver (2000), and Sundberg (2003).

5 See, for example, Barua and Sinha (2019), Forsyth (2013), and Van Patter (2023).

6 In this article I develop an implicitly Benjaminian formulation that is dialectical, multiscalar, and historicist in its orientation toward cultural and geographical specificities.

7 The phrase “botanizing on the asphalt” is taken from Benjamin ([1938–1939] 2006). See also Clark (2000) and Calhoun (2020).

8 The anthropologist Kathleen Stewart (2007) refers to affective microdisturbances or “pockets” in everyday spaces and situations. Complementary perspectives include Gayatri Gopinath’s (2018, 4) emphasis on “the small, the inconsequential, and the ephemeral”.

9 See Pellegrini and Baudry (2014) on relations between urban ecology, street politics, and “civic consciousness.”

10 See, for example, Kohler (2002) on the lab–field distinction.

11 In the field of “vegetation science” there have been long-standing tensions between aerial and ground-level modes of analysis (see, for example, Kwa 2018).

12 Similarly, Barthes emphasized a “slope of affective intensities” (see Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 11). On questions of perception and phenomenology in geography see also Anderson and Wylie (2009). See also the contributions of Waldenfels (1985, [2006] 2011).

13 See Sidaway (2022), for example, for a comprehensive overview of walking methodologies.

14 Gros recalls Nietzsche’s axiom: “It is our habit to think outdoors” (cited in Gros [2011] 2015, 18). There is also Mary Wollstonecraft’s observation that “The art of travelling is only a branch of the art of thinking” (cited in Favret 2002, 209). See also Löwy and Sayre (2011) and Vigus (2017).

15 Early interventions include Karl Gottlob Schelle’s (1802) essay on the “Art of Walking,” which articulates a Kantian celebration of walking as a source of sensory refinement. Celebrations of walking outside the European tradition include the haiku poetry of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) in Edo-era Japan. Later cross-cultural influences between Europe and Japan include the modernist influenced early twentieth-century Kyoto School and the situationist-inspired interventions led by Genpei Akasegawa in the 1960s.

16 Some of the earlier Dada-inspired walks in the late 1940s were located beyond the Paris city limits in agricultural or “nonurban” areas. See Careri ([2002] 2017).

17 The cultural and theoretical aspects to walking have generated a large literature. See, for example, Bates and Rhys-Taylor (2017), Beaumont (2020), Gros ([2011] 2015), Hubbard and Wilkinson (2019), O’Rourke (2013), Petri (2022), Sletto et al. (2021), Solnit (2000), and Sidaway (2022).

18 On the use of walking as research method, see, for example, J. Anderson (2004), Butler (2006), Castán Broto, Sudhira, and Unnikrishnan (2021), Degen and Rose (2012), Ingold and Vergunst (2008), Springgay and Truman (2017), and Wylie (2005).

19 See, for instance, the Stalker manifesto contained in Careri ([2002] 2017).

20 Breton ([1928] 1999) made this observation in his novel Najda (cited in Beaumont 2020, 3).

21 The field of sound studies has grown significantly in recent years, encompassing multiple interdisciplinary foci such as acoustics, cultural history, musicology, the politics of noise, and sound art. Early observations include Benjamin and Lacis ([1924] 1979) on the “porous” soundscape of Naples. On the history of sound, see, for example, Erlmann (2010), Kahn (1999), and Voegelin (2010). On geographies of listening, see, for example, Duffy, Waitt, and Harada (2016), Gallagher, Kanngieser, and Prior (2017), Heine (2023), Paiva (2018), and Wissmann (2014).

22 The focus of sound studies on “natural soundscapes” is especially associated with the pioneering interventions of Murray Schafer in the 1970s and the World Soundscape Project. Other early research programs geared toward urban soundscapes include the work of Jean-François Augoyard and the CRESSON-CNRS (National Scientific Research Centre) at the School of Architecture in Grenoble. See, for example, Augoyard ([1979] 2007).

23 The use of a “static dérive” is described by Guy Debord in 1956 (see Careri [2002] 2017). Unexpected restrictions on movement can also produce intensified forms of attention. One of the widespread effects of the Covid-19 urban lockdowns has been the transformation of people’s immediate environs into a zone of discovery or contemplation (see, for example, Searle, Turnbull, and Lorimer 2021).

24 For greater detail on Maria Thereza Alves’s Seeds of Change (2009–) project see Kuoni and Lukatsch (2023).

25 Erick Greene (2011, 259) points out how Thoreau’s notebooks from the 1850s recorded some 500 species of plants in the Concord area yet a survey completed between 2004 and 2006 found that 30 percent had gone and another 40 percent “are so rare that they will probably not survive much longer.”

26 The botanist James L. Reveal (2011) worried that digital media might render the notebook redundant or supplant the significance of direct or “unmediated” forms of observation. In contrast, Gabrys, Paiva, Weizman, and a number of other scholars have highlighted a variety of technologically augmented modes of collaborative fieldwork.

27 The use of cameras, recording devices, geotracking, and other means of enhancing the human sensorium has altered the role of memory in relation to fieldwork. Enhanced modes of satellite data interpretation, for example, including the use of machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence, can assist with the detection of small-scale disturbances in vegetation that are indicative of past sites of human habitation (see Fuller and Weizman 2021).

28 A key source here is Bernhard Waldenfels’s essay “Im Labyrinth des Alltags” (see Waldenfels 1985).

29 On the need to step back from grandiose epistemological claims see, for example, Hyndman (2001) and Saville (2021).

30 Contributions to what might be termed “critical phenomenology” within geography include Gandy (2017), Hannah (2013), Hepach (2021), Kinkaid (2020, 2021), McCormack (2018), Revill (2016), and Simonsen (2013).

31 See, for example, Barua (2017) and Battistoni (2017).