With a background in geography and urban planning, my research focuses on the affective relationship between individuals and their living places, with an emphasis on how to include this dimension of feeling in the making of the contemporary urban environment. All of my scientific work is marked by a reflection regarding qualitative methodologies and their potential to “unveil” the sensorial.
The desire to write a narrative-fiction story emerged during the organization of a feedback forum session for the Mobi'kids research program funded by the National French Agency (ANR), which was attended by representatives of non-profit organisations, local authorities and addressed to the general public, and in particular to the children surveyed. Academic writing is not well-suited to communicating outside research contexts, and equally, when it comes to evoking the sphere of the sensorial and emotional.
Using the terms “narrative” and “fiction” together allows us to use a narrative (and not a classic scientific demonstration) which, by relying on fiction, constitutes a way of storytelling that blends the imaginary and the real. The narrative is a story, told from my own sensory response of the analysed research material drawn from the audio recordings of the children's commented journey from school to home. My writing process involves listening in an immersive manner to the audio recording. I thus find myself immersed at the heart of a dual relationship between the researcher and the child, and between the child and the environment (Audas et al, 2020). Proposing a written translation of the atmospheric, reveals what's at stake in the here and now of the investigation, which most oftenly remains in the shadows of research, and is often seen instead as a subjective point of view or a fieldwork notebook entry. Based on my feelings and intuitions, the narrative is a creation that takes a selection of extracts from the research data and expresses them differently. The use of fiction includes the creation of characters, inspired by children surveyed, whose role is to express and share the reality of their daily lives which reveal all forms of sensory data at play.
The way in which the sensorial qualities of situations can be conveyed are currently a source of questions for research in Social Sciences and Humanities (SHS). Organizing material in a narrative form is undoubtedly a powerful cognitive and methodological tool for describing and analyzing social reality. The interest of narrative-fiction lies in this emphasis on the inevitable interpretative dimension inherent in any analysis of an empirical situation, and in the acceptance and affirmation of the translation processes it implies as a new form of scientific distancing.
More from this author :
Nathalie Audas et al., « Ambient Outlines of Children's Urban Experience. A Look Back at an Interpretative Methodology », Ambiances, Alloaesthesia: Senses, Inventions, Worlds, Damien Mason (dir.), Grenoble : Réseau International Ambiances, 2020, pp. 126-131.
Nathalie Audas, Jul McOisans, Isabelle Raquin, « Parcourir la ville : un jeu d'enfants », NAKALA, 2023, [en ligne] :
https://doi.org/10.34847/nkl.2404plkh (11/09/2023)
Nathalie Audas, Jul McOisans, Isabelle Raquin, « Parcourir la ville : un jeu d'enfants » (enregistrement sonore), NAKALA, 2023, [en ligne] : https://doi.org/10.34847/nkl.76abr599 (11/09/2023)
