Connecting to Cognition: A Methodological Journey With Urban Dementia

Contemporary sociological developments spanning the ontological turn, post-cognitivism, biosocial transdisciplinarity, post-qualitative inquiry, and new empiricism are opening up novel sites of methodological contention regarding the nature of cognition as a research object. While these developments are conceptually stimulating, their (potential) overlapping methodological implications are under-explicated. Outlining a moving ethnography of urban transport use by passengers with dementia, in this article I delve into the more pragmatic methodological contingencies of attempts to engage with cognition as a fundamentally ecological phenomenon. Blurring the boundaries between the management and analysis of data, I develop a laborious and meditative ‘journeying analysis’ as a means of dealing with an unruly dataset. In line with post-qualitative commitments, I pursue a somewhat haphazard approach to anti-representation, while nonetheless embracing the researcher-centrism of doing research. I advocate creative digital strategies – for example, map-making, soundscaping – for cultivating data forms that offer multiple possibilities for audiences to forge new connections with the study phenomena.