Introduction

In this introductory chapter, we first outline what we mean by ‘digital work’ and why this creates new methodological challenges. Here we specifically consider the difficulties of observing everyday work practices as they occur often invisibly in silent communion between workers and their devices, in new and various workspaces, across a widely distributed and shifting group of workers, and as they are shaped by the workings of hidden algorithms. Subsequently, we also consider a variety of critical research processes for understanding digital work including: accessing digital data; understanding how context shapes digital data; and the meshing of virtual and embodied research presence. We end the chapter by introducing the four sections of the book—screenwork, digital working practices, distributed work, and digital traces of work—each of which comprises four reflexive accounts of researchers’ experiences in developing methods that can capture digital aspects of work and organization.

Waste recyclers, embodied research and planning: evidence from Guangzhou, China

The continued flow of rural migrants into cities has created major challenges for planning and urban management in China. Despite the growth of research concerning the embodied dimension of rural migrants’ urban lives, the development of integrated embodied knowledge and its significance for planning and urban management is yet to be articulated. In connection with waste recyclers in Guangzhou, a conceptual framework involving the body of power, the experiencing body and the embodied encounter is established to integrate embodied knowledge. Reflection on the ways in which rural migrants struggle to live in cities and their agency and capability is imperative to inform socially sensitive planning in a diverse and heterogeneous metropolis.

Embodying Difference: Introducing ‘Contact Movement’ as an Ethnographic Method

This contribution to the special issue advances an ethnographic method which directs the critical project of re-imagining diversity towards studies of how difference emerges in fieldwork encounters. Drawing on my experiences of researching without eyesight, I urge students and teachers of anthropology to acknowledge the value of embodied research methods for examining social and corporeal differences in researcher-participant relationships. Firstly, I call attention to moments when embodied fieldwork may be resisted and how these are expressed as naturalised differences between researchers and participants. To deconstruct such naturalisations, I devise contact movement as a method which allows researchers to embody how these ethnographic tensions, or indeed differences, are negotiated between researchers and their participants. Ultimately, contact movement eagerly re-imagines diversity through a methodological rethink that permits ethnographers to embody and explore the collaborative production of difference in their intersubjective relationships, within the field and beyond.

From the eye-body to the embodied-eye. The use of images in performance-research strategies.

This article discusses the use of images in socio-anthropological research and their contribution to the development of performance-research methodological strategies. By bringing three research-creation collaborative experiences developed in different violent and/or traumatic socio-political contexts in Argentina (a video workshop conducted with indigenous toba-qom teachers, a video-dance in the ruins of Villa Epecuén and a performatic installation about the feminist movement NiUnaMenos) it reflects on different relationships between performance-camera-corporalities and explores the poetic-epistemological-political potential of the images to (re)present sensitive corporalities. In dialogue with other embodied research methods, the analysis suggests how the use of images in a cross-disciplinary approach can contribute to the development of participatory-collaborative strategies and enable a space for decolonizing our gaze(s) and micropolitical transformation.

Research Laboratories: embodied research methodology in perfoming arts

ABSTRACT Research Laboratories: embodied research methodology in performing arts The article discusses the concept of laboratory in performing arts by means of intersections between academic research and laboratory theatre. By using the term laboratory to describe bodily and scenic investigations that are conducted in the studio, a combination of artistic and academic activities are discussed in order to foster a methodology for embodied research in performing arts. To that end, we present examples of laboratory practice in researches based on theory and on Practice as Research. Finally, we indicate laboratory practice as a method that produces tacit-somatic knowledge and present a methodological proposal for laboratory practice in academic research.