Abstract
There has been a recent upsurge in mobilities research relating to embodied movement, and a corresponding interest in adapting methods to acquire data while on the move. At the same time, many of the questions being asked relate to non-representational aspects of movement, notably the sensory, emotional and affective. While approaches that attempt to enable the researcher to ‘be, see and feel there’ such as mobile video ethnography are becoming more popular, they have not been without their critics. Situated within literature on affect and (post)phenomenology, this article critically examines the go-along to weigh up what we might gain and lose from using such methods. I demonstrate the ways in which such methods have the potential to enhance recollection, empathy and our ability to research ‘quiescence’ through the elicitation of detailed verbal accounts. Acknowledging their shortcomings however, I discuss the potential contribution that bio-sensing technologies may make in conjunction with go-alongs. Ultimately, I argue that despite the value-laden nature of such technologies and the history of anthropometry they are situated within, if used sensitively such tools may be used to promote positive logics of affect and mobility.
Introduction
As D’Andrea et al. among others have stated, accelerating and increasingly complicated global flows (of ideas, objects, practices, people, etc.) over the past 30–40 years have led a number of scholars (including many cultural geographers) to study and problematise the relations between and within a diverse array of mobilities, particularly in the fields of migration, transport and tourism studies. 1 One of the key rationales given for focusing attention on flows and connectivity in this broadly post-structuralist formulation is that differing modes, experiences and distributions of mobility are not just produced through the arrangements of other forces, rather they are seen as essential in co-constructing these arrangements. 2
Alongside this, what has been termed non-representational theory (NRT) has begun to open up a new set of questions regarding the relationships between meaning, embodiment and practice, much of it in relation to movement and mobility. 3 Central to NRT’s post-structuralist heart is the notion that the meaning and value of things comes from their ‘enactment in contingent practical contexts’ rather than from ‘their place in a structuring symbolic order’. 4 Thus NRT is very much about analysing the significance of practice 5 and doing in the constitution of meanings and networks. Moreover, NRT is concerned with phenomena – such as sensory and affective experience – that ‘overflow’ our ability to apprehend and represent them through language. Thrift, for example, has argued that new technologies have foregrounded a ‘technological unconscious’ where writing is often no longer the richest way to make sense of human motivations and practices. 6
The influence of NRT has been felt in many areas of cultural geographic enquiry including that concerned with corporeal mobility where significant attention has been focused on the sensory, felt and affective aspects of movement.
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A key question that has arisen alongside this agenda is how do we research and represent the fleeting, unconscious and mobile? If we are to believe Law and Urry, it would seem that the ‘orthodox’ canon of methods are lacking when faced with such research questions in relation to the so-called mobilities turn:
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[Existing methods] deal, for instance, poorly with the fleeting – that which is here today and gone tomorrow [ . . . ]. And such methods have difficulty dealing with the sensory – that which is subject to vision, sound, taste, smell; with the emotional – time-space compressed outbursts of anger, pain, rage, pleasure, desire, or the spiritual; and the kinaesthetic – the pleasures and pains which follow the movement and displacement of people, objects, information and ideas.
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Alongside this interest in worlds of flow, mobility and sense-making, there has been a questioning of existing methodological approaches and their ability to apprehend such phenomena. Lorimer, for example, echoes Urry and Law’s comments suggesting that new theoretical agendas and technological assemblages necessitate a questioning of epistemological and methodological approaches lest they produce ‘dead geographies’. 10 Consequently, the mobilities turn has been paralleled by a growth in what have been termed ‘mobile methods’.
Mobile methods means different things to different researchers depending on where their interests lie, but in essence, mobile methods generally describe any attempt to physically or metaphorically follow people/objects/ideas in order to support analysis of the experience/content/doing of, and inter-connections between, immobility/mobility/flows/networks. As this broad definition suggests, there are many ways that methods can be made mobile, many of which are anything but new. However, in the context of this article, I will focus attention largely on one strand of mobile methods that have gained popularity in the study of everyday embodied movement in the form of ‘go-alongs’. 11 In this article, I use the term ‘go-along’ to describe any method that attempts to (re)place the researcher alongside the participant in the context of the ‘doing’ of mobility.
Go-alongs have been used to apprehend varied mobility practices. 12 While all the protagonists will have a different take on why they felt it important to ‘go-along’ in some way, they all have in common the ethnographic desire to understand in detail what constitutes a mobile practice, particularly the fleeting, relational and felt aspects of mobility which resist representation. Such methods are geared towards enabling participants and researchers to participate and reflect on practices rather than any subsequent representation of practice (although that is, of course, also an extremely valuable avenue of enquiry in its own right).
My main focus in this article will be on the seeing there/feeling there variant which have tended to use audio/video recordings as the basis for further analysis of the mobile practice in question. I cannot speak for others but what mobile video ethnography (MVE) has offered in my experience is a way of accessing a practice where it would be difficult, unsafe or disruptive to do so otherwise. The point of accessing practices in this way is to elicit richer and more detailed accounts of the varied socialities and materialities that constitute movement as a dynamic process of subjectification. 13
Others such as Merriman have been more sceptical of mobile methods and the idea of go-alongs in particular. Merriman argues that go-alongs are ‘ . . . frequently underpinned by a rather problematic assumption that these methods enable the researcher to more accurately know and represent the experiences of their research subjects’. 14 He goes on that the idea that they allow us to witness ‘first-hand’ rely on a dubious claim to authenticity based on an ‘ . . . illusion of “first-handedness,” closeness, accuracy . . . ’. 15
Taking seriously Merriman’s scepticism regarding go-alongs (and mobile methods more broadly), this article pushes off from previous writing and research that I and others have conducted exploring the possibilities of being/seeing/feeling there approaches to gather data on the affective and sensory experiences of mobile subjects. Drawing upon phenomenological and post-phenomenological understandings I first discuss some but by no means all of the ways in which I believe go-alongs can enhance our understandings of embodied mobile practice before critically discussing how they might be further enhanced in conjunction with bio-sensing technologies. Just to be clear, however, I am in general agreement with Merriman regarding the need for a broad palette of methods in the study of mobility. Echoing Lorimer, I suggest that mobile methods should be seen as supplementary rather than replacing ‘representational’ methodologies. 16
The structure of this article is as follows: First, I outline the antecedents of mobile methods in (post)phenomenology and rehearse how and why many researchers with an interest in the embodied and affective aspects of mobility have used them. Building upon this, I critically discuss the use of MVE when used to elicit participant narratives in relation to affective and emotional experience. I focus on three ways in which such methods can aid narrative storytelling: through enabling detailed sensory and affective recollection, co-production of empathic understandings and the potential of such methods to engage with ‘quiescent’ 17 aspects of mobile practice. Acknowledging the shortcomings of existing MVE, I critically discuss bio-sensing as one possible way to enhance its ability to apprehend the detailed, unspeakable and relational nature of mobile sensory and affective experience.
(Post)phenomenology, mobility and affect
Although it has rarely been acknowledged, recent attempts to understand the embodied experience of mobile subjects have in no small part been underpinned by phenomenological method. 18 I do not have the space here to detail the core tenets of phenomenology; 19 I will focus instead on aspects of it that are relevant to the mobile methodologies debate. Put very simply, phenomenological method seeks to focus attention on the relationship between subject and object and to describe the experience from the first person point of view. 20 Relph describes a number of common elements to phenomenological method: it is primarily descriptive, concerned with complexity, and involves attempting to place the researcher in the position of those experiencing the phenomenon. 21
Movement has always been fundamental to phenomenology. For Husserl, the perception of movement meant the perception of continuously changing objects and the relations between them – what Husserl called ‘relational moments’ where we uncover different facets of things by moving round them. For Husserl, movement gives unity or completeness to things because it relates them with possible trajectories in relation to other things. 22 As such, events and relations come to be seen in wider contexts and possess properties not evident if viewed statically. Indeed, according to Husserl, static perceptual content is an abstraction from dynamic content. 23 Hence, there is a phenomenological precedent for wanting to understand in detail the unfolding of movement and how it orients us to and affects our experience of environments. Movement here is a way of making sense, and through bringing us into contact with the world, it is the central way in which we relate to what Husserl would call ontologically ‘natural’ things: those things that we can physically interact with as opposed to abstract things like numbers.
More recently scholars such as Idhe have theorised a revitalised post-phenomenology. 24 The core aspects that denote the ‘post’ are first that through more rigorous analysis of embodied perception, post-phenomenology attempts to move beyond its labelling as anti-science and solipsistic. Second, it seeks to probe the role of technologies/non-humans in assembling the social and cultural. 25 Drawing upon NRT, I would also add a third aspect to the ‘post’; that is, the study of those aspects of lived experience such as affect that may escape conscious thought and language and thus can be described in some ways as being ‘beyond’ experience: experience as pre-personal.
Writing in 2004, Thrift notably commented on the relative dearth of geographical interest in affect. 26 There are, however, numerous reasons to give prominence to such intangible and fleeting aspects of experience, of which I give just two here. First, as Shouse has argued, ‘without affect feelings do not “feel” because they have no intensity, and without feelings ‘rational’ decision-making becomes problematic’. 27 Thus, affect plays a vital if understated role in ‘determining the relationship between our bodies, our environment, and others’. 28 Second, because sensations, feelings and affects comprise our emotional (and ‘rational’) response to everyday situations, they exert a strong influence on the formation of cultural practices, identities and ways in which we respond to different media.
Given the centrality of cultural geographies to debates on affect and mobility, there is little need to account in depth for its various disciplinary definitions and antecedents. 29 However to simplify, on one hand psychological definitions of affect tend to combine emotion and feeling and have generally attempted to measure and categorise such phenomena in the laboratory using pen and paper (e.g. positive and negative affect schedule (PANAS)) or electroencephalography (EEG) techniques. 30 As this suggests, psychological definitions view affect as an individual emotional response to outside stimuli, something that can be measured at both conscious and unconscious levels under controlled conditions.
By way of contrast, more recent writing on affect in cultural geographic enquiry separates out feeling, affect and emotion. 31 However, despite a surge of interest, concise and firm definitions remain hard to come by. 32 Thrift points out that in his reading of affect, it is concerned with how emotions occur in everyday life and is rooted in a phenomenological tradition with a concomitant emphasis on the body as a key site of affect. Both Thrift and Anderson see contexts as vital elements in the constitution of affect, suggesting that the sources of affect are often from outside of the body. 33 For Massumi, affect is broadly equated with intensity, hence the relationship between intensity (affect) and qualification (feeling) is one of amplification or dampening, resonation or interference. 34 A key element of cultural geographic research into affect is to ask what is it that determines the affect that encounters and stimuli have on a person, and why similar stimuli have different affects in different times and places? Hence, the ‘definition’ I work with in this article is that the study of affect is concerned with how emotions, sensations, atmospheres and feelings arise out of relational encounters between objects, spaces and people. 35
As Anderson and Harrison state, research into affect is concerned much less with what practices signify and much more with content because affects in particular are forms of absence in that they become present only through performance; through the interaction of bodies, spaces, representations and objects. 36 The problems of eliciting data on such phenomena are compounded when the phenomena arise only during movement, and it becomes impossible to even sit down and talk to the participant while they are engaged in the activity in question. Moreover, when dealing with experiences that are not only quite fleeting but may also not be raised to the level of consciousness, it can be difficult if not impossible to talk or write about them because they can leave little ‘trace’ of their existence.
Consequently, many mobilities researchers have sought to adapt methods to become ‘mobile’ so that they can ‘bear witness’ to the presences and absences that occur in response to moving through different environments as they happen. My own research on different forms of cycling has promoted the use of mobile methods, in particular the use of MVE as a way of providing ‘an insight into the situated and contextual nature of knowledges and practices’ and attempting to foreground ‘ . . . experiential, affective and material aspects of practice which are often marginalised in less participative modes such as surveys’. 37 As DeLyser and Sui sum up, ‘whether alone or in combination with other methods, go-alongs can vibrantly apprehend mobile worlds’. 38
Merriman however is less sure. He states in relation to go-alongs that ‘I do not see why video recordings or autobiographical reflections on being in a physical environment are more effective at portraying, capturing or representing some-thing, some feeling about a situation, event or environment, than a written or verbal record’. 39 The key crux of Merriman’s argument is that there are many methods just as well adapted to interrogating the feelings and experiences of movement: ‘archival research, textual analysis, interviews and oral histories, to video ethnography . . . photography and performance’. 40 The question Merriman invites us to ask is what do we as researchers gain by being or seeing there?
For my own part, I am sympathetic to Merriman’s call to respect the richness of textual and historical sources in the study of mobility. In relation to particular questions and audiences, Merriman is no doubt right: when dealing with the representational and some aspects of the experiential we may be equally able to access appropriate data through what Csordas has termed a ‘bodily attentiveness’ to these sources. 41 However, there are facets of experience (notably affect) where meaning and value are derived from their ‘enactment in contingent practical contexts’ rather than from ‘their place in a structuring symbolic order’. 42 While some scholars have attempted to excavate intensities of feeling from historical texts, 43 I would suggest that this is an extremely difficult if not impossible task. Moreover, what if the questions we are asking require us to know what people are feeling on a second-by-second basis in response to environmental stimuli? Many of the methods Merriman mentions (and indeed many being/seeing there approaches) struggle to elicit this level of detail.
While I have previously written regarding some of the possibilities and practicalities of using such methods, 44 in the following section I attempt to conceptualise how MVE can enrich phenomenological understandings of movement through aiding recollection and empathy and the apprehension of quiescence. Following on from this, I then discuss the possibilities of bio-sensing in conjunction with MVE to elicit both more detailed and pre-personal intensities of feeling. Of particular interest in the latter part of this article is the extent to which quantitative techniques such as EEG and galvanic skin response (GSR) may enable bodies to ‘speak for themselves’ by providing new narratives around the intensity of affects in relation to other phenomena.
Recollection
The first and most obvious potential of using MVE in a phenomenological sense is to enhance/shape recollection of sensory and affective encounters. According to Husserl, even though the Leib (lived body) belongs to us at all times, it is a thing that we come upon temporally as any other thing. That is to say we experience it differently ‘in the now’, ‘in the just past’ and ‘in recollection’. 45 One of the issues that many mobilities scholars (I among them) appear to have with placed and textual methods is their seeming inability to ‘capture’ the experiences of the Leib as they happen, relying instead on the traces of movement left in any subsequent representation. The logic here (for myself at least) is based on the sense that in asking participants to speak about their lived experiences after the fact risks losing much of the ‘effervescence’, the ‘over-flowing’ nature of lived experience partly because we ask them to do so through language – a form of representation not always suited to describing unconscious bodily phenomena 46 – but also because we ask participants to recall these experiences after the fact and thus lose further detail.
A key point then is the way that go-alongs in their different forms assist recollection by connecting participants and researchers with the materialities of doing. Lashua and Cohen, for example, used multi-sited ethnography to research the importance of voyaging to becoming a musician in Liverpool and the production of urban spaces. 47 They reported how moving with participants allowed the built environment to serve as a prompt for recollection in a way that a mapping exercise and interview had not.
The point I want to make here in relation to MVE relates to Husserl’s distinction between recalling events ‘in the now’, ‘in the just past’ and ‘in recollection’ and how we might think differently about what we are doing and what we have done. It is entirely likely that increasing temporal and spatial distance on events means that how we talk/write about what we have done differs from how we talk/write about what we are doing. Even more so when much ethnographic data are fleeting in nature. 48 Contra to Merriman 49 and Dewsbury, 50 Murchison argues that the more distant we are from an event, the more likely memory is to complicate the record: ‘the longer the period of time that passes between an event and the note taking about it, the more likely that some elements will be misremembered or not remembered at all’. 51 MVE has the benefit of repositioning participant and researcher in a continuum of (non)events and material encounters to aid recollection, rather than relying on memory alone which tends to single out specific ‘events’.
The fact remains, however, that MVE as a representational methodology creates new reductions and abstractions. 52 Husserl, for example, problematised any reflection on phenomenological experience as both a reduction and potentially a distortion. Indeed, Husserl says of recollections that they not only turn lived experience into ‘an object for an absolute self-presenting phenomenological perception’ but that a second reduction is possible which brings a ‘recollected lived experience, as a phenomenological past, to givenness, albeit no longer absolute givenness excluding every doubt’. 53 What Husserl is talking about here is the way in which recollections and representations of lived experience bring phenomena to actuality but in a changed form. Of course, MVE, field noting (and bio-sensing) all transform or distort lived experience through their mode of representation. The point I would make in relation to these is how MVE as a method is used to create ‘distortions with a purpose’ in that alongside an interview, it attempts to act as a sensual prompt to recollection, helping to foreground the aspects of experience we are interested in knowing about and creating a framework through which to talk about felt experiences arising from relations with fleeting, mundane and easily forgotten phenomena.
Empathy
For Husserl, the Leib, ‘lived body’, is differentiated from the Korper, ‘physical body’. In contrast to the Korper, the Leib is the location of the ‘I’; the ‘zero-point’ ‘wherein one’s sensations, feelings, kinaestheses, and volitions manifestly function’. 54 An important tenet of the Husserlian approach to science is the belief that the meaning of lived experiences may be unravelled only through one-to-one transactions between the researcher and the objects of research. These transactions must involve attentive listening, interaction and observation to create representation of reality more sophisticated than previous understandings. 55
For Bortoft, phenomenological seeing/writing/feeling ‘is more than intellectual: it involves a holistic, intuitive dimension related to dedication, reciprocity, and a wish to see’. 56 The writings of Husserl again lend additional insight. Husserl argues that through empathy 57 – the attempt to place ourselves in the position of other ‘Is’ whether through observation or ‘practical reciprocity’ – we can gain ‘psychological knowledge’ of others ‘in the form of self-perception, self-remembering, as well as in the form of empathic experience . . . ’. 58 Husserl positions empathy as a special form of empirical experience because it attempts to experience ‘ . . . the inner life . . . the consciousness of the other I’. 59 Thus, ‘movement with’ our participants is in part about generating empathic understanding; as Vannini puts it, movement as a ‘condition and potential for sensing, knowing and interacting with the world’. 60
For Csordas, what is important in such contexts is the ‘ . . . mode in which the scholar engages the data – whether it is sufficient to attend to the body or whether one must in addition attend with the body – now understood as a tool for research’. 61 Csordas argues that if we use the body as a research tool, ‘ . . . pre-reflective gut feeling and sensory engagement are raised to the level of methodological self-consciousness by insertion of a phenomenological sense of embodiment into the ethnographic enterprise’. 62 The point I want to make here is that ‘movement with’ becomes a way of ‘attuning’ the researcher to the mobile practice in question and in so doing, of facilitating cultural and social empathy. For Husserl, this was essential to a phenomenological project. It was not enough to be just observer, to gather or analyse the empirical: phenomenology requires an immersion and an empathy that is much more readily available through participation.
What are the implications of this for the seeing there/feeling there approaches I have discussed already? Does this mean that such technologised modes of enquiry – where the researcher may not have participated in the practice in question – form a barrier to empathy? On the contrary, my argument here from a post-phenomenological standpoint is that performative technologies such as MVE can facilitate empathy through animating worlds, representing inaccessible aspects of lived experience and enabling conversations between researcher and participant. The possibility emerges here of new ways to forge empathic connections through novel modes of representation and knowledge. As Nold has stated in relation to emotion mapping, ‘the bottom-up process of identifying communal matters of concern, starting from personal sensations, suggests the possibility of an alternative body politic of place’. 63
Quiescence
In relating the importance of small gestures, Bissell expresses a concern that mobile methods privilege the more active dimensions of mobile experience at the expense of the less ‘auto-affective’ such as lethargy, tiredness, pain and hunger. 64 Bissell goes on to elaborate upon these concerns under three main themes: first, that mobile methods privilege and presume a mobile, active subject; second, the ‘over-animation’ of subjects through a focus on the corporeal and non-representational aspects of mobility; and third, the inability of mobile methods such as the go-along to apprehend the non-active dimensions of mobility. 65 Bissell’s contention is that many quiescent sensibilities do not lend themselves well to narration, yet are central to the experience of mobility. 66 Moreover, he voices a concern that despite the durability of many quiescent sensibilities, memory renders them fragile, bursting like bubbles ‘leaving only action-filled recollections’. He goes on that if memory privileges action and movement then such quiescence may have already ‘escaped’ prior to any attempt to apprehend it, be it auto-ethnographic or otherwise. 67
I am sympathetic to this line of argument and agree that unless the researcher/participant take care to draw attention to the less active sides of mobility, there is a real danger that accounts may simply emphasise active ‘events’. However, because of their ability to provide access to a flow of events, and even to re-arrange these temporally through split screen, fast-forward and editing, I would suggest that MVE can retain the potential to help elicit data on the quiescent.
My own MVE interviews with London cyclists have demonstrated the more contemplative side of active pursuits and the way that video can be used to bring these forth – what I have previously termed a ‘counter-dromology’. 68 To give just one example from my doctoral research, alongside a video of a journey she had made by bike, one older cyclist – Joyce – narrated how her choice of route was premised upon a specific form of quiet and stillness. She emphasised this when commenting that she did not want to look at the ‘noisy’ advertising along the main roads. For Joyce, the back roads as well as being quieter in terms of traffic were also visually quieter, and this allowed her to escape into a more reverous style of movement because she didn’t have to spend extra mental energy processing these external phenomena.
Bissell has suggested that quiescence may be better accessed through the silences and absences of encounter, but these as he states are always relational to the active. 69 It is worth emphasising in relation to the example of Joyce that it was the ability of the video to juxtapose contrasting events that assisted in eliciting this narrative – these quiet moments were all the more stark because of the busier parts of her journey. While Bissell argues that ‘quiescent’ moments are less likely to be recollected, MVE has the capacity to bring us back to the moment and further to slow that moment down, zoom in on it, replay it and locate it in relation to others in the hope that we may have something to say about it. Whether we do this or not is, as ever, down to the sensitivities of the researcher and participant.
Moving with: bio-sensing and performative technology
While I believe that go-along approaches have the potential to deepen our understandings of embodied mobile practice, there are, of course, limitations to the extent that they can help us elicit bodily data. Chief among these is the fact that despite being able to bring researcher and participant back to the ‘doing’ of mobility, in most cases, they give us only generalised sensory and affective accounts, telling us less about the separation of quality and intensity (feeling and affect), the levels of intensity experienced, and lacking specificity regarding the relationship between phenomena and feeling. Moreover, in maintaining the need for participants to speak about affect, we move away from a cultural geographic conceptualisation that views affect as ‘pre-personal’. Accordingly, I want to finish by discussing one possible avenue for developing go-along techniques alongside bio-sensing.
One of the contentions that Idhe makes is that a post-phenomenological project seeks to overcome the limitations of subjectivism associated with classical phenomenology. Idhe argues that various technologies expand the means through which we experience the world: ‘technologies as material cultures within a lifeworld’.
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In Lifeworld Inc., Thrift argues that the ways in which we sense the world (e.g. by being differently mobile or connected) are changing to the extent that the conventional technology of writing is no longer enough, both because the new technologies have conjured up a technological unconscious in which writing is only one, and not necessarily the primary, means of description, and because new kinds of ‘writing’ are coming into existence which explicitate’ in different ways, thus allowing other forms of description to take on life.
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Thrift argues that new technologies while changing our orientation to and experience of the world also hold the possibility to study these changes by tracing and re-working them in ways that allow richness and access not possible with writing: Increasingly ‘. . . there is the ability to sense the small spaces of the body through a whole array of new scientific instruments [ . . . ]. Thus, what was formerly invisible or imperceptible becomes constituted as visible and perceptible through a new structure of attention . . . ’.
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From a methodological viewpoint beyond that of the freeze-frame of video, bio-sensing technology offers us the opportunity to dissect and interrogate our experience of the world in new ways. Crucially, bio-sensing technologies (such as global positioning system (GPS)-enabled EEG sensors and GSR sensors) represent bodily data in a quantitative form that attempts to avoid the subjectivism of approaches which seek to interpret bodily experience through verbal and visual recollections. Of course, the data derived are still a partial representation of reality derived from hardware and software that are anything but value-free and remain subject to interpretation. I would, therefore, be very sceptical about the idea that they are ‘objective’ measures. Yet that is not to say there is no value in experimenting with new ways to gain understandings of previously inaccessible phenomena or indeed representing these in ways that may be persuasive to previously sceptical audiences.
To-date, bio-sensing has been most utilised in the fields of health, psychology and security, much of it in the commercial sector. Work in environmental psychology has for some time attempted to ‘measure’ affective and emotional response to environments though often with pen and paper methods 73 or measuring brain waves using EEG in laboratory settings. More recently, however, technological advances have led to some researchers trialling wearable EEG to gauge the affective responses of people on the move. In geographic enquiry, particularly those areas that intersect with health and urban design, researchers (myself included) are becoming interested in what mobile bio-sensing might offer in terms of assessing affective responses to moving through environments. Currently, however, the use of bio-sensing in geographic enquiry remains extremely limited.
Of the very few geographically oriented bio-sensing studies reported, the environmental psychology of Aspinall et al. deserves mention. 74 Using a low-cost commercially available mobile EEG, Aspinall et al. conducted a study with a small number of participants walking around the city of Edinburgh (United Kingdom) to measure their affective response to different environments. The sensor was used to gather data from the brain on how focused or relaxed participants were when encountering different situations. This was combined with GPS data to give accurate locational data. 75 As with all such sensors, its ability to distinguish between the quality of affect and feeling is limited; its strength lies with its ability to measure intensity of feeling (affect) at a pre-conscious level.
Using the device, Aspinall et al. were able to demonstrate the very different levels of affective intensity experienced moment by moment between and within urban and green spaces. Aspinall et al.’s research is illustrative of attempts to ‘let bodies speak for themselves’ because it forgoes the need for bodily sensations to be thought or spoken in order to be represented. However, the resulting graphic representations of the affective data are somewhat disappointing with very little indication of what the affective response might be related to; whether stimuli are internal or external, and certainly not which qualitative feelings intensities are related to. Left to speak for itself the EEG data in Aspinall et al.’s study provides a rather thin description and remains too abstract. Despite this, I would argue that Aspinall et al.’s study begins to illuminate one key way in which bio-sensing may be able to fortify go-along approaches by representing and geo-locating down to the second, pre-conscious intensities that have arisen through moving encounters with other materialities.
Pre-dating Aspinall et al., the artist Christian Nold employed an initially similar process of bio-sensing using a GSR sensor worn on the finger. This measured changes in sweat level to give an indicator of intensity of feeling and was linked with a GPS device to give locational data. Nold gave this device to walkers and was able to produce maps which illustrated their intensity of feeling on a given route. However, not satisfied with letting such data speak for itself, Nold used the resulting bio-maps as a performative technology to elicit rich emotional and affective narratives from his participants: I was struck by their detailed and personal interpretations of their bio-data. Often we would sit next to each other and look at their track together. While I would see just a fairly random spiky trail, they saw an intimate document of their journey, and recounted events which encompassed the full breadth of life: precarious traffic crossings, encounters with friends, meeting people they fancied, or the nervousness of walking past the house of an ex-partner. Sometimes people who walked along the same path would have spikes at different points, with one commenting on the smells of rotting ships, while another being distracted by the CCTV cameras. People were using the Emotion Map as an embodied memory-trigger for recounting events that were personally significant for them.
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One possibility I put forward in this article is that when used in conjunction with go-alongs and interviews, bio-sensing can act as a performative technology, in particular assisting recollection and the study of quiescence in everyday mobility by offering up bodily traces to be reflected upon. The central reason I believe these two methods may complement each other is that MVE can provide insight into the quality of affect whilst bio-sensing can provide data on intensity/quantity. As Nold has argued, bio Mapping functions as a total inversion of the lie-detector, which supposes that the body tells the truth, while we lie with our spoken words. With Bio Mapping, people’s interpretation and public discussion of their own data becomes the true and meaningful record of their experience. Talking about their body data in this way, they are generating a new type of knowledge combining ‘objective’ biometric data and geographical position, with the ‘subjective story’ as a new kind of psychogeography.
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Thus we gain inisght not only into the ‘what’ of affect at the individual level, but also ‘how’ it arises in relation to broader encounters. However, as Nold has commented, hovering over the idea of being able to ‘know’ what people think and feel are issues of bio-mapping and social control tracing a lineage back to 19th-century anthropometry. More recently, we have, as the Raqs Media Collective have pointed out, acquiesced to the banal use of bio-metric technologies at our various borders in the name of security: in this reading, mapping the body is ‘the first step in its governance, and in the subjugation of its boundaries to regulation and control’.
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Certainly, according to Thrift, many of the new vocabularies and ways of knowing being produced through bio-sensing technology: . . . are caught up with new expressions of power, the aim of which is to reterritorialise the world through the deployment of resources which, rather like the apple in the fairy tale, have the ability to poison how we live.
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I am – as one should always be – duly sceptical of technologies and their apparently value-free appearance. However, at the same time, I find myself asking whether such technologies cannot be recuperated for a more civic project such as how to design urban environments that emphasise positive affect rather than increased ‘efficiency’? Thrift says as much when he states that ‘Lifeworld Inc needs to be reworked so that its excesses can be halted and its undoubted treasures can be brought to the fore’. 80 Accordingly, I believe we owe it to ourselves to experiment with, and as Lorimer puts it, mobilise particular ‘logics of affect’ as the basis for a ‘positive micro-politics’. 81
Confluences
So where does this leave us? Well, as the sub-heading suggests, I am wary of drawing strong conclusions from an account that owes as much to desk-bound theorising as it does to field-based empiricism. Rather, what I want to do in these final few paragraphs is to consolidate what I see as the primary possibilities and pitfalls that enquiry utilising go-alongs and bio-sensing may bring to the study of embodied mobility.
For me, the primary potential ‘gain’ in employing such techniques is that of shifting stubborn ontologies. As Relph stated some 40 years ago, science in its distancing from the lifeworld has gradually reconstituted the lifeworld as a set of idealised scientific images where the ‘ . . . subjective, transient and trivial’ are marginalised. 82 In previous geographical readings, embodied experience in both phenomenological and post-phenomenological senses has been marginalised by, on one hand, a positivistic stance that has seen ‘non-rational’ and fleeting experience as superfluous to an ontology of causality and explanation made up of ‘facts’ of nature and, on the other, an interpretivist stance evident in cultural geographic enquiry that has largely concerned itself with the representation and symbolism of movement.
For me, one of the appeals to combining go-alongs and bio-sensing is the idea that we do not let bodies speak for themselves, rather we foreground relational experiences in new ways so that they can be reflected upon and ultimately represented and acted upon. In doing so, we might create representations that will engage and excite audiences hitherto unmoved by, on one hand, lengthy and often verbose written treatise on affect and movement or, on the other, reductive understandings of the ‘rational’ basis for movement. For example, I would argue that the use of audio-visual data as a way of representing research findings to public and policy-makers alike may have much to offer if we are serious about creating truly public geographies. Likewise, the use of bio-sensing allied to geographic information systems (GIS) may help to engage audiences such as planners and engineers who often favour quantitative and cartographic data.
It is also clear, however, that go-alongs and bio-sensing are no less performative of realities than other ‘scientific’ methods. Certainly, what comes to be known as ‘rational’ has largely been produced through techno-science, and there is the very real danger that using bio-sensing in this way may do exactly the same for affect as Vergunst has cautioned: ‘turning too readily to high technology has the danger that we actually distance ourselves from the experience of movement, in the very act of trying to get closer to it’. 83 Despite this danger, my hope is that when used sensitively we might ‘rework’ these technologies to perform different realities and reshape ontologies in ways which might favour more pro-social and humanistic outcomes.
Ultimately, the methods that we adopt and adapt are a question of what kinds of abstraction we are aiming to produce, for whom, and the period of time we are studying. It is certainly clear that one researcher’s ‘loss’ will be another’s ‘gain’ because they will be asking different questions for different audiences. We should not lose sight of this in attempting to present some kind of new methodological orthodoxy; rather, we should as always think carefully about our research questions and how we mobilise method to apprehend traces of movement in any quest to provide convincing and relevant interpretations.
Whatever our mode of enquiry from archive to go-along, mobilising our methods so that we can move with our participants physically, virtually or emotionally is at its heart a call to be transformed by our research; to get involved, to feel and care and be moved by what we are studying in the hope that our abstractions will be ‘less’ abstract; it is the hope that by engaging with movement, we will not forget to foreground the emergent and contingent nature of our relationship with space and place; that we will be able to place the senses of touch, smell, kinaesthesia on the same footing as the visual and audible; and that we will not over-animate our subjects but instead focus on moments of movement and stillness to understand the ways in which mobile practice (re)produces culture. In short, there is no magic bullet; mobilising method is more about a sensitivity to following traces and connections across space and time than it is about a particular mode of engagement. To apprehend such traces and avoid Lorimer’s ‘dead geographies’ 84 requires us to explore the contrast and dynamism of the lifeworld in detail and to look across as well as within practices and representations of mobility.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dydia DeLyser, Wendy S. Shaw and Mike Crang for inviting my submission to this collection and their endless patience in the face of my inability to hit a deadline. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments have helped to sharpen significantly the theoretical underpinnings and narrative of this article. As ever, any errors or misinterpretations are my own.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.