Conceptualising and researching the body in digital contexts: towards new methodological conversations across the arts and social sciences

Introduction

The turn to the body in social sciences has intensified the gaze of qualitative research on bodily matters and embodied relations making the body a significant object of reflection. Post-humanist and new-materialist theories as well as scientific advances in digital and bio- technologies have raised new uncertainties for ‘what constitutes a body, and where one body finishes and another starts’ (Shilling, 2008: 12). This has both unsettled and expanded the qualitative research focus on the body. Alongside this, ‘post-methods’ scholars (Law, 2004; Savage, 2013) have called for social science to engage with, and imagine, more inclusive method possibilities, a key aspect of which is bodily inscribed realities and materialities and less verbal methods. This article contributes to these debates of the body and method within qualitative research through ethnographic study of the similarities and differences in how the body was viewed and addressed in six research groups in the arts and social sciences. Our contribution is three fold: 1) we explore the potential synergies across the social sciences and arts to inform the conceptualization of the body in digital contexts; ¹ 2) we point to ways qualitative research can engage with ideas from the arts towards more inclusive methods concerned with the materiality and non-linguistic character of the body; and 3) we offer three themes with which to interrogate and re-imagine the body: bodily fragmenting and zoning; engaging with the sensory and material body; and bodily boundaries with attention to digital-physical trajectories of the body. ² We discuss the potential of these themes as a resource to support qualitative researchers to explore ‘what kinds of body are being invoked and in-acted, implicitly and explicitly within their own theorizing of bodily matters’ (Blackman and Featherstone, 2009: 4). We conclude by discussing the potential of working with the arts to reinvigorate and extend the methodological repertoire of qualitative social science in ways that are relevant to the current re-thinking of the body, its materiality and boundaries.

The digital body

The body, bodily matters and embodied relations, and how we imagine and manage them are ‘intimately tied to the social’: how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world (Shilling, 2008: 7). Digital technology is a fundamental part of the contemporary experience and re-imagination of the body. Via technological means the body has been the subject of ‘intensification of the extension, abstraction, and reconstruction’ (Cregan, 2006: 5). Developments in digital technology raise questions about the relationship between society, nature and culture, and challenge how we think about these relationships through the body. Harraway’s cyborg vision of a hybrid machine-organism, for example, was a seminal moment in the re-imagination of the body as in-determinant and fluid and no longer tied to the material physical body. The exploration of the ‘material-semiotic’ relationships between nature, biology, society and culture that builds on her work (Haraway, 2003: 201) provide a basis from which to ask what new kinds of bodies are being constructed through the digital. These questions are increasingly pertinent as the body is drawn into, and reconfigured through, digital interaction via touch based, whole body and gestural interfaces in ways that extend the capabilities and uses of the sensory body (Patterson, 2013; Price et al., 2015). This article speaks to the opening up of notions of the body through its relationship to the digital.

Post-humanist bodies

Post-humanism is a significant interdisciplinary platform for ‘radical and accelerated questioning of what it means to be human and what the re-imagined end(s) of the human might be’ (Braidotti, 2006: 250). Post-humanist scholars critique and dismantle the dualisms and boundaries of human/non human, technology/self, nature/science. Through the ongoing process of redefining the human condition, post-humanism draws attention to, and critiques, what is included and excluded within the concept of human and its multiplicity. It pushes towards a mutable, ephemeral, multiple, fluid notion of ‘human’ that redefines humanity’s place in the world as one life form among many (Wolfe, 2009). This article engages with the critical discursive space associated with post-humanism and the dilemmas of how to research a post-human subjectivity and body, its boundaries and meaning. While we do not abandon the ontology of the human in our exploration of the body and the digital, our findings contribute to the broad discussion of the multiplicity, fractal, and sensory character of the body and its boundaries (Mol, 2002).

Material bodies

New materialism is a theoretically diverse movement that has emerged within feminist and post-humanist theory. It responds to the need to re-engage with how culture is materially mediated and inscribed. It insists on the significance of materiality in practices across the boundaries of science and the social, nature and culture: a significance that is echoed in this article. New materialist scholars study how emerging accounts of matter, materiality, and corporeality combine with developments in science and technology to ‘critique the nature of being, conceptions of nature, agency, and their social and political relationship’ (St Pierre, 2013: 654). Matter is viewed as being generated – endlessly enacted and reshaped – rather than existing a priori as static, fixed, or passive (Law, 2004; Mol, 2002). From this perspective it is not possible to isolate material objects from the practices within which they are embedded. In a philosophical breaking of the dualism between object and subject they ‘contest the notion of nature as merely the inert scenery against which the humanist adventures of culture are played out’ (MacLure, 2013: 659). This position has implications for how qualitative researchers approach the body, as from this perspective human bodies are one of many bodies, or agential materialities, in the world. New materialism has been critiqued for its tendency to inadvertently ‘fetishize matter’ (Ahmed, 2008: 35) and its ‘dissolution of our ‘commonsense’ dualism’ in which ‘objects and subjects are viewed as separate and in relationship to each other’ as failing as an ‘empathetic encounter’ with peoples lived practices (Miller, 2005: 14). However, it raises some interesting questions about the body in digital contexts, particularly the call for qualitative researchers to engage more fully with the materiality of the body. This article responds to that call.

Post-methods and the body

Researching the digital body – wherever we set the boundaries for what it is – raises methodological challenges for qualitative researchers. Post-humanist and new materialist scholars have highlighted the need to imagine novel methods that centre on bodily performativity and materiality (Callus and Herbrechter, 2012), and critiqued qualitative research’s ‘over investment in language based methods’. Indeed, Lather and St Pierre (2013: 630) have suggested this rethinking of the body requires radical change within qualitative methods of inquiry. They call for a ‘new methodology for new times’ … ‘Methodology-21’… ‘that reconceptualizes and experiments with standard practices, moving beyond current scripts and their conventional codifying and disciplining of inquiry’ (Lather, 2013: 638). They argue that significant phenomena are elusive, vague, ephemeral, complex, or messy and are ‘hardly caught or partly caught’ by standard qualitative methods, which ‘fail to capture the textured character of the world’ (Law, 2004: 2). Law suggests qualitative research needs to move beyond texts to ‘bodies and devices’, and attend to ‘bodily inscribed realities and materialities’ (Law, 2004: 152–3). Generally, there is a growing ‘restlessness or dissatisfaction’ amongst qualitative researchers with the failure of dominant social science methods to adequately account for the visual, the sensory and the digital (Mason and Davies, 2009: 588), and increasing awareness that body experiences cannot be reduced to talk (Gunn, 2005: 269) and of the need for embodied methods to help gain insight on the social significance of bodily experience (Orr and Phoenix, 2014; Tarr and Thomas, 2011).

In this article we explore what standard methods ‘silence’ (Law, 2004: 144) and how social sciences and arts-based methods might be brought together to work on and with the digital body to move beyond this silence. To do this, we engage with methodological debates regarding the potential of arts-based research for social science (Bartlett, 2015; Crow et al., 2011). We support the proposition that art practice is research (Sullivan, 2010), that making is a form of research, and that the features of art-based research (openness, serendipity, imagination, speculation) provide a valuable focus on ‘inspiration not information’ (Gaver et al., 1999: 25), and the methodological potential of interdisciplinary synergies between arts and social sciences.

Study methodology

This article draws on the findings of the Methodological Innovation in Digital Arts and Social Sciences (MIDAS) project, an ethnographic study of six research groups concerned with the body in technology-enhanced environments in the Arts (Design, Fashion, Performance) and the Social Sciences (Education, Psychology, and Social Interaction studies). We used ethnography to understand how the body and the digital are constituted and enacted by getting up close to the ‘relative messiness of practice’ and materialities, and making explicit how meanings are produced (Law, 2004: 19). Ethnography is an approach that is used by and familiar to both the arts and the social sciences, ensuring participants had shared experiences and understanding of the study methods. This helped to reduce potential theoretical and methodological tensions in the study including the potential critique that the arts were to be subjected to the research processes, methodologies, outputs/insights or logics of the social sciences or vice versa. Our fieldwork informed how meanings of the body were enacted and articulated, understood and disputed, in research groups. We explored the culture of the study groups through the design of their interactional spaces, the texts and objects that circulated within it, and their routine practices with attention to the situated production of research methods and the digital bodies.

We used a multimodal perspective to provide a fine-grained account of practices. Multimodality is built on the premises that meaning is made with different semiotic resources each of which offers distinct potentials and limitations, the production of multimodal wholes, and that to study meaning, we need to attend to all of these resources (Jewitt et al., 2016). Multimodality enabled attention to collective bodily modes of position, posture, gesture, gaze, and movement alongside speech as well as the visual and auditory modes of the technologies in use. Combining multimodality and ethnography is apt, as a talk-focused approach would fail to account for environments where making and doing are central. This combined approach is powerful as ‘a multimodal perspective captures something of the complexity of the studied field, and the ethnographic data collection and interpretation to help to situate that complexity in particular social, cultural and historical contexts’ (Flewitt, 2011:302).

Our six research groups were selected using three criteria: 1) the centrality of the body/embodied practice, 2) focus on digital technologies and 3) engagement in methodological development. The selected groups provided access to a range of methodologies, perspectives on the body, and digital contexts. We selected 21 key participants (two to four from each group) to capture a range of career stages and gain an account of different time-points in the development of a site’s ‘research ecology’. (This term refers to the group’s research stance, cultural and social values, its methods, and theories, their conceptions of the body and the digital). The six groups are exemplars through which we explored the body in digital contexts and the potentials for working across the arts and social sciences, rather than indicative of how an entire discipline addresses the body.

We conducted fieldwork for 8 to10 months in each group (Brown, 2013; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995) to create a detailed account of their research ecologies. Field notes were produced in-situ on iPads to enable written notes, photographs, audio recordings, and video recordings (as appropriate) to be combined. Early fieldwork identified four broad areas of focus including setting (people/roles); the body (terminologies, key concepts and theories in use, related practices); the digital (available technologies, metaphors, how/when technologies feature in practice, relationship to the body); and methods (key approaches, concepts, concerns and interests). Weekly team meetings supported consistency across the fieldwork, ethnographic reflection and discussion of challenges, and exploration of emerging analytical themes. The first stage of fieldwork focused at an institutional and departmental level, we collated and reviewed prospectus materials, observed research lecturers and seminars, met with and informally interviewed academic staff and arts technicians. This generated an account of the research activity and ethos of the sites, including their primary research methods, and the place of the digital and the body as an object of research and to recruit key participants for the second stage of fieldwork. This attended to research practices on and with the body at an individual level to create an account of how participants conceptualized and researched the body in digital contexts, their processes, practices, discourses and rationales. We observed their making and research practice in the studio/lab, supervision and data analysis sessions, rehearsals, seminars, and final shows with access to participant’s sketchbooks, portfolios and publications/papers.

An inductive and data driven approach was used to develop analytical themes. Emerging themes and topics were reviewed and developed into sensitizing concepts to provide a general reference and guidelines in our approach to the data. Each research case was written up through an analytical process of immersion and iterative engagement with the fieldwork data. This involved annotation of the field notes and conceptual development of themes via theoretical notes, and memos to elaborate these (Emerson et al., 2011). In developing a detailed account of the research ecology of each group attention was given to significant practices, rules, norms, and organizational structures, repeated actions, revelatory moments, inconsistencies and breakdowns, and how events unfolded in/over time. Through this process the fieldwork materials were assembled to explore, develop and refine analytical themes and categories relevant to the areas of body, digital, and methods across the Arts and Social Science.

We then used a constant comparative method to explore our themes and tease out variation across the sites. This involved allocating segments of data to the thematic categories, building collections of data, and comparing these segments to map the range and variation of a given category across the data. This phase helped identify the synergies, tensions and points of connection, for researching the body in digital contexts across the Digital Arts and Social Science, leading to the three themes discussed in this article. The project participants provided a degree of ‘validation’ via the opportunity to comment and contribute to the written case for their group and a series of four collaborative workshops involving participants and invited guests to explore emerging ideas, analytical themes, directions and research conclusions. A degree of ‘triangulation’ was achieved by looking across different types of data and working with different researchers’ analytical views of data. A brief description of each research group is given below to help to situate them, and their theoretical frames.

Fragmenting the body

The body was fragmented to different extents and in specific ways across the research groups. This was manifested through the establishment of different physical zones of the body; separating the mind and body into discreet areas of attention; and/or marking boundaries between the physical-digital-virtual body. Attention to practices of fragmenting the body can shed light on how the conceptualisation of the body is shaped through disciplinary context and ontological and epistemological roots. This is methodologically significant as it relates to the role of methods in the imagination of the body, how they establish the materiality and boundaries, what is included or excluded, from the domain of the body. Reflecting on how we fragment the body in our research can be a useful analytical device: how does our research ‘carve up’ the body, why, and what are the implications of doing so? Our analysis suggests the potential of ‘exchanging’ ways of fragmenting the body to promote synergies across the arts and social sciences. Such methodological exchange offers a way to research the multiple and fractal character of the body (Mol, 2003), and to engage with its complex materiality. The research groups re-imagined the body differently and these imaginations were shaped by and in turn shaped their research ecologies.

The fragmented body was established by the use of strict body zones within the arts (Fashion and Design) and the social sciences (Social Interaction and Education) groups. In Social Interaction and Education these zones mapped to forms of communication or interaction. Although the body was understood as a holistic social entity in which the mind and body were intimately connected and mediated by technologies, the body was zoned into distinct areas for analytical purposes:

Sitting in the lab, the researcher is working with her video data using the transcription software Elan. She works with a short excerpt of video made of a team undertaking an operation in the surgical operating theatre. She is looking at action and sequences, has broken it down into different rows on a transcript– actions are marked on a (vertical) time line– every second is marked with a short hairline, and every 10 seconds with a long hairline. The spoken utterances of members of the surgical team are on a time line and other time lines/rows account for different aspects of communication mapped to the body: eyes to gaze, arm and hand to gesture, hand to manipulation, and torso to body orientation. The transcript is linked to the video and both ‘play’ simultaneously when she clicks on either. (Social Interaction, Fieldnote excerpt)

While the body was ‘carved’ into body/action zones these two research groups situated these parts in the broader context of the body: they had ‘zoomed in’ for analytical purposes and would ‘zoom out’ to ‘reassemble the body’. The central conceptualization of the body was concerned with the performativity of the body in action and zoning was used as a method for managing the ‘mess’ and boundaries of the body. The education researchers talked of zones as ‘building blocks towards a holistic understanding of bodily communication, interaction or learning’. A similar process was observed in Fashion through the use of established fashion areas. Each zone required distinct design knowledge and craft skills, and was a topic of a specific training: feet and footwear; hands and gloves and jewellery; head and millinery; and torso and contour lingerie. The technologies in the fashion studio (scanners for the foot, hand or whole body) were connected to these zones shaped by fashion’s historical disciplinary practices. However, in Fashion the body remained fragmented into zones, individual and un-situated.

The technician who supports the use of the studio digital equipment body and other scanners … talks about ‘a body’ to refer to a ‘general sets of measurements’ or a 3D mannequin in relation to the body scanner, and as they reach each bit of equipment she talks of the body as discreet units (spine/back, foot, hand) mapped to the use of available scanners and the focus on the body of each course. (Fashion, Fieldnote excerpt)

The social, cultural and technological were aligned to present a particular view of the body.

The Design participants approached the body as a means of accessing people’s social and psychological experiences to support the production of design artefacts and experiences. Participants frequently talked of the body as a ‘sensory organ’ and a ‘living research tool’ that they used to collate data on experiences. They zoned the body via the senses– tactile, olfactory, sight, and kinesthetic – a methodological frame that generates an imagination of the body that accentuates its sensory character.

The Psychology participants fragmented the body through the separation of the cognitive/mind and the body. Virtual navigation of the virtual learning environment was seen as a way to access cognitive navigational strategies that negates the sensory and material body to generate an imagination of the body as mind.

Two researchers in the office are sat at the computer plotting the route of a participant in the virtual learning maze onto the 2D layout map of the maze. They are talking about the child/subject’s movement through the maze as indicating how they perceive the space and trying to establish the ‘navigation strategies’ that were used. They discuss the body as it relates to ‘cognitive perception of the environment’. They use two terms to describe this: ‘perceiving the space around your body in relation to yourself– ego-centric’ and ‘perceiving space from outside the body where the environment is seen as some kind of layout– allo-centric’. (Psychology, Fieldnote excerpt)

In contrast, Performance participants treated the body in an integrated/amalgamated manner viewing the body as a part of the physical-digital-environment. Their stance was embedded in a broader historical ethos of performance and understanding the body as ‘being in the world’. They talked of the body as a ‘language realised through bodily movement and kinetics’ through which to experience and explore being in the world, using loose ideas of narrative to explore ideas of intimacy and emotion, the sculptural body, ideas of bodily performativity (for example, masculinity), and the ‘physical-technological body’. The digital was frequently used as a methodological lens to amplify and re-imagine the body:

The room is dark; there are four large canvas screens in the center of the room; and four projectors in each corner of the room that back project a black and white film onto the screens. The audience is sat or lying on the floor centre of the screens. The projections display a magnified view of the skin, the camera – slightly out of focus at times – moving over the contours of a woman’s body, the hairs on the arm look like grasses blowing in the wind, the whole body is not in view, the hips look like hills. …. the maker says ‘I use HD video to project a micro-view of the skin as an abstracted landscape – its exploring the reframing of the body. Skin and hair become a landscape to travel across and explore. The focus not being a silhouette but the intricate nuances of the intimate body.’ (Performance, Fieldnote excerpt)

Across this group participants used the digital to re-envision the body, as one of blurred mixed realities, encompassing the biological, machinik, affective, and virtual: to de-zone the body and reimagine the boundary between human and non-human via methods beyond language that assert shared bodily sensation and materiality.

Engaging with the sensory body

The Arts research groups were more intensively engaged with sensory material aspects of the body than the Social Sciences. It was routine within the former to engage with a broad range of senses (olfactory, touch, kinaesthetic, vision, aural) and the sensory had a central role in exploratory research artefacts and performance. Participants generated sensory bodily experiences to explore the materiality of the body, memory, emotion and affect – key aspects that are relevant to the call for new methods within post-human, new materialist, and post methods literature and the challenges of researching the body in digital contexts more generally. In the Design group, for example, sensory forms of interaction were used to access emotional experiences – an aspect of interaction that may be ‘silenced’ by standard qualitative methods:

Looking through her sketchbooks she talks about a strong focus on touch as a ‘sensory experience’, a ‘communicational tool’, and a ‘data collection method’. She shows us a series of clay objects that she made for a project on Parkinson and well-being to generate sensory experiences of touch. These facilitated the production of ‘tactile stories, that is touch based experiences that open up memories to be enlivened, rendered visible untold ‘taboo’ or losses (such as the loss of mobility or loneliness)’. She talks about touch object’s ‘potential to re-mediate or rearticulate experiences that are often hard to get at…to stimulate thinking and conversation’. (Design, Fieldnote excerpt)

This focus on the sensory body led to the development of several methods, sensory probes and ‘tactile stories’ and sensory smell maps (participant walks mapped via audio and written descriptions of smells, the collection of smell objects and their distillation into scents) to evoke experiences, memories and imaginations. Thus exemplifying the potential of working across the arts and social sciences to expand the non-linguistic methodological repertoire of qualitative research and in doing so expanding our understanding of bodily matters and experiences.

The relationship of the digital to the sensory was a common site of exploration in the arts groups. The digital was associated with both a loss and a reinvigoration of sensory bodily experience. Fashion participants attended to the texture, sound and movement of materials against the body to foreground sensory aspects of the body. One participant, for example, made garments to express the bodily experience of depression. Working with methods from the quantified self-movement and social media data she made a Manikin mapping her body measurements to the results of the Gross National Happiness survey on internal and external dimensions of happiness: she literally turned her emotional well-being into a sensory bodily-wearable experience. Another participant explored how sensory touch experience could be supplemented via the digital by translating it into online virtual retail environments through visual textures and surface movement of fabric and the development of gestural interfaces that enabled users to ‘touch’, ‘hold’, ‘pinch’ and ‘scrunch’ fabrics. Within Fashion, one participant, concerned at the lack of sensory materials for 3D printing (that typically relies on synthetic plastics that result in a loss of mutuality of materials and body and reduced sensory experience for the wearer), was developing new natural materials for digital printing. Within Design a participant used speculative scenarios, a staged reality performance, to explore the loss of sensory emotional experience in a digital future. The digital was used to disturb and critique the sensory body:

In the video a man (late 60s) is sitting in a small medical cubicle – his arm is connected to ‘machine’. Another younger man enters and starts to abuse him, shouting insults, and the older man is finally with the aid of the ‘emotion synthesis machine’ enabled to cry. Technology here is seen as operating on the lost, as fundamental to human emotion, as reconnecting us to what it means to be human. The machine ‘addresses sensual inputs like sound, smell and visuals, which make a person cry and asks what if generated tears affect the emotional state in the same way natural ones do?’ (Design, Fieldnote excerpt)

We observed participants across the arts groups using the digital to augment, enhance or extend the senses toward a re-imagining of the sensory body.

In contrast, the social science groups had a limited approach to the sensory echoing, suggesting that it is ‘oddly abstracted and distanced from the sensory, embodied and lived conditions of existence that it seeks to explain’ (Mason and Davies, 2009: 260). Sensory material bodily experiences were not a feature of the Psychology or Education groups. The Social Interaction group employed the sensory to create an authentic simulation environment to support effective staff training while with the arts groups participants engaged with sensory bodily experiences to challenge or re-imagine the body. There were some points of connection between the design of this sensory environment and the understanding of sensory bodies and environment in the Performance group.

Physical-digital trajectories of the body

We use the term ‘digital-physical trajectories of the body’ to point to whether and how the practices and wider research ecologies of the different research groups established and articulated the boundaries between the digital and the physical, and the movement of the body across and between these. Such trajectories speak to notions of inclusion and exclusion, and the broader debates set out earlier in this article concerning the relationship between the body and digital technologies, and what it is to be human. The presence and character of these trajectories differed across the research groups. Typically, in the Social Science groups, trajectories were not a feature and the digital and the body were embedded in real time interaction and the digital was primarily seen as mediating participant experiences:

Moving away from the desktop has made it more possible to engage with your body differently through digital technology … Looking at how digital technologies like mobiles or tangible technologies change the way that you physically interact and engage either with the technology or the world or both together. We try and understand better what role that plays in learning or meaning-making. (Education, Interview excerpt)

In contrast, the boundaries and trajectories across them was an object of study in the Arts groups. Design participants explored the place of the body across these boundaries and experimented with traversing them. During a studio workshop the lecturer introduced the idea of inputs and outputs, ‘Physical Computing explores methods of bringing together the virtual world of the computer and physical world of people.’ This notion was materialised in the students design work, for instance:

Sensors and actuators have been used to link the physical and the digital. The viewer physically blows into a bubble wand to produce digital bubbles on a screen that are a little later re-materialized as a stream of bubbles emerging from a black box. The mechanism for this is not made visible or explained. (Design, Fieldnote excerpt)

Fashion participants working on digital virtual media and retail proposed there was no difference between the material physical and virtual body, while other participants explored their boundary with attention to gender and body norms. These explorations were achieved through the creation of new types of digital bodies that de-stabilized measurement reference points, ‘distorted’, ‘manipulated’ and ‘invented’ the body and the idea of avatars as ‘shadow bodies’. Trajectories tended to start and finish with a physical artefact. The arts participants used physical-digital trajectories to generate ideas of the body and bodily artefacts that were not possible to create via either one alone. There was much challenging of the limits of the digital within the arts, finding ways to work around its affordances limits.

Digital Fashion Studio: Body-Scanner session 1: The student scans herself wearing one of the garments she produced. The scanner is designed to take a ‘set of body measurements of multiple points on the body’ from a naked person. These measurements automatically generate a 3D avatar. In this session a pixelated-textured 2D image is produced but no avatar is generated. The student takes screen shots of the image. The student and technician try to make sense of what went wrong …

Scanner session 2: The student says the scanner ‘couldn’t read’ her body ‘the machine has got an expectation and if you don’t match that it cant come up with anything…I wanted to work with what the machine sees. So I had to learn what the machine liked and what it doesn’t.’ She has adapted her garment pattern design to make her body shape more visible. The scanner now generates measurements and an avatar. She says this ‘dialogue’ with the software started her thinking of her garments as ‘body extensions that the machine could then cover with a new body’ through the creation of a new avatar. (Fashion, Fieldnote excerpt)

In Fashion, trajectories across the physical-digital were used to draw attention to the agentive potential of the digital and critique/expose digital ideologies related to the body. Performance participants made technologies visible, for example by exposing the devices and wires used in a performance, although the mechanisms for activating the technology were not always transparent. This produced an amalgamated physical-digital body where no one state was singled out and the liminal boundaries of the body were explored –what the body is, how it comes to be, and the body as subject, object and abject. For example, one participant used his body to subvert the expectations of everyday technology:

Performance: he is seated mid-stage on a chair with his hands on his knees in front of a plinth lit by a spot-light. On the plinth there is a set of discarded and obsolete electronic components from an old phone and a computer. These are connected to electrodes on his shoulders and arms to create a living electric-circuit. The circuit starts to heat up – the current forces his muscles to involuntarily twitch and move. He calls the performance a commentary on ‘constructing a cyborgian system with a human body’ seeking ‘to explore human-machine hybridity in the context of the material consequences of a culture of compulsive technological innovation, driven by planned obsolescence.’ (Performance, Fieldnote excerpt)

Within Performance the digital was seen as a ‘constructive destructive force’ with which to ‘amplify the body and the senses’.

The ways in which these trajectories were constructed speaks to the different imaginations of the body that the methodologies helped to generate, and what is excluded and included in the process of establishing boundaries.

Conclusion

This article engages with imagining inclusive methodological possibilities to contribute to qualitative debates centred on the body as a significant object of reflection with reference to post-humanism, new-materialism, post-methods. We have outlined three analytical themes and how these could be mobilized to explore the body in digital contexts and to enhance and expand qualitative methods to be more inclusive. We have demonstrated how interrogating approaches to the fragmentation of the body can contribute to understanding what kinds of body are being invoked and enacted and the potential benefits for qualitative research of moving between different stances of fragmentation to facilitate critical thinking, re-focus the view of the body, and generate novel questions. The potential of increasing social science methods engagement with the sensory via engagement with arts-based methods and ideas has been highlighted. We have shown that innovative research on the body in digital contexts could be supported by the design and reordering of physical-digital trajectories and transitions to create new contexts of digital serendipity, that purposively disrupt the digital to generate new ideas. We have brought differing perspectives on the body into conversation and contributed to the challenge of exploiting potential synergies across the arts and social sciences to support interdisciplinary innovative qualitative research on the body in digital contexts. There is, we conclude, immense potential for qualitative social science to exploit arts-based methods to reinvigorate and extend its methodological repertoire in ways that are relevant to the contemporary re-thinking of the body, its materiality and boundaries.