The Birkbeck Institute for Social Research | Events | Doing Critical Research Seminar Series 2011/12
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Doing Critical Social Research Seminar Series

Professor Sarah Pink
Tuesday 1st November  12.30 - 2pm  Room 320 Birkbeck Main Building
This presentation explores how theories of place, a sensory ethnography methodology and video practice can be brought together to create routes to knowledge in interdisciplinary research. I will outline how, theories of place and place-making might inform research practices that explore how place is onstituted and experienced. Focusing on themes of movement and sensory experience I discuss how video and photographic media might be engaged as routes to learning about and understanding the practices through which people create elements of their everyday environments, how they experience these. My interest is in both the implications this kind of knowledge might have for applied research and in how it can contribute to developments in theoretical scholarship.In doing so I will reflect on a range of examples from current interdisciplinary research projects, including work intended to inform the production and evaluation of digital interventions for domestic energy consumption reduction, and a project focusing on the Slow City movement.

Suggested reading:

1. Walking with Video in the journal Visual Studies

2. Doing Sensory Ethnography by Sarah Pink - Chapter 2 - PRINCIPLES FOR SENSORY ETHNOGRAPHY: perception, place, knowing, memory and   imagination


Professor Carey Jewett - Multimodal methods for researching digital data and environments

Wednesday 2nd May  12.30 - 2pm Room B03, 43 Gordon Sq

Many digital texts and environments employ a range of linguistic, visual, aural, spatial, and haptic (tactile) modes of representation and communication. Increasingly, in order to understand how people communicate and interact in digital environments researchers need to look beyond language, and towards the idea of communication as multimodal. Multimodal research builds on concepts from Social Semiotics, Linguistics more generally, Art History, and Sociology to analyse how people make meaning.  This talk will introduce multimodality and some of its key concepts. It will then explore how these can be applied to digital data and environments to research how technologies re-mediate interaction. It will focus on two interconnected areas of interest to multimodal communication  - space, place and time and embodiment. These are of particular interest to digital research as both are significantly reconfigured by the use of digital technologies and environments. This talk will examine multimodal concepts with attention to online social media, mobile and haptic technologies.