Principal Investigators:

Dr. Christian Erbacher

Dr. Andrea Ploder

Prof. Dr. Tristan Thielmann
(Former Principal Investigator)

Dr. Jason Turowetz

„The project investigates the cooperative accomplishment, accountability, and socio-technical mediatization of multisensorial practices. It extends digital praxeology by showing in detail, how embodied and intercorporeal practices of cooperation are fundamental for the study of sensoriality and mediality.“

Executive Summary

As explored in detail in the past two project phases of P01, Harold Garfinkel has worked continuously since the 1950s and 1960s to elaborate the implicit, permanently fragile mediatic dimensions of the routine production of social order. He realized this methodologically, among other things, by conducing a series of practical experiments with students using induced sensory, cognitive, intersubjective, and normative breaches. With an orientation towards Wittgenstein, Gurwitsch, and Merleau-Ponty, Garfinkel showed how supposedly intrapsychic processes like understanding, interpretation, and even perception and sensation, are 1) interactional fabrications, 2) socio-technically conditioned, and 3) public. Even sensory and perceptual practices are therefore genuinely social phenomena.

Against the background of this preliminary work, subproject P01 will probe more deeply into its praxeological line of research, but now by directing both a theoretical and an empirical focus on the multisensory practices of embodied cooperation. In addition to P01’s research findings from the first two phases of the project, this focus thus also draws on empirical research conducted by the later joining subproject leaders on intercorporality (Meyer et al. 2017a, b) and multisensory interaction (Mondada 2021). For the CRC as a whole, the planned findings will, on the one hand, provide an empirically saturated theoretical starting point for a better understanding of digital media practices that systematically underlie embodied sensory practices, as well as of developments in the fields of AI and robotics in which these are either emulated or simulated interactionally. On the other hand, they will reveal socio-practical and socio-technical implications regarding the inclusive accessibility of digital infrastructures.

The research design of the third phase therefore consists of a complementary series of studies that consider the relevance of vision and blindness in interaction in the fabrication, making public, and socio-technical mediatization of perceptions: (1) The hybrid study of “tutorial problems” (Garfinkel 2002, 2022) renders the embodied, mediatic, and socio-technical conditions of perception in everyday life and science explicit. (2) Ethnomethodological ethnography is conducted to explore multisensory cooperative practices in professional physical therapy. (3) Ethnographic video analysis of cooperative multisensory practices is performed to analyze object-based multisensory cooperative perceptual practices in various “tasting sessions” (Mondada 2021). The project thereby combines the further reconstruction of the development of ethnomethodological theory. To do this, it will delve further into the Harold Garfinkel Archive and the extensive material on the thematization of perceptual practices. Moreover, it will engage in two complementary empirical analyses of the role of multisensoriality in their situational variations of mediatic and semiotic conditions. It will continue the project of intermeshing media and social theory of digital praxeology, which systematically demonstrates the extent to which embodied and intercorporeal practices of cooperation are fundamental to the field of sensoriality.