Feeling the Field: An Exploration of Multisensory Positionality in Visual Research on Migration

Researchers and participants enter the field with their feeling bodies, which both react to what they encounter and are, in turn, reacted to by those in the field. The meanings of these encounters are shaped cognitively and through knowledge acquired via sensory experiences. In mobility and migration research, fieldwork often intersects (trans)local places, practices, systems of meaning, and sensory scripts, amplifying the embodied experiences of both researchers and participants. While these bodily felt impressions influence how individuals act in the field and interpret data, they are rarely collected systematically. This paper addresses this by contributing to established debates in migration studies on the positionality of researchers and participants, offering a discussion of multisensory positionality when studying migrants through visual methodologies.
Multisensory positionality refers to a holistic, intersectional approach to the positionalities of both researchers and participants, acknowledging the body and senses as vital dimensions of positionality that actively shape the negotiation of meaning between people and spaces relevant to the research context. It is grounded in the concepts of intersectionality (Essed 1991) and positionality (Alcoff 1988), recognizing the cultural and structural situatedness of embodied sensory impressions and expressions. Aligned with the reflexive turn in migration studies (Amelina 2021), multisensory positionality extends discussions of intersectional positionality in migration research by emphasizing its embodied, sensory dimension
Keywords: positionality, multisensoriality, migration, visual methodologies, reflexivities

Catherine Earl (School of Communication and Design, RMIT Vietnam, Vietnam)

Sensing Class, Place and Kinship Relations: A Exploration in Experimental Ethnographic Poetry

This paper builds on my recent experiments in ethnographic writing that challenge conventional narrative-based academic publications derived from field research. I tell a multisensory story of the youngest son’s wedding over three days in three homes – Ho Chi Minh City, his father’s village, his bride’s father’s village – that are concurrently located in Vietnam and connected online to the US diaspora. Using my innovative ethnographic writing-poeticising method, I explore middle- class identity as multisensory expressions of place, kinship and social relations. As a practicing social anthropologist committed to interdisciplinarity, I interpret the category of field data to include sensory experiences, learned embodied practices, memories and emotions. The aim of my experimental storytelling is to move beyond the visual, auditory and linear as dominant modes for data collection and research dissemination by offering a more balanced or decentralized multisensorial engagement. My ethnographic texts offer the reader an entangled experience of their own and others’ sensations. The practical challenge I face in my writing-poeticising is conveying multisensoriality through scripting decodable words, symbols and marks on the page. The paper explores the process of developing my writing sensation style and locates this method as a practice of sensory studies scholarship.
Keywords: middle classes, place, kinship relations, multisensoriality, ethnographic writing method