ABSTRACT
This chapter points in fruitful directions for future conceptual and empirical investigations of mobility and sociality. To focus these forward-looking considerations, though, much of the chapter is spent looking back, recovering and re-evaluating some important research that was done by David Sudnow, one of the lesser known characters in the history of the social sciences. Sudnow’s research concerns are with issues of bodily movement, existential space and sequential organisation, and he makes it plain that these are profoundly social issues, bound up with acquired, performative, collaborative skills, or with the learnt and habitual ways of doing in an intersubjective life-world. His work is noteworthy, at least in part, for its mix of borrowings from phenomenology, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology. Sudnow is presented here as a significant figure in historical context, because of the way in which his research on music, language, body and technology can be seen, in retrospect, as a sort of theoretical junction-point, anticipating aspects of later non-representational theorising while also linking with the writings of several better known figures who were working before or alongside him (for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Harvey Sacks and Harold Garfinkel). The chapter asks a methodological question, too, about how empirical investigations of various communities of co-movement might be carried out. A key difficulty facing researchers in this area is the problem of how best to document and reflect upon sensuous, meaningful bodily movements and co-movements that tend to be, in the flow of everyday routines, pre-reflective.
