Abstract
We present our first four heuristics for interviewing objects: gathering anecdotes, following the actors, listening for the invitational quality of things, and studying breakdowns, accidents, and anomalies. These heuristics focus on attuning the reader to the objects and things of practice, and on gathering the kinds of qualitative material needed for further posthuman reflection and analysis. Each heuristic begins with suggested object interview questions and is followed by an in-depth description of the heuristic’s theoretical underpinnings, practical applications, and examples.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Adams, C. (2010). Teachers building dwelling thinking with slideware. The Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, 10(2), 1–12. doi: 10.2989/IPJP.2010.10.1.3.1075
Adams, C. (2016). Programming the gesture of writing: On the algorithmic paratexts of the digital. Educational Theory, 66(4), 479–497. doi:10.1111/edth.12184
Adams, C. (2017). Technology’s hidden curriculum and the new digital pharmakon. In J. Jagodzinski (Ed.), The precarious future of education: Risk and uncertainty in ecology, curriculum, learning, and technology. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan. [forthcoming]
Adams, C., & Yin, Y. (2014). Undergraduate students’ experiences of time in a MOOC: A term of Dino 101. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA) (pp. 225–230). Lisbon, Portugal: International Association for the Development of the Information Society.
Banerjee, B., & Blaise, M. (2013). There’s something in the air: Becoming-with research practices. Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 240– 245. doi: 10.1177/1532708613487867
Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. doi:10.1086/345321
Benso, S. (2000). The face of things: A different side of ethics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Bruni, A. (2005). Shadowing software and clinical records: On the ethnography of nonhumans and heterogeneous contexts. Organization, 12(3), 357–378. doi:10.1177/1350508405051272
Crowther, S., Ironside, P., Spence, D., Smythe, L. (2016). Crafting stories in hermeneutic phenomenology research: A methodological device. Qualitative Health Research. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/1049732316656161
Decuypere, M., & Simons, M. (2016). What screens do: The role(s) of the screen in academic work. European Educational Research Journal, 15(1), 132–151. doi: 10.1177/1474904115610335
Fenwick, T. (2014a). Knowledge circulations in inter-para/professional practice: A sociomaterial inquiry. Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 66(3), 264–280. doi: 10.1080/13636820.2014.917695
Flusser, V. (1999). The shape of things: A philosophy of design. London: Reaktion.
Gadamer, H.G. (1976). Philosophical Hermeneutics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gibson, J.J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Gourlay, L., & Oliver, M. (2017). Students’ physical and digital sites of study: Making, marking and breaking boundaries. In L. Carvalho, P. Goodyear, M. de Laat (Eds.), Place-based spaces for networked learning (pp. 73–89). New York: Routledge.
Gunkel, D., & Taylor, P.A. (2014). Heidegger and the media. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (trans: Macquarrie, J., & Robinson, E.). New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, and thought (trans: Hofstadter, A.). New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, M. (2012). Bremen and Freiburg lectures: Insight into that which is and basic principles of thinking (trans: Mitchell, A.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hillman, J. (1982). Anima Mundi: The return of the soul to the world. Spring, 1982, 71–93.
Hirschauer, S. (2006). Putting things into words. Ethnographic description and the silence of the social. Human Studies, 29(4), 413–441. doi: 10.1007/s10746-007-9041-1
Ihde, D. (1979). Technics and praxis: A philosophy of technology. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Ihde, D. (1983). Existential technics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the lifeworld: From garden to earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ingold, T. (2012b). Toward an ecology of materials. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 427–442. doi: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920.
Introna, L. D. (2016). Ethico-onto-epistemology: some reflections on performative epistemic practices. Paper presented at 4s/EASST Conference Barcelona 2016.
Introna, L.D. (2009). Making sense of ICT, new media, and ethics. In C. Avgerou, R. Mansell, D. Quah, R. Silverstone, (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of information and communication technologies. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199548798.003.001
Knorr Cetina, K. (2001). Objectual practice. In T.R. Schatzki, K. Knorr Cetina, E. von Savigny (Eds.), The practice turn in contemporary theory (pp. 175–188). London: Routledge.
Latour, B. (1992). Where are the missing masses? A sociology of a few mundane artifacts. In W.E. Bijker, & J. Law (Eds.), Shaping technology/building society: Studies in sociotechnical change (pp. 225–258). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Latour, B. (1996). Aramis or the love of technology (trans: Porter, C.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Law, J. (2008). On sociology and STS. The Sociological Review 56(4), 623–649. doi:10.1111/j1467-954X.2009.01846.x
Law, J., & Singleton, V. (2012). ANT and politics. Working in and on the world. http://www.sv.uio.no/sai/english/research/projects/newcomers/publications/working-papers-web/ant-and-politics.pdf
McLuhan, M. (1964/2003). Understanding media: The extensions of man (critical edition), ed., W. T. Gordon. Corte Madera: Ginko Press.
McLuhan, M., & McLuhan, E. (1988). Laws of media: The new science. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
McLuhan, M., Hutchon, K., McLuhan, E. (1977). City as classroom: Understanding language and media. Agincourt, ON: Book Society of Canada.
McLuhan, M., Hutchon, K., McLuhan, E. (1978). Multi-media: The laws of the media. The English Journal, 67(8), 92–94.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible (trans: Lingis, A.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (trans: A. Landes, Donald). New York: Routledge.
Michael, M. (2000). Reconnecting culture, technology and nature: From society to heterogeneity. London: Routledge.
Michael, M. (2004). On making data social: Heterogeneity in sociological practice. Qualitative Research, 4(1), 5–23. doi: 10.1177/1468794104041105
Michael, M. (2012). Anecdote. In C. Lury, & N. Wakeford (Eds.), Inventive methods: The happening of the social (pp. 25–35). Abingdon, OX: Routledge.
Mitchell, A.J. (2015). The fourfold: Reading the late Heidegger. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Mol, A. (2010). Actor-network theory: Sensitive terms and enduring tensions. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie and Sozialpsychologie, 50(1), 253–269. http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.330874
Mulcahy, D. (2012). Thinking teacher professional learning performatively: A socio-material account, Journal of Education and Work, 25(1), 121–139. doi:10.1080/13639080.2012.644910
Mulcahy, M.D. (2013). Turning around the question of ‘transfer’ in education: Tracing the sociomaterial. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 45(12), 1276–1289. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2013.763592
Norman, D.A. (1988). The psychology of everyday things. New York: Basic Books.
Olsen, B. (2010). In defense of things: Archeology and the ontology of objects. Plymouth: Altamira Press.
Pickering, A. (2005). Asian eels and global warming: A posthumanist perspective on society and the environment. Ethics & the Environment, 10(2), 29–43.
Pickersgill, E. (2016). Removed. http://www.removed.social/
Richards, I.A. (1936). The philosophy of rhetoric. London: Oxford Press.
Röhl, T. (2015). Transsituating education: Educational artefacts in the classroom and beyond. In S. Bollig, M-S Honig, S. Neumann, C. Seele (Eds.), MultiPluriTrans in educational ethnography: Approaching the multimodality, plurality and translocality of educational realities (pp. 143–161). Beilefeld, Germany: Transcript.
Rosen, S.M. (2006). Topologies of the flesh: A multidimensional exploration of the lifeworld. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.
Scolles, J. (personal communication, 2016).
Thompson, T.L. (2010). Assembly required: Self-employed workers’ informal work-learning in online communities. PhD diss., University of Alberta.
Thompson, T.L. (2012a). I’m deleting as fast as I can: Negotiating learning practices in cyberspace. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 20(1), 91–110. doi: 10.1080/14681366.2012.649417
Van den Berg, J.H. (1972). A different existence. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press.
Van Lennep, D.J. (1987). The psychology of driving a car. In J.J. Kockelmans (Ed.), Phenomenological psychology: The Dutch school (pp. 217–227). Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Van Manen, M. (1989). By the light of anecdote. Phenomenology + Pedagogy, 7, 232–253.
Van Manen, M. (2014). Phenomenology of practice: Meaning-giving methods in phenomenological research and writing. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Van Manen, M.A. (2012). Looking into the neonatal isolette. Medical Humanities, 38(1), e4. doi:10.1136/medhum-2011-010061
Vannini, P. (2015). Non-representational ethnography: New ways of animating lifeworlds. Cultural Geographies, 22(2), 317–327. doi: 10.1177/1474474014555657
Von Uexküll, J. (2010 [1934/1940]). A foray into the worlds of animals and humans; with, A theory of meaning (trans: O’Neil, J.D.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Zukas, M., & Kilminster, S. (2014). The doctor and the blue form: Learning professional responsibility. In T. Fenwick, & M. Nerland (Eds.), Reconceptualising professional learning: Sociomaterial knowledges, practices and responsibilities (pp. 38–51). Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Adams, C., Thompson, T.L. (2016). Attending to Objects, Attuning to Things. In: Researching a Posthuman World. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57162-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57162-5_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57161-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57162-5
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)