Experimental partnering: interpreting improvisatory habits in the research field

This paper proposes that established research techniques can be developed in new directions by becoming attentive to the ways in which novel epistemological and ontological frameworks can shape the production of research knowledges. Drawing upon ideas from performance theory and science studies, and two brief fieldwork examples – archival research on the MRC’s Common Cold Unit and participant observation of the challenge of moving a herd of cattle – we argue that habits are also always to extent improvised; shaped by the capacities of human bodies to sense and respond to the nonhuman agentive world around them, including methodological habits. We propose a new term, ‘experimental partnering’ to define an interpretative approach that is attentive to how practice can illuminate the improvisatory or unstable temporary alignments that underlie some habits. ‘Experimental partnering’ is not offering a new way to access the research field, but a term to express a particular interpretative mode that draws attention to human-nonhuman relations and assemblages, fostering new apprehensions of how these more than social relations modify and interrupt the habitual.