Assembling the Affective Field

Abstract

This article recounts what happens when an increasingly commonplace technology such as the smartphone is mobilized in ethnographic fieldwork practice, investigating the particular research-related affects and intimacies that are produced by/in this sociotechnical assemblage. I start with a brief account of my research project, after which I discuss the ways in which my smartphone has informed and modulated the different components of my fieldwork, conceived as a heterogeneous practice of logistical and affective labor. In the last two sections, I reflect on the methodological consequences of incorporating a smartphone into ethnographic research and address the question of how this practice prompts a reconsideration of the relation between knowledge production, research intimacies, and mobile technology.

Keywords

ethnography methodology affect intimacy smartphone technology

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