Following Embodied Practice Across Space-Time and Shared Data

• In Event: 34.093 - Moving Data Across Methods of Analysis: Collaborative Research on the Complexities of Literacy Activity

Abstract

In the decades since Law and Urry (2004) proclaimed “orthodox” social science methods insufficient for dealing with fleeting, sensory, emotional, and kinaesthetic dimensions of practice, many in literacy studies have developed and refined multimodal and mobile methodologies attentive to phenomena that “overflow” our abilities of apprehension and representation (Kress, 1997; Leander & Boldt, 2014; Lenters, 2016; Wargo, 2018). However, we still have much to learn about how affective, emotional, and sensory experiences shape and are shaped by literacy practice. In this presentation, I draw upon non-representational theory and data from a mobile video ethnography following high school students’ daily subway commutes to and from school to trace out relations among material, embodied, and literate mobilities.

Working from non-representational and (post)phenomenological analytics (Thrift, 2008; Idhe, 2009) and within a larger mobilities paradigm (Sheller & Urry, 2006), I approach students’ differing modes, experiences, and distributions of literacy and mobility as essential to co-constructing and rearranging spatial and temporal scales, from subway cars to systems of education and transnational social networks (Nespor, 2004, Stornaiuolo, Smith & Phillips, 2017). Central to this approach is analysis of embodied practice and its sensory, felt, and affective aspects in the constitution of space-times and representations of literacy activity.

While this mobile ethnography employs a number of methods for documenting, visualizing, and analyzing embodied practices—e.g., time-space mapping (Ivanič et al., 2009); rhizomatic analysis (Leander & Rowe, 2006); video observation and screencapture recording—this presentation focuses on the affordances and limitations of go-along methods (Kusenbach, 2003) for accessing and reflecting on fleeting, relational, and felt aspects of mobile literacies resistant to representation.

I begin by discussing my own go-along sessions with high school seniors on their daily commutes (some as long as 5 hours roundtrip) from Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn to a public school in Lower Manhattan. Audio/video and screencapture recordings reveal how students partner with their smartphones and each other to fold literacy practices into the flows of bodies, senses, feelings, and emotions that make up and connect scenes of literacy across space-time. For example, recordings of go-alongs with students reveal how the gradual whitening of subway cars in route from students’ home boroughs to Manhattan (a reflection of the city’s spatial, racial, and educational segregation) consistently affected the postures, expressions, and activities of students of color. While such representations inevitably reduce and abstract practice, I argue the methods that produce them have the potential to enhance and (re)shape recollections of sensory and affective encounters and contribute to co-producing emphatic understandings.

After discussing possibilities and pitfalls of go-along methods in my own research, I turn to a consideration of the ways in which representations of “going-along” with participants, texts, and practices across our shared datasets—whether over a semester or a lifetime—convey senses of “being/seeing/feeling there” (Spinney 2015) to intimate sensory and affective experiences of researchers and participants. Analysis across datasets reveals how physical and/or metaphorical followings of literacy activity and development reveal, elide, and sometimes obscure relationships between meaning, embodiment, and practice.

Author

• Brice Nordquist, Syracuse University