NOISY FIELD EXPOSURES, or what comes before attunement

Vickie Zhang

doi:10.1177/1474474020909494

NOISY FIELD EXPOSURES, or what comes before attunement

Vickie Zhang^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

School of Geographical Sciences

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article (Academic Journal) › peer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Before attunement comes exposure, the necessary fact of being a body. This photo essay is a play on two meanings of the word exposure: corporeal exposure and photographic exposure. I offer the latter in order to stay with moments of the former, exposing multiple scenes of misattunement from fieldwork in a small country town in regional Australia. Picking up the classic distinction in information theory between signal and noise, this piece pauses at the moment of indeterminacy before an event might be affirmed as valuable signal or discarded as unwanted static, weaving stories and images from the field with excerpts from Michel Serres’ The Parasite, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and Paul Harrison’s essay on Corporeal Remains. Ultimately, this essay’s suggestion is that ‘attunement’ is not primarily about attunement. Instead, as a methodological principle, I offer that attunement initially – and sufficiently – gestures towards an attempt, a vulnerability and a commitment to the event of exposure.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	647-664
Number of pages	18
Journal	cultural geographies
Volume	27
Issue number	4
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474020909494
Publication status	Published - 1 Oct 2020

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
I would like to thank Ben Anderson and participants of the Durham-Melbourne Affect Digital-Symposium in 2018 for the timely opportunity to turn feeling into prose, audiences at the 2019 Institute of Australian Geographers annual conference in Hobart for their open ears, David Bissell for his boundlessly attuned reflections and Hayden Lorimer for his thoughtful editorial hand. I am grateful to the many townspeople who so generously accommodated my parasitic itinerary. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support of an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and the University of Melbourne’s Elizabeth & Vernon Puzey Scholarship.

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2020.

Keywords

exposure
failure
fieldwork ethics
misattunement
noise and signal
qualitative methods

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abstract = "Before attunement comes exposure, the necessary fact of being a body. This photo essay is a play on two meanings of the word exposure: corporeal exposure and photographic exposure. I offer the latter in order to stay with moments of the former, exposing multiple scenes of misattunement from fieldwork in a small country town in regional Australia. Picking up the classic distinction in information theory between signal and noise, this piece pauses at the moment of indeterminacy before an event might be affirmed as valuable signal or discarded as unwanted static, weaving stories and images from the field with excerpts from Michel Serres{\textquoteright} The Parasite, Roland Barthes{\textquoteright} Camera Lucida and Paul Harrison{\textquoteright}s essay on Corporeal Remains. Ultimately, this essay{\textquoteright}s suggestion is that {\textquoteleft}attunement{\textquoteright} is not primarily about attunement. Instead, as a methodological principle, I offer that attunement initially – and sufficiently – gestures towards an attempt, a vulnerability and a commitment to the event of exposure.",

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NOISY FIELD EXPOSURES, or what comes before attunement

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