Venue | Program | Contact

Sensing as a Cooperative Practice

University of Konstanz, Room C-202, September 09–10, 2024
(in cooperation with Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation”
and “The Binational Center of Qualitative Methods”)

Phenomenology has played a crucial role in the development of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EM/CA). When Garfinkel spoke of “misreading” phenomenological authors, such as Merleau-Ponty and Gurwitsch, he implied to transpose their findings into the vicissitudes of actual social practices and to read them as instructions for doing empirical research. Cooperative practices in and across social interaction are therefore at the center of our approach to “sensing bodies” in P-01’s research on the sociology of perception, synesthesia, (technical) mediation, and multi-sensoriality. In this sense, the workshop will cover and combine: a) discussions of our collaborative reading on phenomenology; b) Garfinkel’s “tutorial problems” (such as inverting lenses) from the archive; c) empirical data sessions on tasting and physical therapy; with d) an expert practitioners’ workshop on (self-)massage, TCM, and body therapy, who will guide the participants into practices of sensing bodies with the help of a wooden object (7-star). Food and tasting practices zero in on sensing objects, whilst physical therapy is predominantly concerned with sensing other bodies. However, practices of self-massage relate to sensing one’s own body mediated via a physical object. The workshop will thus chart a first path of connections between the three work-packages of P01: tutorial archive, physical therapy, and a variety of tasting situations. This also contributes to theory discussions on the mediation of cooperative sensing practices in the third funding phase of the CRC more broadly.

Reading list: