Science in a touch: Distributed perception through intercorporeality
Learning concepts in science classes can be difficult. Often, teachers and students use the possibility of explaining a concept like the periodic table or the Pythagorean theorem through visual illustrations. However, visually impaired students (VIS) cannot see and thus cannot benefit from any such illustrations alone. We have, in a video ethnographic project, followed VIS in their everyday lives in Danish schools, focusing on technological and material objects as situated resources. In this presentation, we show how VIS often in science classes receives help from assistants who creatively uses available mundane objects and haptic guiding actions to support the VIS in achieving understanding of scientific concepts. Based on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis in the multimodal tradition (Mondada, 2019) of two exemplary cases, we show the fascinating creativity of everyday assisting scientific practices by focusing on what we suggest calling “science in a touch”. Our argument is that knowledge about a scientific concept and its possible ‘gestalt contextures’, as Gurwitsch (1964) talks about, can be achieved through haptic guiding if the object and depicting gestures, are used in a direct way, i.e. not in an imaginative or metaphorical way. This research contributes to ethnomethodological studies of science (Garfinkel et al., 1981) by focusing on the co-construction of VIS understanding of abstract concepts through haptic guiding in object-centred sequences.

Garfinkel, H., Lynch, M., & Livingston, E. (1981). The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 11(2), 131-158.
Gurwitsch, A. (1964). The Field of Consciousness. Duquesne University Press.
Mondada, L. (2019). Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: Embodiment and materiality, multimodality and multisensoriality in social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 47–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2019.01.016