Course Poetic Resonance: Decoding sensorial and embodied ripples in ethnographic analysis

Course description

• Our bodies are peculiar phenomena. As a complex jumble of matter, sensations, and movement, the living body – and we, as human beings – is continuously and actively engaged with its environment to sustain itself, to make a life, and to change with the flow of time. We continually take in food and oxygen from our surroundings; our cells and tissues the membranes through and across which space leaks into and out of us (Ingold, 2012). We listen for the whirs, we feel the vibrations in our feet, we smell the smoky, musty fumes; our multisensory modalities the meshwork of nodes through which we understand what we experience and where we are in place (i.e., an intersection of a busy city street) (Pink 2009). We learn what is a wink, how it differs from a blink, what it means when its thrown at us by a close friend or an attractive stranger, and when it is appropriate (or not!) to wink ourselves; our complex inner life worlds the infrastructure through which memories, inchoate thoughts, moods, and imagination integrate previous knowledge, our embodied state, and the social situation at hand to interpret, plan, and act out our desired present and future lives together with others (Geertz 1973, Irving 2016).
• Ethnographers have studied bodies in its many forms and interactions since the early 20th century, with Mauss’ pioneering work on embodiment and the role of socialization and enculturation that leads people to personalize their bodies in specific ways (see also Bourdieu 1984, Wacquant 1993). The 1970s saw a shift from bodies as containers for culture to research of bodies as expressions of culture (e.g., dress and tattooing, but also healing and punishment) (e.g., Howes 1991, Claassen 1993, Miller and Woodward 2007). Since the 2000s, ethnographic research has come to focus on work with and through bodies, noting not only the interconnectedness of bodies with their environments (Pink 2009, Ingold 2012) but also the limitation of ethnography itself to know and theorize on the bodies of others through third-person observations (Irving 2016). This workshop builds on this latest research acknowledging that working with transmodal material in ethnographic research complicates the alchemist process of analysis to find what is not automatically apparent due to its embodied, sensory nature. To work with transmodal materials therefore requires analytical experimentation to discover alternative tools. Experimentation of this nature, however, cannot happen without collective reflection, collaborative action, and joint-discussions.
• The workshop introduces the concept of 'poetic resonance' as a starting point for collaborative experimentation. Poetic resonance is understood here as the ethnographic investigation of the intangible yet palpable forces of emotions, moods, atmospheres, and tensions that reverberate within and across spaces, bodies, and interactions. ‘Resonance’ understands the ways these forces travel within and across environments as sound waves, i.e., the continuous motion of bumping and pulsing that make relational worlds and shape people’s everyday experiences of them. While, ‘poetic’ elicits a particular listening for the sensory and affective modalities of texture, rhythm, tone, silence, call-and-response, and triggers to capture and study the ineffable qualities of these forces. By framing these forces within the vernacular of sound and poetry, this methodological approach activates sonic metaphors – leaping, reverberating, fading, echoing, amplifying – as tools to:
  • Attune to the emotional, affective, and sensory aspects of relations between people, objects, and environments
  • Trace and map these relational dynamics as they ripple across time, space, and modalities
  • Apply an intuitive and nonlinear analytical lens to identify patterns and meanings in the slippery undercurrents of the multimodal data
  • Express the relational and emotional qualities of fluid and emergent moments in evocative metaphors and poetic descriptions that spotlight their affective and sensory dimensions.

Aim

• As participants, you will walk away not only having learned a potential new analytical tool, but having been an active contributor to its development.
• Furthermore, you will get the chance to write a 2000 word essay analysing your own fieldwork object for peer-reviewed publication in a special issue

Target group/Participants

• PhD students who have collected empirical data or are in the state of analyzing empirical data.
• The course is open to students from both theoretical and practice-based research across the arts and the social sciences.

Language 

• English

Form

• Online course

ECTS-credits

• 2

Lecturers

• Jussi Parikka
• Eva van Roekel

Literature

• Participants are asked to read the submissions of the others before the start of the workshop.

Venue

• Online course. A Zoom-link will be sent out after the application deadline and before the course starts

Course dates:

• 19 May 2025 13:00 - 16:00
• 20 May 2025 13:00 - 16:00