Conference Agenda

This paper introduces Wheeling Ethnography, an innovation in qualitative data collection designed to study embodied experience, affective regulation, and the illusion of agency within engineered environments of late modern capitalism. Combining two well-established methodologies - sensory ethnography and situational analysis - Wheeling Ethnography anchors sensorial observation around an anthropological node: a focal participant whose immersive engagement with human and non-human actors becomes the center of analytical rotation. From this node, three systematic rotations unfold. Nodal rotation attends to the participant’s sensory immersion and bodily attunement; social rotation traces interactions among patrons, staff, and material infrastructures; and sensorial rotation captures the ambient sounds, lights, and rhythms that scaffold emotion, perception, and behavior. Together, these rotations form a “wheel” that moves fluidly between layers as situations evolve.

Borrowed from the emic metaphor of the “Wheel of Fortune,” this framework transforms a cultural symbol into an etic methodological tool. Developed through fieldwork in two off-Strip Las Vegas casinos catering primarily to local residents, the method privileges naturalistic, real-time observation without interviews. This approach yielded rich data on micro-interactions, embodied gestures, and atmospheric cues as they unfolded, revealing how spatial design and sensory conditioning choreograph affect and agency while exposing the patterns, disruptions, and absences of everyday life.

Wheeling Ethnography offers a portable and transparent framework for qualitative researchers seeking to capture the infrastructural logic of a field, from casinos and gyms to airports and cafés, providing a new grammar for data collection on the construction of sensorial experience and emotional regulation in late modern capitalist environments.

This presentation recounts my effects to cultivate a research practice capable of capturing the more ‘invisible’ dimensions of practices encountered during fieldwork. The atmospheres seemingly vibrating with tension. The moments we experience as reverberating throughout our bodies. The pre-linguistic forms of communication which always, at times unknowingly, inform and shape our research journeys.

Inspired by Critical Disability Studies and Critical Phenomenology, this presentation draws on a two year-long fieldwork conducted as part of my ethnographic doctoral research studies (carried out between March 2023 to March 2025). The aim of this study has been to better our understanding of disabled families’ lived and embodied experiences of negotiating the meaning of disability – of their families – with professionals throughout the Danish social welfare system. Following these families to and from such encounters has been a humbling experience. I quickly came to the realisation that it required more than written descriptions to fully depict their lived realities. I needed a way to capture the palpable yet unspoken tensions that so characterised these intimate and private spaces; a way to capture the non-verbal communications of articulate, pathic bodies. To fully understand the families’ attempts to negotiate successfully with the system, the importance of considering the pre-linguistic language of the pathic body cannot be understated.

Reflecting on the concepts of ‘bodily empathy’, ‘embodied self-awareness’ and ‘embodied intersubjectivity’, I realised that the solution to capturing these important ‘invisible’ dimensions of practice was to be found in a more creative approach to methodology. Thus, phenomenological writing, poetry, sketching and knitting became my trusted research tools. This talk will delve into each of these methods, detailing the essential ways they shaped and informed my research journey from beginning to end.

In this paper, eight practicing psychologists, a dog (Oscar), white cockatoos, crimson rosellas, blue gums, plum blossoms, the words of theorists of eco-psychology and post-humanism joined together for two days with the mountains of the Darug and Gundungurra peoples of Australia, to explore questions about psychology and its capacity to respond to the climate crisis. We designed a series of psychoterratic exercises for this purpose: (1) a bio-graphical definitional ceremony, (2) a series of short lectures and readings set to the poetics of open dialogue, (3) a sympoietic vegetal-thinking exercise, (4) a bush-psychogeography and (5) a final reflection on praxis. We present our findings, written in bricolage, a compost of experiences and ideas both horizontal and vertical, written, drawn and photographic.

This institutional ethnographic study was conducted in two Social Services Departments in Israel through participant observations and individual interviews with social workers, management staff, and support personnel over several months. Observations included participation in professional meetings, supervision sessions, and daily departmental activities.

Drawing on Nancy Fraser's theory of recognition as a dimension of social justice, this study explores how social workers explicitly articulated their need for professional acknowledgment and how the ethnographic research process responded to these demands. Throughout fieldwork, practitioners consistently expressed frustration with the invisibility of their complex work and the challenging conditions under which they operate within bureaucratic systems.

The ethnographic methodology's emphasis on prolonged engagement created temporal space for recognition to develop, moving beyond superficial encounters to deep witnessing of practitioners' daily realities. The practice of "being there" communicated to social workers that their work was worthy of sustained scholarly attention, countering narratives of professional marginalization they frequently encountered.

Participant observation became a form of professional validation as researchers engaged seriously with the complexity of social work practice, learning the nuanced skills required to navigate bureaucratic systems while maintaining client-centered approaches. Through detailed fieldnotes and attentive listening during interviews, the research made visible invisible aspects of social work—the emotional labor, strategic thinking, ethical dilemmas, and advocacy efforts that typically remain unacknowledged.

This methodological recognition operated through reciprocal processes: as researchers demonstrated genuine curiosity and respect for practitioners' expertise, social workers gained confidence in articulating their professional knowledge and challenges. The ethnographic encounter functioned as a space where professional identity could be affirmed through scholarly engagement, creating what Fraser might recognize as cultural recognition that acknowledges the value and legitimacy of social work practice.

The findings reveal that ethnographic research functions beyond data collection—it becomes an active practice of recognition directly addressing practitioners' needs for professional validation.

A new primary school curriculum was launched in Ireland in September 2025. This new, four-stage, curriculum contains five curriculum areas. Curriculum specifications for each of these areas were published in September 2025. One of these curriculum areas is Arts Education. The curriculum specification for arts education advocates an integrated approach in stages one and two, and a more differentiated approach to arts subjects (drama, music and art) in stages three and four.

The presenters are teacher educators in (primary school) drama and members of the National Arts Education Curriculum Development Group. Their participation in the latter prompted them to explore the roots of drama as a subject in Ireland’s primary curriculum with reference to their own roots in drama/theatre and education. In this exploration, they use themselves as sites of inquiry, juxtaposing and making each of their voices explicit as they trace the routes that brought them, along very different trajectories, to becoming teacher educators in (primary) drama and, more recently, to curriculum development.

In their paper, the presenters draw on six hour-long conversations over the course of nine months to untangle their experiences within the dominant discourse of drama education in Ireland in which the previous drama curriculum (1999) was nested. They show how this untangling enables them to also untangle their emerging understandings of themselves as teachers/artists/researchers as they begin to work differently, as per the new curriculum specifications, with student teachers.

In their exploration, the presenters invoke the evocative power of duoethnography, and embrace the opportunity it provides to engage in meaningful self-study in the presence of each other.