Developing expertise in domains such as art, music, science, engineering and medicine, whether as an individual or a group, has always been an embodied process of learning amidst technologies. Artists train their perceptive skills while performing and making with materials. Scientists’ experiments involve complex skilled interactions between humans, organisms and objects. Doctors train to know the body, through their senses and with technologies. MUSTS projects in this subtheme build upon decades of scholarship in this area, extending beyond the existing focus in STS on tacit knowledge to contribute new theoretical and empirical insights into how bodies, technologies (digital and non-digital), and knowledge are co-created. Research explores issues such as: the interaction between the experts’ authority and their skills, and the negotiated boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity in sensory knowledge production. Working on such topics requires new research methods to study embodied expertise, including artistic research, re-enactments, online and multisensory ethnography.
Coordinator for this research theme: Anna Harris.
