Filtering Touch: An Ethnography of Dirt, Danger, and Industrial Robots

Abstract

“Industry 4.0” marks the advent of a new wave of industrial robotics designed to bring increased automation to “extreme” touch practices and enhance productivity. This article presents an ethnography of touch in two industrial settings using fourth generation industrial robots (a Glass Factory and a Waste Management Center) to critically explore the social and sensorial implications of such technologies for workers. We attend to manifestations of dirt and danger as encountered through describing workers’ sensory experiences and identity formation. The contribution of the article is two-fold. The first is analytical through the development of three “filters” to grasp the complexity of the social and sensorial dynamics of touch in situ while tracing dispersed mediating effects of the introduction of novel technologies. The second is empirical, teasing out themes embedded in the sociosensorial dynamics of touch that intersect with gender, ethnicity, and class and relate to the technological mediation of touch.

Moving Sensory Ethnography Online

“…Moreover, who touches what, and how, can hold significant cultural meanings across both society and industrial sectors. These can, for example, be traced through hierarchical skills discourses or within the contexts of dirty, dangerous, and dull work (see Barker & Jewitt, 2021).…”

“…These are introduced in this section and consisted of: A corpus of fieldnotes were produced through participatory moments that exposed important experiential aspects of the field. These included the intensities and mundanities of tactile experiences and processes of desensitization (see fieldnote exerts in Barker & Jewitt, 2021). Capturing and describing these data required me to understand how workers sensory experiences interacted with sociopolitical themes that were pertinent within and across the industrial sites.…”

Editorial

“…There are a few studies within anthropology of the senses that prioritize the categorisation of the senses including touch (Howes and Classen, 2014), trace the socio-cultural histories of touch (Classen, 2012), and explore the cultural variation in touch practices and rituals (Finnegan, 2014). However, ethnographic research more generally, seldom brings touch into focus – touch tends to be filtered out of qualitative descriptions (Barker and Jewitt, 2020). The same is true of sensory ethnography, where touch is rarely attended to with the exception of a few studies including touch in the context of laundry (Pink, 2005) and mobile media (Pink et al, 2016).…”

“…We have explored the potential of dialogues between multimodality and sensory ethnography for touch in detail elsewhere (Jewitt and Leder Mackley, 2019; Jewitt et al, 2021; Barker and Jewitt, 2020). While multimodality asks if and when touch can (and cannot) be considered a representational and communicational mode, sensory ethnography attends to the situated sensorial experiences and perceptions of participants, of which the tactile may be an element, in order to both understand their experiences and activities, and how touch as an experiential category may become relevant in people’s actions and reflections.…”

Sensoria: An exploratory interdisciplinary framework for researching multimodal & sensory experiences

“…It is paradoxical given its significance that touch is perhaps the most neglected of the senses within qualitative research. Although there are a few qualitative studies that prioritise the tracing of socio-cultural histories and/or the variation of touch practices and rituals (Finnegan, 2014), changing touch cultures and epochs (Classen, 2005(Classen, , 2012, and the critique of the universality of touch and its categorization (Howes and Classen, 2014), qualitative research seldom brings touch into focus -touch tends to be filtered out of qualitative descriptions (Barker and Jewitt, 2021). The same is true for sensory ethnography, touch is rarely attended to with the exception of a few studies including touch in the context of laundry (Pink, 2005) and touching mobile media (Pink et al, 2016).…”