Sensory encounters and mobile technologies : mundane intimacies as a site for knowing

Sarah Pink, Jolynna Sinanan, Heather Horst, Larissa Hjorth

Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Esther and Patrick were respectively from two parts of the world very different from Sarah’s own place of origin. They had met in England before moving to Australia together in the 1980s. The three of them sat in the dining area in Esther and Patrick’s Australian middle class suburban home, talking about their biographies and experiences of mobile media. A British woman of a different generation who had moved to Melbourne only four years earlier, and who had some knowledge of Esther’s country of origin, Sarah looked around her for material cues, wondering how and where the connections and gaps in their understanding would lie. This encounter was the start of a three-year research project undertaken with colleagues in Melbourne, Tokyo and Beijing – Locating the Mobile – about mobile media use in intergenerational families. Several transnational families participated in the Melbourne-based part our project and it became apparent that for such families, mobile media and apps are integral to how living across generations and countries is navigated. With Esther and Patrick, and two other Melbourne based nuclear families they were related to, we learned how digital and mobile media had grown to be part of the complex sets of everyday mundane social and intimate relationships that held their families together. As the project unfolded, we realised that their and other participants’ uses of mobile media enabled senses of well-being, playfulness (see Pink et al., 2017) or concern as they lived their everyday lives together across the world. These feelings are at the core of the themes that sensory ethnography seeks to follow. Sensory ethnography is not simply a technique for understanding what people do and say, but for seeking to imagine how they may feel. In this chapter we argue for and outline a sensory approach to the encounters that occur in ethnographic research and dissemination. We focus on the mundane as a dynamic site, where things, feelings, and people are entangled in the ongoingness of everyday life, as it forever slips over into a not yet determined future.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFamily and Space: Rethinking Family Theory and Empirical Approaches
EditorsMaya Halatcheva-Trapp, Giulia Montanari, Tino Schlinzig
Place of PublicationU.K.
PublisherRoutledge
Pages99-108
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781351017954
ISBN (Print)9781138497757
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2019

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