Objectifying sight through eye-tests: Using video to study the senses in social interaction

This paper reports on an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded study that employed ethnography and video methods to analyse the processes of testing vision in optometry consultations. The analysis is based on the examination of more than 70 video recordings of one-to-one consultations between optometrists and patients. The paper presents sections of video data to demonstrate the ways that the subjective vision of the patients is made accountable and objectifiable for the purposes of professional scrutiny. We look at the methods through which optometrists and patients attempt to make visual experience available to one another.

Using this data, we will discuss the potential value of video methods for scrutinizing the senses and sensory activity within social interaction and we show how sensory activity can be turned into a sociological concern. Instead of treating ‘sensory experience’ as phenomena that are inaccessible to researchers, we regard the creation of mutual intelligibility in social interaction - and the application of the senses within this process - as being observable in real-world contexts. The study draws on an ethnomethodological perspective, and adopts assumptions about the situated character of communicative action as constitutive of the meaning of social scenarios. The paper reflects on how sensory scholarship may benefit from the study of situated practices through video methods in order to better understand how people make sense of their own, and their fellow interlocutors’ sensory practices.