Posthuman Ecologies: The Future of Ethnographic Environ/mentality

• In Event: 35.067 - Rethinking Ethnography in the Posthuman Turn

Abstract

Objectives
The aim of this paper is to show how conventional ethnographic concepts, such as thick description and presence, must be entirely reconceived to address contemporary transformations of digital life in the “end of times” (Latour et al, 2018). This paper argues that there is a need for us to fashion new forms of presencing that are not conventionally ethnographic. The ‘present moment’ in all its digital fragmentation now depends on our access to worldly technicity, and on our capacity to develop new forms of inquiry adequate to the Anthropocene.

Theoretical Framework
The media theorist Mark Hansen states that today “the scope of the present depends on the degree of precision of technical access.” (Hansen, 2015: 195). Everything hinges on how well we can live with this “resolutely technical” matter while resisting the ossifying instrumentality that captures and controls it (p. 198). Such a dangerous fact raises frightening prospects. The digital revolution forces us to imagine life quite differently, and to seek the inorganic potentialities and inhuman forces by which a body can “branch out into territories beyond its own self-maintenance” (Colebrook, 2014: 138). The turn to posthuman ecologies is part of a turn to a generalized ecological paradigm, a geologic technoecology, a total technical milieu (Braidotti & Hlavajova, 2018). This digital condition requires an onto-ethics adequate to current socio-technical attachments to the physiological body and corporate attachments to the global market. The rapid integration of sensor technologies into human life processes suggests that the near future will hold a convergence of the biological, the digital, the sensual, and the social. This paper explores the potentials of sensing technologies in the construction of new methods and conceptualisations of ethnographic fieldwork.

Mode of Inquiry and Data Sources
Compulsive connectivity in our current computational publics, and the turn to affective computing in the learning sciences, underscore the need for new research methods that can capture new modes of being that are both digital and ecological. This paper discusses ethnographic projects that use sensor technologies to ‘describe’ various learning environments. Examples discussed show how these projects aim to merge affective activity below the timescale of the human, as part of a kind of vitalism and intensive matter. Research questions are: How can sensor technologies expand the purview of ethnography beyond the narrow bandwidth of the human senses? How might these technologies enable new forms of ethnographic participation?

Scholarly Significance
Savage and Burrows (2007) and Ruppert, Law & Savage (2013) point to the shifting ground of the social sciences since the digital revolution of the 1990s. They recount how research methods once dominant – including ethnography – are no longer well suited to current computational culture and the proliferation of both social transactional data and micro-bio data. If past empiricisms in the social sciences involved an active retrieval of information and data, this new kind of passive data, often offered up without conscious consent, marks a new kind of material ecology, and demands a radically different kind of ethnography.

Author

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Manchester Metropolitan University