Book chapter
Eco-sensory ethnography and the surrealist impulse
Posthuman Social Science and Computational Culture: Essays on Methodology, Theory, and Practice, pp.101-116
Routledge, 1st
2026
Appears in Recent Faculty of Education Publications
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Abstract
Sensory experiences are newly tapped in a vastly expanded digital economy, which is reshaping our relations to place and culture, and distributing data across widespread circuits of connectivity (Ruppert et al., 2013). Sensing is now distributed across an increasingly complex array of digital devices, bodies, architectures, and built environments (Gabrys, 2016; Tironi, 2017). Digital sensors are "emplaced" within buildings, embedded in smartphones, worn on bodies, mounted on rooftops, orbiting in satellites, submerged in soil, flying through air, and connected to plant and animal life. This redistribution of sensory relations goes well beyond the quantified self (Lupton, 2016) and is occurring at a planetary scale, emblematic of what Rosi Braidotti (2013, 2019) has termed the "posthuman condition," a convergence of technological and climatological disruptions that radically destabilises our understanding of sensory capacity. Under these conditions, the digital has come to be part of a "general ecology" that commingles the "natural" and the "artificial" in new uncharted terrain (Hörl, 2018). In terms of ethnographic research, this opens onto what Clough (2009) envisages: "an infra-empiricism that allows for a rethinking of bodies, matter and life through new encounters with visceral perception and pre-conscious affect" (Clough, 2009, p. 44).
Details
- Title
- Eco-sensory ethnography and the surrealist impulse
- Creators
- Elizabeth de Freitas - MIXI, Adelphi University’s Manhattan Institute for Studies of STEM and the Imagination (New York)Maggie MacLure - Manchester Metropolitan UniversityDavid Rousell - RMIT University
- Contributors
- Elizabeth de Freitas (Editor) - MIXI, Adelphi University’s Manhattan Institute for Studies of STEM and the Imagination (New York)
- Publication Details
- Posthuman Social Science and Computational Culture: Essays on Methodology, Theory, and Practice, pp.101-116
- Publisher
- Routledge; Oxon, UK
- Edition
- 1st
- Identifiers
- 991013322128302368
- Copyright
- © 2026 Elizabeth de Freitas.
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Education
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Book chapter