Experiments in becoming: corporeality, attunement and doing research

Abstract

Human geography has become deeply interested in a range of research methods that focus on researchers’ corporeal engagement with their research sites. This interest has opened up an exciting set of research horizons, energising the discipline in a whole range of ways. Welcoming this engagement, this paper presents a series of meditations on the process of using the researcher’s corporeal learning as a research tool. Exploring two research projects, as well as the work of the photographer Nikki S Lee, it examines how the process of becoming corporeally capable might productively be framed as sets of ongoing experiments. Framing such engagements as experiments is a useful heuristic through which to think rigorously about what such research can claim as knowledge. More controversially, the paper argues that the heuristic of the experiment helps us to attend to the varying durations of becoming in ways that much existing work has discounted. Developing corporeal capacities – gaining a skill, becoming capable of doing a particular activity – involves becoming attuned to a range of thresholds, the crossing of which open up novel and frequently unexpected perspectives. Attunement to these thresholds does not arise simply through the process of mixing in and participating in a research site. It requires careful attention to the parameters of transformation involved in being able to participate. The paper explores how such parameters might be decided upon and calibrated as part of an ongoing engagement with a research site or event. Our aim is not to artificially restrict or constrain how human geographers approach their research design. Rather it is to encourage human geographers to show more courage in their use of corporeal based research methodologies.

Taking back taste in food bank Britain: on privilege, failure and (un)learning with auto-corporeal methods

“…49 Envisaging research as "body work," this has focused on scrutinising "bodily becoming as a kind of research technique." 50 Such an approach is necessarily experimental, taking as it does an interest in how researchers can change their corporeal realities to learn afresh. 51 Wacquant describes work of this nature as underpinning a "carnal sociology" of "flesh and blood" built on an appreciation of humans "as a sensate, suffering, skilled, sedimented and situated corporeal creature."…”

“…a purposeful changing of state, to push towards a point of transition, or passing of a threshold, in order to explore how thresholds are produced that demarcate one state from another." 2 Orwell sought to change the state of his own body and pass his embodied thresholds of taste to demarcate his privileged lifeworld from the poverty he sought to learn about. The outcomes include evocative accounts of embodied effects.…”

The hopes of memorial remaking: Product, process, and the temporal rhythms of making

“…Methodologically, geographical research has been enlivened through participatory methods that transcend distinctions between researcher and maker (Carr & Gibson, 2017; Hawkins, 2015). These participatory methods include self‐studies of making that are orientated towards the embodied practices of becoming skilled (Latham & Wagner, 2020; Paton, 2013; Straughan, 2018). The intuition of learning how to do, rather than studying what is done, foregrounds the processes through which the hands that do suppresses the mind that plans (Sudnow, 2001).…”

Geographies of running cultures and practices

“…Here scholarship requires using one's own organism as a reflexive, sensuous research tool, learning the practice one is investigating and training with skilled practitioners in their sporting environment. Expressing this in research has also seen several scholars craft insightful, creative and evocative writings of running based in part on their involvement in events or training practices or biographies (Edensor et al., 2018; Edensor & Lorimer, 2015; Larsen, 2022; Latham & Wagner, 2021; Lorimer, 2012; McGannon & McMahon, 2021; Oldfield, 2020). While these studies involve research with other runners, approaches where researchers draw on their own bodies have obvious limitations and can raise exclusions in the field, prioritising the experiences of some at the expense of others.…”