Multidisciplinary work requires multidisciplinary methods. The concept of care is nuanced to begin with, but when pushed into an intersectional and culturally self-aware setting it becomes ever the more entangled. The chosen methods facilitate a critical examination into the processes and dynamics of care rather than question its ontology.
Autoethnography
In socially-oriented research, the lines between researcher and researched become increasingly blurry. As researchers we are inherently embedded into the research that we are conducting, and therefore have a varying level of influence over the information that we are studying. Thinking of ourselves as valuable channels of experience instead of denying the subjectivities we bring into the research process allows us to be more critical and self-critical. Autoethnography lays the groundwork for more research rather than present a quantifiable data set, for this reason this method has both advantages and weaknesses. As such, in the context of Culturing Care, autoethnography is always used as a supplementary method and never as the central source of data.
Sensory ethnography
Sensory ethnography is a method developed primarily by scholar Sarah Pink, who advocates for a more reflexive and self-aware approach to ethnography. Doing sensory ethnography disrupts traditional techniques of gathering knowledge and enables the researcher to rethink previously established paradigms. Thinking about ethnography as “already necessarily sensory” allows us to pay attention to the experiential and embodied [1]. By attuning to the senses, we can enrich our perception of the worlds around us.
Photography
Show, don’t tell. Photography is an accessible and intuitive way to disseminate visual information while still allowing people to insert their own interpretations onto the images. Photography serves both as a method of inquiry and as a vital part of the documentation process in Culturing Care.
Videography
Video offers an effective way of documenting the ephemeral and processual. The dynamic nature of film capture the in-between, the fleeting moments and the absences.
Participant observation
The ways in which we move in the world tells a story. By observing people interacting with their external world we can start to gain an understanding of their unique internal cosmos. Participant observation can be the passive scrutiny of others, however, it is often quite an active and hands-on method whereby researchers partake in the sensory world of their subjects. Culturing Care values the space of interaction that is created in these shared moments, which can lead to new sensibilities and deepen relations of empathy.
Interview
Interviews provide a conversational articulation of complex ideas. Though some interview techniques can be quite restricting, Culturing Care uses mostly unstructured interviews, which provide enough freedom for the interviewee to express their views in a safe space and add whatever they think is relevant to the conversation.
Foodmaking
French gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s declares, “tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of […person] you are,” and indeed, the foodways we choose to occupy are telling of more than just culinary preferences [2]. Food can hold up a mirror to our emotions, act as a marker or confirmation of socio-cultural or personal identity, and structure one’s experience of the world, among other things. Food is a relational object– it signifies. Understanding food as such reveals that it is almost never just about food: it is equally about the people, ingesting, manipulating and interacting with it. Using foodmaking as an engaged practice of discovery therefore provides space for reflection and (self) discovery, while also mediating the transfer of information through a hands-on activity.
References (In order of appearance)
Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography: an overview.” Historical social research/Historische sozialforschung (2011): 273-290.
[1] Pink, Sarah. Doing Sensory Ethnography, second edition. Sage Publications, 2015, 7.
[2] Brillat Savarin, Jean Anthelme. The physiology of taste: or meditations on transcendental gastronomy. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009, 14.
Culturing Care 