Mining Experience for Methods

• In Event: Metabolic Relations, Subjects, Differences

Abstract

This paper reflects on two empirical projects that have engaged with the pervasive yet elusive problem of heat and heat stress. A transdisciplinary methodology has emerged that utilises thermal physiology, environmental monitoring, video ethnography and interviews with 'practitioners' of heat stress and its management (mine and construction workers). The researchers sought to engage both critically and productively with the ontological and epistemic contributions of our multi-disciplinary team's knowledges, technologies and materials. Heat stress was produced as multiple objects through each of these approaches. In bringing them together, we were trying to gain traction on at-once profound and mundane, universal and intimate, registers of heat (and heat stress) as a human-non-human relation. The catalyst of this effort was however the non-academic, informal experiential knowledge we developed in the process of doing the empirical work on site. Our own somatic registers provided a mechanism for communication, in part through providing 'common' experience, but also by helping to challenge the limits of what our own disciplines could 'see' or otherwise acknowledge. This is only a starting point to thinking much more deeply about how to research more-than-human becomings. It also still leaves the problem of how to communicate things that are known bodily. Default, yet also 'proxy,' numeric, verbal, visual and written modes of data collection, analysis and representation 'feel' woefully inadequate, a challenge that is even more compelling when research is conducted in already-extreme environments on the precipice of runaway climate change.

Author

• Elspeth Oppermann, Charles Darwin University