On Possibilities for Sensory Research

Lina Aschenbrenner germinates manifold questions regarding the study of social power dynamics in different religious institutions, narratives, and frameworks. She opens up space for discourse on the lack of academic tools for navigating sensory implications of different religious contexts on individuals and individual identities. The central question of her text is: “How can scholars elucidate (and criticize) the cultural and social power dynamics in the context of religion as a procedural, animated, and multi-material forces?” Looking through the lens of my own practice in nonverbal learning processes, the mechanisms of the academic feedback loop immediately reveal themselves in the framing of this question. We know that oppression and oppressive behaviors are learned through daily lived experience, interwoven within the webs of social dynamics and political interests. These coded systems of power are, more often than not, exposed to us through interpersonal, nonverbal communication. Such forms of transmission can be tricky to trace or document, precisely due to their visceral nature. Yet, as I will argue in this text, this is exactly why their study is so crucial and interesting. Our bodily encounters with the environment in which we are enmeshed shape our understanding of the world and, as such, the ways power dynamics manifest in both verbal and nonverbal language. As Aschenbrenner unfolds throughout her text, our bodies both create and maintain the structures of power that arise between us. Such transactions of power are firstly nonverbal in nature (what phenomenologists would call pre-reflective), and subsequently grow to manifest in language and action. Examples for such transactions range from the signaling of dominance or submission through eye contact and gestures, to residual changes in one’s scope of movement, such as the freedom with which an arm or a leg is extended or retracted in public or private space. I find that Aschenbrenner’s text points to a gap in understanding that often occurs in practice, which becomes particularly focal when engaging in academic research on power dynamics and cultural spaces, such as religious contexts. This gap can be characterized by a lack of fluency in bridging the researcher’s personal sensations and movement patterns with the systems of power they are either subjected to or create, as they arise within the field of research. This bridging would firstly encompass an acknowledgement of the researcher’s own embodied positionalities and experiences of power when looking for manifestations of power dynamics in the bodies of others. This is a form of understanding which is not only conceptual, but physically present within the body of the researcher. It requires a more serious stance within academic study on the informational value of sensory data and nonverbal communication. Upon such groundwork, a second step would be shaping educational environments that are apt to nurture the researcher’s availability to work from an autoethnographic position—a process that can be traced through a lineage of educators, including Paulo Freire (1970), bell hooks (1994), Sherry Shapiro (2015), and Rae Johnson (2018), among others. Perhaps the most helpful and accessible method for forming links between experience and research is reflective writing that engages somatic elements. Reflective writing, when approached through the body, creates space to focus on visceral impulses as an inherent part of the knowledge-construction process. Despite gaps in experience with and access to somatic practices, maintaining a researcher diary is one simple way of incorporating such reflective processes within one’s modus operandi. Reflective journaling may engage practices of somatic writing: a process of expressing pre-conceptual or non-conceptual thinking by attending to sensations as they Material Religion volume 19, issue 1, pp. 87–88