ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for a research gaze that de-centres talk and attends to the body. It situates my reflections on methodological innovation and transdisciplinary collaboration in the context of studying the body and its meaning making capacities at the intersection of the social sciences and the arts. With a focus on the body as it is digitally mediated, the chapter draws on exploratory work within the MIDAS project, to discuss how social science methods might be brought into conversation with art and design based methods. It shows the potential of working at this intersection to generate novel themes and ideas for researching the digital body. I introduce three of these thematic synergies and reflect on how these could be mobilised by social research to interrogate and re-imagine the digital body: Fragmenting and zoning the body, Physical-digital trajectories of the body, and Engaging with the sensory material body. These themes are not exhaustive; rather I am using them to illustrate the indicative potential of an interdisciplinary approach to foster social science imagination and to move beyond the silences left by standard social science methods towards engaging with a creative potential for social science methodological innovation.
