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- Convenors:
-
Megan Graham
(Carleton University)
Sarah Rodimon (Carleton University)
- Discussant:
-
Bernhard Leistle
(Carleton University)
- Stream:
- Moving bodies: Medical Travels/Corps mouvants: Trajets médicaux
- Location:
- HGN 302
- Start time:
- 5 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 1
Short Abstract:
This panel draws attention to sensory ethnography and experiential research in places of care, focusing on embodied relationships among communities, ideologies, and the materiality of care environments.
Long Abstract:
This panel aims to draw attention to the 'sensorial turn' in the social sciences. Embodied experiences of health and illness continue to intrigue scholars, yet ethnography's reliance on spoken or written accounts can limit researchers' analytic scope. Ethnographic methods require creative forms of embodied immersion in the field. Multiple ways of knowing and the reflexive exploration of routes to knowledge are necessary to approach the experience that is felt, yet is unspoken or unspeakable. Sarah Pink (2015) proposed the practice of sensory ethnography as a way to approach and harness the phenomenological complexities of ethnographer and informant experiences in the field, and to disseminate this knowledge to audiences through creative, often arts-based modes of presentation. This panel seeks to draw attention to experiential research carried out in places of care, focusing on embodied relationships among communities, ideologies, and the materiality of the care environment. We welcome contributions from researchers working at the theoretical and methodological intersections of embodied experience of health and illness, places and practices of care, and ethnography. Among the questions we would like to consider are: How do ethnographers negotiate the dominance of spoken and written narratives from informants and take into account that which is unsaid? What is the significance of sensorial memory in ethnographic fieldwork, writing, and presentation? How might multisensory research be interpreted and presented to audiences in a meaningful way?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Anne Gudrun Langaas (Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences) Anne-Lise Middelthon (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses how students of physical therapy develop bodily ways of knowing during training. Descriptions and reflections on what bodies do and how they are done, infers that students develop more embodied bodies and competencies in staying attuned kinesthetically in intercorporealities.
Paper long abstract:
By investigating what bodies do and how bodies are done in various physical therapy training situations - emphasizing both reflection, observation and theorization - we were able to say something about what kind of knowledge the students acquire or incorporate. Part of the teaching in physical therapy is through the body, which implies that some of the core knowledge in physical therapy only can be acquired through bodies. As first author, my background as anthropologist, physical therapist and lecturer at a physical therapist training program, seems to be prerequisite to ask this this kind of question. Throughout the research process the second author and I have engaged in dynamic and dialogic reflections and explorations from both an insider and an outsider perspective. This has brought us close to the experiences under scrutiny, and assisted us in gaining the necessary analytical distance to the field. Students develop more embodied bodies, including bodily intentionality specific to physical therapy, and they become competent in staying kinesthetically attuned in professional intercorporealitites. Bodily ways of knowing often operate in a tacit and taken for granted manner, can be difficult (if not impossible) to articulate exhaustively in verbal language, and consequently will easily escape thematization. Physical therapists lack satisfactory verbal articulating tools both to express and to describe some of their knowledge, exactly because it operates implicitly through the habitual actions of their bodies. This calls for a professional way of qualifying incorporated knowledge. This paper draws on theories from Michael Polanyi, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and Bruno Latour.
Koya Sato (Chiba University)
Paper short abstract:
I explore the performative construction of individuality by focusing on unspoken experiences. By examining the practices surrounding a girl with cerebral palsy in a preschool in Sweden, I discuss how people use intersubjectivity and intercorporeality to place the girl as an individual.
Paper long abstract:
I explore the question of how the nature of the individuality of humans is constructed through performative practices in daily situations. To explore this question, I discuss the practices of teachers and a girl with cerebral palsy in a preschool in Sweden, and how each practice places the girl as an individual. As a result of the emphasis by disability movements on the social factor of disabilities, many political movements have been pushing for the inclusion into the society of people with impairments as regular individuals. With these attempts to achieve an inclusive society in Sweden, many preschools now accept both children with and without impairments in the same school. However, the girl with cerebral palsy examined in this study has a language impairment and seems to encounter difficulties in behaving as an individual in daily situations.
From the daily interactions between the girl with cerebral palsy and the teachers, I found that their intimate practices with bodily touch gave the teachers an understanding of the will and preferences of the girl. Thus, intercorporeal and intersubjective practices, which are different from language communication practices, are significant in interpreting the subjectivity of others in this situation. The will and preferences of the girl are articulated and transferred between teachers and other children, and people in the preschool can recognize the status of the girl as an individual in these articulations. To conclude, I argue for the significance of intercorporeal and intersubjective practices in constructing the status of an individual.