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:

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

Relaunch of the SFB graphic design and presentation of the new PR guidelines and formats

organised by the Ö project

In this seminar-style workshop, communication and technology expert Dr. Heather Suzanne Woods invites conversation and collaboration around scholarly and personal investigation of data-sensing domestic environments (sometimes known as smart homes.) Using the introduction and a case study from her recent book Threshold: How Smart Homes Change Us Inside and Out, Woods will guide participants through a discussion on the challenges and benefits of investigating the intersections of digitality, space, and culture, with a particular focus on digital domestic spaces (smart homes). Participants will be invited to imagine how researchers can contribute to finding/building a “smart homeplace,” which Woods playfully poses as the alternative to corporatized, technoliberal smart homes that privilege the pleasure of few digital subjects over the collective wellbeing of the majority.

In this lecture, Dr. Heather Suzanne Woods examines the far-reaching consequences of proliferating domestic data-sensing environments—smart homes—in the United States of America. Drawing on findings from her recent book Threshold: How Smart Homes Change Us Inside and Out, Woods argues that smart homes (literally and figuratively) architect a future in which every moment of every day is mediated by surveillant technologies. Highlighting her extensive fieldwork at smart homes throughout the USA, Woods demonstrates that these data environments (and connected technologies more broadly) are now so ubiquitous that it is difficult to “be outside” of them. Although her book focuses on the domestic sphere, for Woods smart homes are only one point of arrival in the broader context of a new social, political and economic condition called “living in digitality.” Living in digitality names the technoliberal condition in which technology becomes environmental, expansive, and omnipresent. Troubling late-capitalist and neoliberal narratives of user choice and agency, Woods argues that individual agents need not “opt-in” to smart technologies to be affected by them. Partnering with the collective intelligence of the audience, Woods suggests forms of collective action to resist living in digitality—reformatting our technological future for a common good.

The conference “Machine – Body – Space. The Accomplishment and Entanglement of Human and Nun-Human Sensing” will explore the various relationships between machinic and human methods of sensing and sense-making in their practical environments. Digital and networked technologies are increasingly permeating everyday life and practices. This not only applies to forms of communication, navigating and traveling (e.g. on a bicycle in the city or at border control), but increasingly involves bodily and environmental sensor technologies also within people’s living environments. Whether its managing one’s blood sugar, cooking in the kitchen, watching television in the living room, or regulating the solar panels on the roof: sensor-based, domestic technologies are increasingly brought onto the market and get integrated into almost all areas of life – e.g. new generations of voice assistants, which now also capture visual and tactile signals. „Sensing machines“ (Salter 2022) pervade various environments, equipped with an array of sensors that detect diverse physical or chemical attributes. These sensors register and capture attributes like brightness, motion, touch, temperature, and humidity from their surroundings. Thereby, they capture the movements of humans and pets, their habits, information about architecture, furnishings, or consistency of certain materials (e.g. in the kitchen). They enable new kinds of everyday practices and sensory experiences – or transform familiar ones (e.g. cooking and tasting food) – and can play an ambiguous role also in the context of physical dis/abilites and assistance (Meyer/Asbrock 2018).

Sensory technologies not only potentially empower bodies, but also challenge them with new vulnerabilities, inequalities, and frictions. The entanglement of human and machinic sensing appears to be increasing, which reflects a broader trend of intertwining between humans and machines, e. g. in recent developments of communicative AI. Machines are capable of mimicking human behaviors, while in postmodern approaches such as Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1991) humans are often reconceptualized within mechanistic frameworks. Various perspectives on social theory, such as the concept of “human-machine reconfiguration” (Suchman 2007) have highlighted these developments. Approaches range from feminist critique (Haraway 1991) via Actor-Network-Theory and the idea of nonhuman actors (Latour 2007) up to posthumanist perspectives (Barad 2003) and psychological findings about humans who partly conceptualize themselves as computers (Turkle 1995, 30–31). These approaches stand in opposition to essentialist perspectives, which distinguish sharply between humans and machines as an ontological boundary. However, recent sociotechnical inquiry highlights “the simultaneity with which humans and machines are both separated and interconnected” (Lipp/Dickel 2022, 15). Expanded understandings of “interfacing” (Lipp/Dickel 2022) and of “human sense-making practices” (Eisenmann et al. 2023) offer paths for re-examining familiar boundary-work and exploring new connections between humans and machines.

To facilitate such a conceptualization a certain set of theoretical assumptions seems valuable: The activation and processing of senses and sensory systems can be conceptualized as practical “doings”, with which participants indicate to each other in practices whether and ‘what’ they perceive. Accentuated by praxeological perspectives (e.g. Hirschauer 2016), material objects, including machines, can engage in sensory practices. They contribute to sensory processes and exhibit specific machinic states (e.g. by emitting audiovisual cues), thereby actively participating in the practical execution of sensing. A praxeology of perception, grounded in ethnomethodology, hones in on the embodied and interactional dimensions of sensing (Coulter & Parsons 1991; Lynch & Eisenmann 2022, Mondada 2021), to illuminate the characteristics, achievement and display of sensing-and-sensory-practices. In this vein, figurations and conceptualizations of body and space come into play: Linguistic research in multimodality has intensively discussed this relationship (e. g. Streeck/Goodwin 2011) and suggested to conceptualize also space as an “interactive achievement” (Hausendorf 2013).

The conference encourages  investigations into the social accomplishment of perception and sensing against the backdrop of sensor technologies. Contributions could focus on the co-constitution of perception in everyday situations, but also in situations of testing, research and self-examination of perception. We seek to explore (among others) the following questions:

• How are machines, bodies and spaces reconfigured in the context of sensory technologies?
• In what ways do recent developments in sensory technologies challenge traditional ontological distinctions between humans and machines
• How can we conceptualize and discuss dis/continuities, seams and ruptures between bodies and machines in the context of empowering but also irritating embodiment of sensory media – also against the backdrop of normative body concepts, which are incorporated in machines
• What are differences, interrelationships and preconditions of machinic sensors and synaesthetic sensory practices? How can we illuminate and describe them?
• In what ways are machine and human methods for interfacing realized in situ? How are they dependent on the practical accomplishment of perception and sensing in interaction and vice versa?
• How can we discuss the relationship between machines, bodies and spaces against the backdrop of different concepts of sensing and multisensoriality?

We are looking forward to discussing theoretical questions, e. g. on interface/interfacing, multimodality and multisensoriality, as well as methodological approaches, empirical findings and project presentations.

The workshop is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) – Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” – Project-ID 262513311.

For questions, further information and participation requests, please reach out to Dr. Clemens Eisenmann or Tim Moritz Hector.

All information and the registration form for the 2024 annual conference of the CRC 1187 “Scaling Sensing – Sensing Publics: Landscapes, and Borders, Homes and Bodies” can be found ➞here.

About the conference

The Collaborative Research Center “Media of Co-operation” first annual conference of its third and final funding phase, explores the interplay between sensing and the public. Through the theme “Scaling Sensing – Sensing Publics. Landscapes, and Borders, Homes and Bodies” the conference examines the mutually constitutive dynamics of sensing practices and the publics they shape and are shaped by, through multi-perspective, interdisciplinary approaches to sensing practices in graduated, fragmented, and heterogenous public spheres. How are sensors and sensing practices shaped within different public realms? 

The pervasive integration of sensor technologies is fundamentally changing the way we perceive, sense, and produce knowledge. Technological sensors are capable of making their captured data visible and credible in ways human and environmental sensors cannot: they track movement, measure health data, and analyze built and grown environments. Thereby, they influence diverse settings, ranging from landscapes to cities, to homes and bodies. They both enhance and obscure bodily sensorial practices and intervene in their publicity and intersubjectivity. While sensor media might offer solutions to social, political, technological, medical, and environmental challenges, they also raise ethical and political concerns, such as privacy erosion, disconnection between sensory data and sensory experiences, controversial forms of surveillance, and the socio-technical diffusion of prejudices and various forms of bias. Thus, sensor data, their collection, analysis, and integration with other data formats, and within various social practices, groups of people, and institutions are constitutive not only of sensing but also of publicity and publicness. This conference aims to refine our understanding of the relationship between sensing and publics by examining collaboratively constituted sensors, media, and sensations across different research fields. Contributions present case studies from diverse disciplines and foreground practice in their theoretical stance, addressing the interplay between sensing and publics across four key domains:

• Landscapes. Use of sensors in environmental settings, such as in cities, forests, waters, agricultural terrains, or resource management;
• Borders. Sensing practices and control at physical and digital borders or within communities, such as in settings of migration, security, and bureaucratic control;
• Homes. Sensor applications in domestic spaces, such as smart home technologies, security, care, and design;
• Bodies. Situated embodied sensing in social interaction, and the (dis)connections with wearable sensors, biometric identification, quantified and embodied self in social, religious, and health settings.

These four key domains represent different scales of publicness involved in sensing, but also a range of different sociopolitical and environmental contexts in which various forms of socio-technical sensing occur, distributed among multiple actors, including humans, machines, and the environment. 

To enhance interdisciplinary dialogue and debate, all contributions should engage with the broader issues of sensing and publicity that guide this conference and address the following questions:

• How are sensing and sensing practices shaped within different public realms? 
• Who and what is being sensed, by whom, and for what practical purpose? 
• Which relationships are established between sensing, sensors, the sensed, and materiality/the environment? 
• What happens to sensory data, how are they used and how might they be misused?
• What are the ethical and political implications of distributed sensing? What happens to the intersubjectivity of sensing in embodied practices and technologically augmented practices?
• What are the individual, social, ethical, political, and environmental consequences of interacting with sensing technologies?

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo.