Mobile Methods

Research often gives in to the temptation to fix, isolate, hold down and dissect its phenomena. This seems necessary to be able to study them. However, this approach can blind us to the lively, performative, mobile nature of phenomena. Bergson’s call to recognise that ‘reality is movement’ and for us scientists to ‘install ourselves within it’ (see Mobilities reading group). Reality isn’t just movement in the sense of being on the move, but also in blocked and arrested movement, border and boundary making, stillness. Mobile methods address some problems and opportunities of doing research which respond to the challenges of installing oneself within movement in this sense. Mobile methods seek to afford this by trying to move with, and to be moved by, the fleeting, distributed, multiple, non-causal, sensory, emotional and kinaesthetic.

An inevitable corollary of this methodology is an orientation towards research co-creation, inventive methods, artistic methods, experimentation and experimentality.