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Abstract

Vibes are having a moment and academics seem increasingly serious about understanding whatever the vibe is. Many qualitative methodological approaches are already very vibey. This is especially true of those that engage with affects and atmospheres, social and sociotechnical imaginaries, and materialisms and the more-than-human. In this article, I reflect on these approaches and outline some vibes-based methods. I discuss how vibes-based methods help us consider and work with the generative ambiguities of social life.

Keywords

vibes affect atmosphere imaginaries more-than-human qualitative

Introduction

When I was fourteen, everyone started saying LOL out loud ironically, and now I am thirty-three and cannot shake it: I lol without irony. In many academic circles, ‘vibe’ seems to have had a similar recent trajectory. At nearly every academic discussion I have attended in recent years someone has summarised their interest as being the vibe of something (whichever event or phenomenon we are there to discuss). First, vibe came with a smirk and attracted the spattering of knowing, nerdy laughter you get at a scholarly event when someone appropriates contemporary teen lingo. Now, vibes have taken on a life of their own. If you have young people in your life, encounter youth culture via TikTok or Instagram Reels, or read about such things in places like The Guardian (Zhou, 2023), you will already know that vibes have been big lately. In putting together these reflections, I am conscious of likely being at the tail end of cultural relevance already; the Guardian reminds me with a yellow beacon that the above article ‘is more than 1 year old’. Nevertheless, I see some more enduring methodological substance in this trend. Atmospheres, moods, even affects and milieux are all very vibey. Studying these calls for some vibes-based methods.

Vibe does not have an easy synomic equivalent. Feel comes close; when a researcher explains they are interested in the vibe of X, they could say the feel of X. But this draws an association with embodiment and affect theory which may be limiting even if we clearly frame (via differentiation or not) emotion, affect and sensory experience. The feel of something is not exactly the same as how something (especially, how someone) feels. Space, place, stuff and things matter to the vibe, so following all my favourite sociologists and human geographers I draw affect and materiality together here to consider vibes as emplaced sociocultural relations. How vibes are mediated is significant, and media and communications approaches to understanding participation, representation and circulation are highly relevant. Discourses, imaginaries and performativity also matter; drawing on approaches from STS we may consider how vibes and/as/in these dimensions are made to matter. Anthropologists, cultural studies scholars and ethnographers of all ilk have a clear tradition of researching vibes too and variously attend to these dimensions as culture. Sketching some vibes-based methods here, I draw from across these scholarly landscapes and from conceptual approaches seeing multidisciplinary interest to speak to social research in its broadest form.

In this article, I consider some interesting ways that qualitative researchers have worked to observe, analyse, reflect and/or generate a vibe (either explicitly or in my own reading), from how they have designed a research encounter to what they actually do with participants to how they record and present their data. Focusing on examples from recent research projects that engage with concepts of affect, atmospheres, imaginaries and/or new materialisms, I contemplate what these examples offer in terms of thinking about vibes and designing/doing vibes-based methods. While vibes are having a major cultural moment, qualitative researchers have arguably always been interested in vibes. Acknowledging this, in what follows I traverse salient features within newer methodological and conceptual currents and their affinities with the ways that vibes are currently in vogue. These affinities offer a window for reflecting on contemporary research approaches and the social world. Below, I reflect on what this vibey orientation within contemporary research suggests researchers are noticing and trying to grapple with in social life today – namely, a generative ambiguity. I discuss how vibes-based methods may enhance how we understand, approach and work productively with ambiguity in qualitative research. First, I reflect briefly on the rise of vibes.

Big vibe culture

One major cultural space where vibes have been examined and advanced is The New Yorker.¹ The magazine has published 973 articles using the term vibe. More than two-thirds of these have been published since 2017, with 100 appearing in the past 12 months alone. From what I can discern in the magazine's online archive, the history starts with a short 1971 piece within The Talk of the Town pages titled, simply, ‘Vibes’ (Hertzberg, 1971). In this, the author recounts their ‘interesting, if bewildering’ day spent with two communes in New York. Members from the first had journeyed from Massachusetts to New York City to help promote their rock group – ‘the only commune we know of that has a press kit’ – whose lead singer was also the leader of the commune, a 20-year-old man named Michael Metelica. The second commune, a local NY branch of a different MA ‘Community’ headed by the folk singer Mel Lyman, declared war on the first. The author ended their day on the subway amongst a still-stereotypical cast of New York characters, where they reflected on the ‘vibration of togetherness’ as one communard put it and (tongue fully in cheek) ‘just sat there and soaked up the good vibes’.

Most of the recent ballooning of vibes in the magazine is single offhand uses, such as the ‘faux Churchillian vibes of Brexit’ mentioned in an article about the British Broadcasting Corporation (Knight, 2022). A 2021 year-in-review article offers an extended engagement: ‘The Year in Vibes’ (Chayka, 2021) looks back at ‘a year that feels as though it does and does not exist, a hangover’, ‘the year of liminality’, one that felt ‘vacuous and unstable’, that ‘never really started’ so ‘can’t really end, either’. They see 2021 exemplified in the experience of working from home as ‘the combination of convenience and ennui’ (Chayka, 2021). Scholarly life and ideas form two flashpoints of the reflection: the aesthetic mood encapsulated by the novel and content surrounding Sally Rooney's Beautiful World, Where Are You (‘“Dark Academia” vibes’), and the abject figure of the facemask as exemplifying Jane Bennett's concept of vibrant matter (‘“Crumpled mask in a puddle on the sidewalk” vibes’). These illustrate the author's read of what vibes are: ‘ephemeral, multisensory … fleeting impressions … anything that becomes representative of a mood in society at large, to which one can point and say, “That's a vibe”’; vibes are ‘ambiguous nonverbal phenomena, both positive and negative’ (Chayka, 2021). Many Australians and/or Australiana appreciators have been warmed by this vibes renaissance, given the beloved 1997 film The Castle. Even if you have not seen the film, the speech delivered in the climatic courtroom scene may seem familiar if you too have been part of these vibe-full academic discussions (‘It's just the vibe of the thing … It's the Constitution. It's Mabo. It's justice. It's law. It's the vibe and, ah – no that's it. It's the vibe. I rest my case’.).

Many academics may be familiar with this verbiage from their classroom discussions. In a piece about Brooke's (2017) historical research on London and affective ecologies, Bentel (2024: 101) notes that students increasingly use the term vibes to vaguely speak to ‘the feeling of a particular place or moment’. Sharing one student's insightfully droll comment – that ‘History is just past vibes’ – he suggests that Brooke's writing ‘may offer us entry into a vibes-based study of the past’ (Bentel, 2024: 101). This is a novel approach that Bentel connects to the prior spatial turn and affective turn (as the history of emotions), which have given shape to theoretical and methodological developments across many fields. While students’ seemingly flippant assessments of things as vibes may seem superficial, a number of recent Master's theses engage with vibes deeply and in interesting methodological ways. This includes Folsom-Fraster's (2018) thesis on education and Youth-Adult Partnerships which presents a detailed empirical analysis of a vibe ‘as the mood, or feeling of a space and how it affects individuals and the group’ (2018: 26) as well as a vibe typology, similar to the Myers Briggs personality indicator. In this typology, vibes may be marked as quarantined or liberated, individual or collective, static or kinetic, and internal or external (Folsom-Fraster, 2018: 27–28); applying this, the project's participants assign a four-letter type to a vibe they have experienced, as Myers Briggs is used to assign a four-letter personality, to reflect on the vibes that may facilitate a curriculum and the power dynamics of the classroom. Another illustrative example is Fuher's (2024) thesis on the memes and digital spaces of politically leftist communities. Fuher argues that vibes ‘aren’t mysterious feelings we have about things; vibes come out of the way we participate in community online … vibes are a form of literacy’ (2024: 32–33). Analysing what vibes do in this context and how vibe literacies operate, Fuher iterates the in-community meme ‘I am (and we are) vibes-based scientists’ to invite a particular reading of their work, one involving active engagement, immersion, interaction and new modes of perception (2024: 6–7). Vibes are also creeping into the casual lexicon of more established academics, and being referenced beyond core social sciences and humanities research where we might expect vibes to be more freely welcomed by academic editors. This includes work on the experiential turn in healthcare decision-making, where experienced clinicians may be seen to ‘rely on vibes”’ (Lawton et al., 2019); as the non-verbal cues by which consent for sex acts may be established and negotiated (Schobert et al., 2021); and in methodological reflections by computer scientists on tests of how large language models (LLMs) learn, which were ‘a bit more vibes-based than we [the authors] would have liked’ (Li et al., 2024).

Recently, The New Yorker also published an article on changing literacy pedagogies (Winter, 2022) which captures a sense of the vibey sensitivity and vibes-based process I am interested in here as method. For Winter (2022), vibes-based literacy is an experiential process of proximity and osmosis through which one develops fluency, in this case in reading. I see these as transposable dimensions of vibes-based methods for social research.

Vibes-based methods

If vibes-based methods are experiential, focused on proximities and osmoses and performed in service of fluency, many established interpretative methodologies share these elements. Qualitative social research methods including interviewing, focus groups, workshops, textual/content analysis, archival work, observation, and various creative approaches such as arts-based participation can all be very vibey. To give some specific examples of how these may be employed as vibes-based methods, I focus on three relevant contemporary conceptual umbrellas: affects and atmospheres, social and sociotechnical imaginaries, and materialisms and the more-than-human. A great deal of contemporary research that applies or advances these ideas may be seen as exploring a vibe. Traversing these three – somewhat overlapping – conceptual umbrellas, I highlight some select projects I have found to be generative for thinking about vibes in social research. Rather than explicitly exploring vibes, these projects variously seek to understand and convey an affect or atmosphere, an imaginary, or the material world in which we enmesh. I consider the ways in which they do, and what insight these approaches offer into why vibes are rousing interest and how vibes-based methods may enhance social research.

Affects and atmospheres

Affect theory is a broad and popular space full of scholars who are interested in feeling. Various and sometimes competing definitions of affect abound, from biological/physiological sensations to sociocultural qualities. Emotion, embodiment, expression and collectivity are significant dimensions within social research approaches to affect, and these resonate with many of the ways that vibes are understood including in the cultural representations above. Dominant modes of theorising affect within social research follow the Spinozan-Deleuzoguattarian-Massumian translation trajectory to Thrift's (2004) work on affect as spatialised intensities of feeling; Gregg and Seigworth's (2010) work on affect as visceral and resonant circulating forces; Ahmed (2004; 2013) who draws together affect and emotion to consider impressions and bodies in relation; Sedgwick's (2003) sense of affect as textured touching-feeling; Berlant's (2011) materialist approach to sociality and relations of attachment; to Stewart (2020) on affect as an animate circuit of immanent public feelings; and Seigworth and Pedwell's (2023) new collection that variously explores affect as a shimmering doing and undoing of bodies. Methodological engagements with these (and other) ranging understandings of affect often attend to the interpersonal dynamics of research encounters: as/for trust and rapport in interviews (Fraser and Taylor, 2022), as praxis in participatory projects (Hammelman et al., 2020), and as a vital in intimate settings (Lydahl et al., 2021) (for instance).

Relevant here to conceptualising vibes-based methods are the various techniques that researchers use to probe the affective dimensions of participants’ experiences and lifeworlds. Notably, visual techniques and forms of media appear particularly dominant in research on/with affect. For instance, Moewaka Barnes and colleagues (2017) used haerenga kitea or audio/visual documentation methods to research national days of remembrance in Aotearoa New Zealand; doing so, they united affect with wairua (a Māori concept that translates somewhat reductively, the authors note, to spirit) to explore the affective politics of cultural observance and colonisation. Led by participants in terms of what and how they video-recorded while participants immersed in the events of focus, the research team's methodological reflections emphasise their careful attention to the ‘spiritual moments’ of these ritual events and in the everyday (Moewaka Barnes et al., 2017: 319–320). Another example is Roswell's (2024) work on family photographs, which considers how emotions, feeling(s) and forces of intimate understanding may be shared within ethnographic interviews. They turn to photographs for their non-representational affordances or tacit modalities, as a way to capture ‘how people experience matter in the moment’ and what matter – in this case, a photograph – ‘resurrects … on embodied, sensory, and emotive levels’ (Roswell, 2024: 6). Reflecting on these moments in their interviews, Roswell (2024: 17) sees that they ‘qualitatively change’ the research encounter and lead to a deeper understanding of participants. My own collaborative work on queer archiving and technologies of memory utilised an online story-map as an elicitation technique within interviews to explore the relational and spatial dimensions of participants’ affective responses, affective logics, affective ties and attunements that emerge with and through this map (Watson & Kirby, 2024; Watson et al., 2024). In this work, this interactive visual mediator helped us witness and highlight how our participants developed a sense of space, how the map itself cultivated a sense of togetherness, and how this affected a queer sense of a situated collective subjectivity that participants coalesced with. As in the works above, animate in our approach was the capacity that a visual modality afforded: to create and share in an emotional-tactile sense of the world, however contemporary or historic, domestic or global, to meet our participants in live feeling. This is not something limited to or inherent in visual methodological techniques; what these examples raise are broader questions about the modalities via which vibes circulate and what techniques vibes-based methods may use.

Research at the vibier end of affect often adopts Anderson's (2009) concept of affective atmospheres or Stewart's (2011) atmospheric attunements. Anderson takes Marx's metaphor of air – emphasising its material force, ephemerality, movement, turbulence and associated atmospheric bodies – to give some conceptual and aesthetic form to the notion of (social) atmosphere. Stewart (2011: 445) similarly conceptualises atmospheres as forces or force fields, ‘palpable and sensory yet imaginary and uncontained, material yet abstract’, with which we variously attach and attune. Both scholars spatialise affect while retaining focus on everyday sensory experience. Key in Anderson's summation is that affective atmospheres are produced by, but not reducible to, bodies/things in relation; they ‘exceed that from which they emanate’ (2009: 80). More contemporary work on atmospheres further develops this sense of complexity and profusion. Sumartojo and Pink (2019), for instance, approach atmosphere as the changeable, contingent and elusive socio-spatial quality of how bodily senses, memory and imagination configure, linger and emerge with and through people's everyday surroundings and activities. This approach seeks to build on the generative vagueness of previous conceptualisations while unfettering atmosphere from the experiential holism, space-time fixity, ontological assumptions and loaded temporal and affective claims that they see in this prior work. Doing so, Sumartojo and Pink (2019: 3) emphasise how atmospheres ‘continually exceed’ their conditions of emergence and cannot be ‘reduced to the terms of their configuration’. This exceeding irreducibility presents the basis of the theoretical and methodological challenge that they respond to, a response which, among other elements, emphasises the importance of specificity, uncertainty, reflexivity and collectivity in researching atmospheres (Sumartojo and Pink, 2019: 35–47): of finding dialogic ways of working with other researchers, with participants and with techniques and tools – including visual methods – in order to attend to and affectively translate the multisensory dimensions of atmospheres as/and experience.

Scholars have variously taken up these concepts to explore the bounded intensities and lasting traces of specific formations of people, space and time (e.g., movements, events, digital trends; the mundane to the exceptional). For instance, in research on the annual UK lights festival Blackpool Illuminations, Edensor (2012) examines light as an aesthetic experience and the festival atmosphere as flows of feeling through, around and beyond the lights. Of interest here is how Edensor's ethnographic approach is rendered and reflected upon in the article. Six photographs offer glimpses into the blurring ‘representational and nonrepresentational qualities’ of the lights on display, though captured in static form they are divested from ‘any animating attributes that might generate a stronger affective connection’ for the reader (Edensor, 2012: 113). In addition, three vignettes each from a different successive year illustrate and evoke Edensor's specific sense of the flow and social co-production of the event's atmosphere through thick description. These vignettes pan through space (as well as time) and use creative writing techniques to translate the multisensory experience of being there then: where ‘Waving is part of travel on the illuminated trams … hotel guests move towards the windows of the bar and restaurants to wave at the tram and we wave back, part of the show’ (Edensor, 2012: 1109); when ‘the jammed-up traffic edges forward, spewing fumes … jutting out into the dark is the Central Pier, its Ferris wheel spinning like a giant Catherine wheel. Groups of friends and families pass… Smells of fish and chips mix with sea aromas … ’ (Edensor, 2012: 1110). Lindén and Singleton (2021) do something similar in their research on cancer and hospice care settings. They explore ‘the potential of describing things at the periphery of our attention’ (Lindén and Singleton, 2021: 426) within their collective ethnographies as a ‘feminist commitment to the neglected’ (Lindén and Singleton, 2021: 436); in doing so, they consider the challenges and politics of describing affective atmospheres given their vague, elusive and excessive – yet perceptible, corporeal – quality. The authors share two descriptive excerpts from their fieldnotes that emphasise shifts in body language, tone and the feeling of the room to tease apart their use of this concept methodologically. From this, they reflect on the empirical value of folding atmosphere into their approach – namely, that ‘trying to describe elusive atmospheres might be important in attending to… what gets to count’ (Lindén and Singleton, 2021: 435) as well as ‘what might count’ (Lindén and Singleton, 2021: 437).

If we understand vibe as partly akin to affects and atmospheres, the above projects raise some rich considerations for vibes-based methods. Together they evidence the value of carefully considering presence, observation and mediation in qualitative research where interpersonal dynamics, sensory experience and the feel of a space are constitutive dimensions of the phenomenon at hand. From where researchers went and how they engaged with participants, we could glean that doing research on vibes or with vibes-based methods requires presence (to experience the vibe) and observation (to see the vibe experienced). This involves thinking about how, where and in what relevant ways people are meeting – with other people and/or with things – so research (and vibes) can take place; and for these elements to form part of methodological and empirical materials. Importantly, this includes engagement with the variable contingencies of vibes; as has been interrogated within debates in affect theory in particular (Lim, 2007; Wetherell, 2015), these are not socially neutral phenomena and power dynamics are significant in how affects and atmospheres emerge, circulate, mark, connect and exclude. There is a politics of subjectivity and recognition at play in how vibes may – and may not – be experienced and validated, and these are also significant methodological and empirical considerations. Further, the visual elicitation techniques and richly descriptive texts crafted by researchers highlight how we use various forms of media in research, to generate data and mediate the research experience. Doing research with a vibey sensitivity perhaps also requires mediation: when eliciting and representing data – with photographs, video recordings, our own fieldnotes – we can pay mind to dynamics of both remediation (when we forget the medium) and hypermediacy (when we feel the medium) for the same reasons, to witness and to vibe.

Social and sociotechnical imaginaries

Imaginaries are another major cluster of concepts that lend well to vibes-based methods. Largely drawing on Anderson's (1983) research on imagined communities and Taylor's (2004) notion of the social imaginary, scholars working with these ideas are typically interested in illuminating the sociomaterial enablers of/and performative sense-making practices that comprise coherent(ish) social groups. One example of this line of thinking at work is Nelson's (2020) study of plurisexuality and bi + people's experiences within LGBT+ imagined communities. Using interviews, photo diaries and analytic autoethnography, they examine the double discrimination people face when they do not neatly fit with imagined heterosexual or queer communities. Nelson's (2020) reflections on this research chart the shifts they experienced while undertaking the project, and the energy and sense of charge they felt within research encounters which became methodologically valuable and personally insightful as the research unfolded. While examining these shifts and charged relations as power dynamics requiring negotiation, Nelson raises deep questions of reflexivity, emotional work and the experiential contingencies of what is commonly called ‘insider/outsider status’. Their experience of generating deeply personal data across a complex hinterland of joy and trauma, and the effects of this on their own sense of identity, emphasises the connection and reciprocity that can make qualitative research a palpable shared experience. Another example is Gawlewicz's (2016) work on interviewing people of a similar background (in this instance, conducting interviews with Polish migrants in the UK as a Polish migrant in the UK themself). Discussing the methodological complexities of translation and positionality, Gawlewicz considers the ‘symbolic spiritual alliance’ (2016: 35) that participants can imply and use during interviews. This deep sense of sharing something significant rests on more practical commonalities, such as a shared language and shared experiences of/across places, yet exceeds these. Reflecting on the interviews, Gawlewicz considers participants’ expressions of ‘we’ and ‘us’ – where participants unite themselves and the researcher – as expressions of imagined communities that are reflective of (assumed) shared values. How, when and to what effect a momentary community is imagined and exercised within research encounters, especially by participants, illuminates a valuable emic quality that has resonance for how – and by whom – vibes may be identified and shared in.

To think slightly more diffusively about these two examples where the notion of imagined community carries some methodologically significance: for me, what characterises the approaches of Nelson and Gawlewicz is generosity. In different ways, both researchers are generous with what they bring to and make of their research. This is not an uncritical generosity; Nelson critically considers their changing emotional engagements with the study, and Gawlewicz critically reflects on the discriminatory language participants used to discuss Others (as distinct from we/us, above). They cultivate a generous mode of engagement in line with feminist research approaches that centre body-work and care-work within fieldwork (Hall, 2020) and feminist traditions that conceive of generosity as an embodied exchange (Springgay, 2009) and critical encounter of transformative possibility (Zembylas, 2023); too, with queer/trans theorising of generosity as enabling new relations, spaces, embodiments and ways of imagining (Rodriguez, 2016). In doing so, they evoke some of the generosity that Fuher's (2024) Masters’ thesis on vibes literacies asks for in its readers, where active engagement and interaction are seen to allow for new modes of perception and an understanding-insight usually only gained from immersion within a community. In all of these projects, researchers ‘vibe with’ their interlocutors, to varying degrees and effects, and this shapes and colours the research encounter. We could understand this as a lively or sociable approach (Sinha and Back, 2014) to conceptualising rapport; atmospheres and relational environments (Pitts and Miller-Day, 2007), flow and ambiance (Schmid et al., 2024) are already considerations within work on rapport-building as a way to make sense with participants, and these features with align with what a vibe – or to vibe – might mean. Another example is Collier and Perry's (2023) project which sought to establish ‘a common space of enquiry’ between the researchers, artists and participants that enabled creative collaboration and an openness to epistemic multiplicity. In these works, conceptual interpretations of imagined communities and social imaginaries give shape to important methodological considerations, and are understood as epistemologically operative within the research. Such work is valuable for considering what vibes-based methods of data collection mean: the generous cultivation of vibes is significant for knowledge generation.

A popular contemporary iteration of the social imaginary is the concept of the sociotechnical imaginary. This places focus on imaginaries of science and technology and how these impact the ways that desirable futures are envisioned and materialised across different contexts and scales (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015). As a review of the concept's use in energy research shows (Kuchler and Stigon, 2024), this work tends to involve discourse analyses of ‘official’ media (reports, policies, news articles) and interviews with authorities (industry experts, civil servants, politicians) to determine the logics, norms, values and politics driving development trajectories. Other more creative and speculative approaches to studying sociotechnical imaginaries are beginning to be taken up (Lupton and Watson, 2021; Lupton and Watson, 2022; Felt et al., 2014; Meskus and Tikka, 2024; Pink, 2023) that explore forms of resistance to dominant visions and closely attend to how hype, anticipation and expectations are intensively rendered in everyday life. Importantly, and of keen relevance to vibes-based methods, sociotechnical imaginaries are comprised of more than rational and technical aspects; being futures focused and advancing a performative sense of promise and risk (Watson and Wozniak-O'Connor, 2024), key within these are more complex forms of sense-making such as collective moods or valences of hope and fear which publicly circulate. There is both a vagueness and a valent intensity to sociotechnical imaginaries and together these elements may be read as a vibe; indeed, many of the academic discussions I mentioned in my Introduction have been focused on analysing various sociotechnical imaginaries. In these discussions, it seems that researchers speak about ‘the vibe’ in order to gesture to these rich yet illusory, circulating, contradictory, counter, contingent, imminent senses people develop and carry with them in making sense of the world including of where things are heading.

How researchers handle the complexity of sociotechnical imaginaries offers a glimmer of a vibes-based method of data collection and analysis. Holding all of these dimensions together – power, promise, imminence – across material and immaterial forms – technical elements, knowledge processes, valences, forms of organisation – is no mean feat, and analyses often reach for the gist of the imaginary in focus. In Hughes’ (2024) work, for instance, the anti-fracking imaginary he analyses is exemplified in an impassioned quote from a campaigner which he uses to open his article. In Dahlgren and colleagues' (2022) work, comic strips are used to synthesise and illustrate their analysis of sociotechnical imaginaries of the smart home. This impassioned quote and comic strip give an evocative sense of the respective imaginary without reducing it to its composite parts; they help convey the gist or vibe of the imaginary. Hughes’ (2024: 2) focus on the kinds of articulations exemplified in the noted quote reveals the significance of ‘the intensity of feeling’ in counter-imaginaries; from this, he advances how emotion/affect are theorised in sociotechnical imaginaries research. Dahlgren and colleagues (2022), after analysing relevant industry reports, created a series of comic strips to represent major domains of everyday life at home that automation technologies promise to impact, such as heating, driving and energy use. The comics themselves offer an analysis of the imaginaries proffered in the reports, and afforded an opportunity for co-analysis with participants; the research team brought the comic strips into ethnographic encounters to facilitate discussion, critique and the creation of alternative imaginaries. These works show the analytic value of a concentrated representation: of working to identify or generate the gist of the analysis at hand, to consider ways of conveying the vibe of analysis, of bringing a vibey sensitivity to analysis as well as to data collection.

If we understand vibes as partly akin imaginaries, these projects also raise some useful aspects for thinking about doing vibes-based research. They reveal the significance of shared experience, and the deeper understanding that may be reached when connection and sociality – or sociability (Sinha and Back, 2014) – are centred in research. They reveal the epistemic value of generosity in our modes of engagement, especially in an openness to multiplicity in knowledge and meaning. They reveal the merit and challenge of exploring the vague-yet-intense aspects of collective sense-making. They also highlight the importance of how we make representations of/as/in research, showing what can be done with representations that are both concentrated and open for interpretation, that render something specific yet are not bounded by that specificity. From these projects, we may glean that vibes-based methods require sociality, epistemic openness and attention to sense. By sense I mean the duality of the multi-sensory and processes of sense-making, to sensitise to the relations between vague-aries and intensities, between what crystallises and what remains abstract and how these hang in relation. We can also see how vibes-based methods may make representations of vibes, and benefit from doing so if these effectively correspond: if representations afford some sociality of engagement, if they do not bind understanding, and if their meaning may be sensed and made sense of.

Materialisms and the more-than-human

A third conceptual umbrella offering germinal ground for vibes is the materialisms (new, feminist new, vital and other emergent forms) and more-than-human or posthuman theory. These are contemporary (re)turns to researching environs and entities in ways that de-centre the significance of people while advancing deeply human questions of agency, relationality and ethics. A Deleuzoguattarian-Latourian-Massumian conceptual lineage grounds this work, though arguably more significant are the contemporary feminist ‘big four’ of Donna Haraway (1990), Karen Barad (2007), Rosi Braidotti (2019) and Jane Bennett (2020); Indigenous feminist and anti-colonial research is also significant in this space (Country et al., 2015; Rosiek et al., 2020). Such work highlights the interconnections of life and challenges the traditional Western anthropocentric frames of social research. Nature, animals, technologies and objects are seen as dynamic, affecting and agentic forms with which we enmesh, rather than inert backgrounds upon which people act. Exercised in this scholarship is what we might call a creatural and scientistic vocabulary, a deliberate departure from the more humanistic poetics commonly used in social research; this can be seen, for instance, in Haraway's (2016) description of the contemporary era as ‘one in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices’ and in Barad's (2007) bridging of quantum physics and cultural theory through concepts like diffraction. Also animating much of this scholarship is a play on the double meaning of ‘matter’ to connote both substance and significance. These diverse materials or non-human forms are often conceptualised as matter, and research aims to understand processes of ‘mattering’ or how things are ‘made to matter’.

In order to generate this kind of perspective, researchers often experiment with methodological and analytic techniques to reframe their attention on the materialist or more-than-human. The results – seen especially in the particular style of writing that scholars (myself included) adopt – show that these efforts afford some generative sensibilities. Researchers ‘attune’ to the empirical field; they seek to sense ‘enchantment’ and ‘vitality’; special attention is paid to ‘vibrancies’, ‘entanglements’ and ‘enactments’; analysis involves ‘thinking-with’ concepts; insights ‘glow’ and ‘surface’. These novel vocabularies reflect a mode of engagement that has resonance for vibes-based methods; I recognise a vibey sensibility at play in much of the work in this space. This includes in Flint's (2022: 526) research involving participant-led alternative tours of a university campus; paying attention to moments in these encounters where leaf blowers interrupted conversation, instead of leaving these to simply be rendered as ‘unintelligible’ on their transcripts, Flint builds from these sounds into an analysis of lawn management, settler colonialism and white supremacy. Flint conceptualises this practice of listening differently as a ‘process of attunement’ (2022: 521), of ‘attuning to resonances’ as ‘the infrasounds of the event that linger beyond what is immediately heard, seen, or felt’ (2022: 526). Another illustrative example is Thorpe et al.'s (2024) work on wellbeing; in this, the authors reflect on the value of object interviews as a method for ‘surfacing new ways of knowing (theoretically, methodologically, and cross-culturally) wellbeing beyond human-oriented health’ (Thorpe et al., 2024: 149). Participants were invited to bring objects to their interviews, and the researchers conceptualise these objects as co-participants. How people resisted or embraced this invitation, and what the objects evoked and created within the research encounter, offered valuable avenues for discussion and unspoken/bodily engagements (see also Harrison et al., 2024). In attending to what lingers and evokes, inviting a focus on things typically overlooked or unspoken, these authors work to (re)train their attention away from the usual qualitative articulations that dominate in social research and towards what is un- or otherwise-articulated such as the power or feeling of things. Through practices of attuning and surfacing, the more vaporous, veiled or unseen forces that connect and sustain things – vitalities, vibrations, viscosities and kinships – are materialised.

Hurley and Roe (2022) also take up this conceptual approach in their research on food, masculinities and ecological crisis. Presenting a detailed overview of their participatory workshop method, from the room setup to how those involved cooked and ate together, and their techniques for cultivating convivial conversation, the authors emphasise their focus on materialities, entanglements and juxtapositions: how the workshops became a space with which people could cultivate an ecological awareness and experience ‘becoming different’ (Hurley and Roe, 2022: 692-693). This performative approach to methodology has clear dimensions of pedagogy, as Hurley and Roe (2022: 701) themselves note. In such approaches, where data generation and knowledge translation are folded together, or at least both seen as lively moments of/for public engagement, projects often adopt explicitly pedagogical aims where the research design creatively supports the (re)training of participants’ attentions too. In my own collaborative work that engages feminist new materialism and more-than-human theory, we have been guided by sensory pedagogies in designing our methods and creative outputs – most notably an exhibition – from the research. This brought a kind of meta-methodological dimension to the project, as we aimed to attune people (participants and audiences) to the complex interembodied vibrant relations of which they are part and to explore how creative methods could help achieve these sensibilities and modes of engagement (Watson et al., 2023).

Scholarship within this conceptual umbrella raises a number of ideas that are interesting for vibes-based methods. This includes how agency is attributed to non-human animals/objects/actors/things: agency is seen as something that is not discretely possessed but produced through distributed entanglements/assemblages/relations as things intra-act (rather than interact). With this notion of agency, we may orient ourselves to what vibes do and consider how vibes themselves affect and impact, or the unfolding always-in-becoming ways that vibes emerge with and through a dynamic relational process of co-constitution. Another is the non-representational dimensions of new materialist thought, which emphasises how many dimensions of life may not be easily captured and explained through language or symbols. Working with this idea, we may consider how vibes are not (only) the result of people's perceptions nor limited to their cultural representations but always evade and overspill these. Further, in their methods of data collection/generation and analysis, scholars working within this broad conceptual approach resist the strictures of traditional research techniques, both in practice and in how these practices are represented. Instead, they endeavour to attune to the field and think-with theories: to vibe with the world and with legacies of scholarship. Research is understood as a series of performative engagements/intra-actions that may be most generative when they are convivial and resonant. That is, they also aim to cultivate vibes: to create encounters where other people can begin to attune to the more-than-human too. The particular animation of ethics across this scholarship – the onto/ethico/politico/epistemologies as modes of caring multilaterally with the world – is itself a very vibey sensitivity that resonates with the ‘vibration of togetherness’ first considered in The New Yorker (Hertzberg, 1971).

Especially key in this context is the focus on more-than-human/new materialist theoretical approaches on forces. The notion of force seems particularly aligned with how vibes may be conceptualised. As an energy or spirit, a dynamism and kind of cogency, a force is a generative factor. When scholars explain their interest as being the vibe of something, they speak to not only the feeling of something, as the Introduction notes, but also perhaps the force in something. I note that power does not seem an easy association for this sense of force, despite how deeply and broadly it has been theorised; it seems to me that people would speak explicitly to power dynamics if that was what they meant. Instead, people turn to vibe to convey another sense of force, something less concrete or less concretised than power, something more akin to the style of a generative feature. This sense of force is perhaps what resonates most strongly with the sense of vibes conveyed by The New Yorker – especially the vibes that emanate within/from the warring seventies communes and the impressions left by constitutive phenomena of the pandemic year 2021.

Conclusion: vibes and ambiguity

Vibes are affects, atmospheres, relations, valences, intensities, enmeshings, vibrations, vibrancies and textured entanglements, something sensory and sensed – yes, ‘the feeling of a particular place or moment’ (Bentel, 2024: 101), something qualitative researchers have long contended and worked with. Vibes resonate with the ways that affects and atmospheres, imaginaries and materialisms are being conceptualised and researched, especially contemporarily. It would be remiss however to conclude by subsuming vibes within any of these conceptual umbrellas, or by defining the notion (only) through its relation to these. Vibes are a generative force that in some ways equal and in many ways escape these terms. Someone or something can have good or bad vibes; something can be the vibe and something can be a vibe; something can be vibey; the vibe can be off; we can have a vibe; we can be low-key vibing; we can do a vibe check; anything can have [adjective] vibes and anyone can give off [adjective] vibes – good, bad, chill, weird; something can be a whole vibe; there can be a vibe shift; the vibes can be immaculate. The term has both diffused and clarified as it has accrued meanings through varied use, some of which Zhou's (2023) article in The Guardian charts through the Beach Boys and John Lennon to 1990s Black vernacular and rap culture to contemporary corporate, political and social media adaptations. Emerging research interest taps into good and bad vibes, or spans the ambi-valence of vibes. In 2023, for instance, the annual Australian symposium Digital Intimacies responded to a rising sentiment within digital cultures that ‘the vibe is off’. In reflecting, engaging with and being part of sociocultural trends, social researchers are seeking to meaningfully understand the vibe in a way that does the vibe justice and avoids the very not-the-vibe approach of abstracted academic dissection.

In this spirit, in concluding here I lean into how vibes evade easy definition. With this diffusion of meaning comes an ambiguousness. The term evokes an ambiguity. How people use vibes to speak to a generative ambiguity says something interesting about social life and social research. Much of the research discussed above grapples with ambiguity in some way. They use vibes to convey that something was driven by a loose sense, hunch or intuition, something less than a coherent rational or logical process, as in the research on healthcare decision-making (Lawton et al., 2019) or computer science testing (Li et al., 2024). Such work illustrates the point that one of Folsom-Fraster’s (2018: 50) participants makes, that ‘A vibe is a sixth sense’. Others think beyond the firm definitions of the concepts they employ and towards a sense of vagueness (Lindén and Singleton, 2021; Sumartojo and Pink, 2019). These scholars reach towards what is not captured by established conceptualisations as they consider how the thing they are interested in (an affect, an atmosphere, an imaginary, a dynamic relation) seems irreducible to these concepts or to the parts of the thing they can capture in data. To address this, some scholars focus on phenomena that is often overlooked within research, as in Flint's (2022) work with background sounds. Others design experiential research encounters so that they might interact with participants in ways that get beyond talk and potentially centre things that are unspoken or cannot be spoken; they hope to create affective atmospheres, live ways of sensing and making sense, or ways of relating and attuning to our dynamic interrelations. This includes Moewaka Barnes and colleagues’s (2017) haerenga kitea, Collier and Perry's (2023) creative collaborative workshops, Hurley and Roe's (2022) participatory food encounters, indeed many of the projects discussed above. They aim to elicit emotional-tactile sensibilities and modes of engagement with their participants; they work to cultivate a generative shared experience to explore representational and nonrepresentational qualities of akin experiences, to grapple with the material yet abstract.

In various ways, these are methodological attempts to capture ‘ephemeral, multisensory … fleeting … ambiguous nonverbal phenomena’ – the distinguishing features that Chayka (2021) sees in vibes. In sum, within and across these methodological developments I see a vibey orientation and vibey sensibility at play that is illustrative of broader trends within contemporary qualitative research. Vibes are the vibe. This highlights how researchers are noticing and trying to grapple with social life today. In particular, I see that this turn to vibes reflects a generative ambiguity. By reading these projects as illustrative cases of vibes-based methods – or by considering what these methodological developments might offer for researching (and researching with) vibes – we may enhance how we understand, approach and work productively with ambiguity in qualitative research.

From these various projects, I see that vibes-based methods accord with how vibes have been explored in cultural readings. They are experiential, focused on proximities and osmoses, and performed in service of fluency (cf. Winter, 2022). They involve experiencing the experience(s) of focus, participating as a form of meaning-making and grasping the felt value of the elements at hand. They involve close attention and/to co-presence, including reflexive consideration of the generative tensions of positionalities. They involve saturation (not necessarily Thematic Saturation) and sensitising for subtlety, to identify the gradual ways that connection(s) and similarities are sewn. They involve aims of deep understanding, achieved through the generation and analysis of rich data, rendered in forms that resonate with participants/communities and articulate with the subject(s) at hand.

The various methods and approaches I have drawn attention to here reflect and extend this cultural reading. I have largely focused on social research involving participants here, but see relevance in vibes and vibes-based methods for textual analyses. This includes the ways we engage with the research of others, how we ‘think-with’ scholarly literature (cf. Jackson and Mazzeri, 2011; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012) and vibe our way through a scholarly landscape. Further, while three conceptual umbrellas – affects and atmospheres, social and sociotechnical imaginaries, and materialisms and the more-than-human – structure the material above, most of the works cited would have an easy home in at least one other section; many intentionally draw together affects, imaginaries and materialisms. Reading back across them offers an expanded sense of what vibes-based methods entail: participation, presence, observation, recognition, generosity, sociability, openness, sense-making, dynamism, paying attention to what is not represented, attending to forces of feeling, sensing, experience. Vibes-based methods involve being together with others in situ or in amongst important things, to enable us to share in experiences; to be in the field and in feeling. They involve mutuality and possibility, a way of being a researcher that is kind and curious, a style of multisensory engagement that grasps the power of forces of connection and transformation big and small.

Vibes-based methods are for experiencing the vibe, for witnessing the vibe experienced, for vibing. They follow vibe as an emic concept, a resonant and amorphous collective impression (potentially; hopefully; somewhat; contingently) shared between researchers and participants and/or a social world. Stretching focus to the immateriality within the material-immaterial dyad that gives form to a vibe, vibes-based methods offer a generative way to engage ambiguity in research – to approach ambiguity, and work with it. Most references to ambiguity within qualitative methodological scholarship remain single passing references, made in discussing mechanisms for reducing or avoiding ambiguity in research processes and interpretations. A notable exception is the recent edited collection by Alimardanian and Heffernan (2024), The Anthropology of Ambiguity, in which authors variously engage with knowledge, experience, multiplicity, the present and potent yet indeterminate and incomplete. Vibes-based methods may open a way for qualitative researchers to grapple differently with ambiguity, and work in ways that reflect the generative ambiguities of the social world. This ambiguousness seems to be an increasing or particular feature of the present moment, if we see the rise of vibes as having a deeper social and cultural significance. With these methods, we may co-create research encounters and bring a vibey sensibility to our craft, one that enables us to better vibe with ambiguities.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ash Watson

Notes

Author biography

Ash Watson is a sociologist and Scientia Senior Lecturer at UNSW Sydney. Her research combines creative and qualitative methods to explore digital technologies, belonging and participation, storytelling and futures.

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