Body-based method in ethnographic interviews

When I first consciously entered the field by joining the actions of Ende Gelände in August 2017, I was not guided by any clear academic elaboration on how to conduct embodied research.

However, I was guided by choreographic thinking and various somatic movement techniques that I had been practicing in the last years. When beginning to conduct the interviews, it was clear from the start that I did not only want to speak with the research participants; I wanted to find a path to their embodied experience of the resistance through methods that were informed by corporeality. Later, I have come to learn how methods are political and performative: They can work as acts and devices performing or disrupting knowledge systems or creating new political visions (Aradau & Huysmans 2014, 598, 612−613). I hope to be able to do some of that with the embodied inquiry of this thesis.

Stelter (2010, 860−864) has developed a method called “body-anchored qualitative research interviewing” to better involve the research participant holistically in the interview situation by integrating their emotions, thoughts and felt senses (see also Sparkes & Smith 2012). Core elements of this method are 1) situatedness, 2) paying attention to the lived experience of the research participant, and 3) developing narrative based on the embodied elements of the

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interview in dialogue with the research participant (Stelter 2010, 859). Without knowing of Stelter’s approach, I had integrated, in an applied way, the aforementioned elements to the body-based tasks of the multisensory interviews guided by my experience in somatic practices and dance education.

My supervisor had suggested to start the interviews with a drawing task in order to find a creative way to enter the interview that would be comfortable for most of the people. At that moment, I was not quite sure what the connection between visual expression and embodiment was. However, later on, I have learned how multimodal approaches are supportive of capturing the different senses of the researched topic (Merchant 2011, 68; Sparkes & Smith 2012, 178).

Visual methods can help the interviewed person to navigate between the different sensuous experiences they are going through in the interview. In other words, visual clues can serve as a bridge to other senses (Pink 2012, 13). They also have the power to evoke embodied memories and “provoke acts even when the ‘real-time’ and tangible instigators of these are absent”

(Merchant 2011, 68−69).

In concrete terms, I began nearly all the interviews by asking the activists to visualise their place in the climate movement on paper. Many of them drew bodies in movement and in different constellations, most of the time in groups, or in relation to the lignite mine infrastructure (see Attachments 17.−27.). My supervisor had been right: I observed that the drawing task seemingly relaxed the research participants and gave them an accessible entrance to the interview situation (cf. Vastapuu 2018). It also prepared them to think of their resistance experience in the terms of the bodies. Below I present excerpts of these drawings (see Figures 1.−3.).

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Figure 1. Wilma’s drawing on her role and place in the climate movement.

Figure 2. Xavier’s drawing on his role and place in the climate movement.

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Figure 3. Indira’s drawing on her place and role in the climate movement.

During the research process, I have been continuously forced to ask myself what is the added value of applying body-based methods in ethnographic fieldwork. What can this approach attain that other means of knowledge production cannot (cf. Malkki 2007, 166)? Midst of this reflection on methods, Ann Cooper Albright’s thoughts offered me an important perspective:

[B]odies are the sites in which politics and somatics intersect, the locus of a meeting between biology and sociology. I believe we need the attention to both realities in order to thrive individually and as a society. (Cooper Albright 2018, 6.)

Following Cooper Albright, we need to be able to integrate the embodied and the analytical in order to grasp the world we are living in. Studying Stelter’s (2010) method more in depth has given me analytical tools to understand the added value of embodied approaches in ethnography. Being interested in the protesting bodies, I wanted to inquire direct corporeal responses of the research participants in the interview situation related to 1) the images and embodied connotations that the activist had on climate turmoil, and 2) the lived experience of the activist on the political disobedience they had gone through in Ende Gelände.

The way how I facilitated the body-based task for the research participants got refined through the course of the interviews as I gained subtle understanding on how the activists’ bodies

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responded to the verbal instruction that I proposed. Finally, it became important to start this phase with a small warm-up, shaking, walking or stretching to wake-up the bodily awareness after a longer discussion on the activist’s experience in Ende Gelände (see Stelter 2010, 863−864). Integrating movement and corporeal awareness to the interview situation enabled the emergence of embodied knowledge that might be difficult to attain in traditional sit-down interviews (see Sparkes & Smiths 2012, 173). Walking interviews are another example of participant driven interview situations that integrate movement and talking. Moreover, they are “helping to reduce the power imbalance and encouraging spontaneous conversation because talking becomes easier with walking.” (Kinney 2016, 1−2.)

After the short tuning-in of the body, I asked the research participant to close their eyes and relate to the discussion we had had by choosing an image of climate turmoil that was present for them at that moment. Then, I would ask the activist to feel what this image did in their body, and to invite them follow the impulses that the emerging bodily sensations suggested. I stressed that there was no need to act out something; that it was important to stay true with the present impulse; and that small and minimal impulses were also just fine. Following these invitations, I witnessed what was happening (see Lask & Norlon 2003, 78). When I could see that the research participant had developed the bodily and that the movement started slowly fading, I proposed that the they could find a closure for this small dance. This section was followed by the second one where I used similar kind of descriptive questioning (Stelter 2010, 864) but replaced the notion of climate change with that of the activist’s experience of the resistance of Ende Gelände. I invited the research participant to feel what happened in their body at that precise moment. I often also asked whether something felt different and whether something in the body parts, alignment or weight had changed.

In this second part as well, I let the participant do their movement research with their own tempo, taking time. When it seemed that the movement impulses were fading out, I encouraged the research participant to find an ending at their own pace. After that, we made a closing talk where we reflected together on what had just happened. The research participant shared on what they had experienced, and I shared the things and possible changes in the body I had witnessed. In the first two interviews I had not understood to ask the research participants to engage in a more in-depth reflection after the movement journey. In the following interviews, however, I then corrected this and made the closing of the body-based task intentionally a space where new things, questions and reflection could arise. This proved to be very important, as the reflection after the body-based task opened up a space for the research participants to