Engaging with engagement: Ethnographic sensitivity in the sociology of regimes of engagement Open Access

This article discusses the methodological implications of French pragmatic sociology for ethnography, specifically in relation to the recent turn to non-representational ideas in methodological considerations in ethnography. This tradition marks a decisive move away from cognition (Vannini, 2015) as researchers engage with more-than-human, more-than-textual, and multi-sensual worlds (Lorimer, 2005, p. 83). The ambition of non-representational methodologies is to sensitise social scientists (Thrift, 2007, pp. 18ff) by focusing on affect, events, complexity, and the openness of everyday performances (Vannini, 2015, pp. 319–20). This ambition is seen in kindred discussions on affective ethnography (Gherardi, 2018), embodied knowledge (Okely, 2007), and sensory ethnography (Pink, 2009).¹ The intent is to challenge the hegemonic power of discursive language that defines and thus controls human lives within categories, roles, assignments, and causal entailments.

In this paper, we discuss French pragmatic sociology with a focus on its latest theoretical extension, Laurent Thévenot's (2000, 2006, 2011) sociology of regimes of engagements (henceforth, SRE), to show that this specific literature can contribute to the broader methodological debates in sociology about how researchers can and ought to be sensitive to their research object when it includes the non-verbal, affective, and material. While there have been discussions concerning methodological issues in justification analysis (e.g. Ylä-Anttila & Luhtakallio, 2016), methodological questions related to SRE have only been addressed in a few studies (e.g. Bullinger, 2014; Carlsen, 2020; Hansen et al., 2016; Thévenot, 2020) and have not been addressed systematically (Hansen, 2023). By focusing on SRE, we show that the methodological implications of this framework, while in some ways aligned with the turn to non-representational methodologies, can be used to specify engagement – both the researcher's own engagement and the study of actors’ engagements. While non-representational ethnography leans towards the epistemological implications of capturing what lies beyond cognition and discourse, SRE can provide valuable ontological insights into what researchers should capture and why.

The article is structured as follows. We start by describing the methodological implications of French pragmatic sociology, with a focus on the role of ethnography, which leads us to discuss the potential dialogue between SRE and non-representational ethnography. We go on to discuss the methodological implications of SRE through three key focal points: 1) plurality, in the sense of how to capture a range of different regimes of engagement; 2) investment, i.e. how to be sensitive to people's attempts to invest in their environment to secure goods, including the most close and proximate, and 3) versatility, that is, how to study the changes between trusting and doubtful engagements. This allows us to discuss how SRE may contribute to debates about non-representational ethnography and vice versa. These discussions are informed by our own previous and ongoing research using SRE (Carlsen, 2020; Juhlin, 2024; Meilvang, 2021; Pultz et al., 2021) and by the few discussions available in the literature on French pragmatic sociology and methodology. We end our paper by discussing how methodological questions and concerns in SRE can contribute to debates about non-representational ethnography and how researchers can develop and avail themselves of this theoretical approach's methodological advantages. Throughout the article, we focus on meta-methodological issues without going deeply into either philosophy of science and theorising, on the one hand, or very hands-on questions such as concrete styles of observation and interview techniques, on the other.

In the late 1980s, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot initiated a sociological programme outlined in the book On justification (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1987, 2006) that was later to be labelled French pragmatic sociology (Breviglieri & Stavo-Debauge, 1999). This article discusses the methodological implications of French pragmatic sociology, focusing on its latest and most significant theoretical extension, Thévenot's SRE. Although the analytical model of orders of worth drew upon several ethnographic field studies (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1989; see Lemieux, 2014, p. 156), the relationship between French pragmatic sociology and ethnography has rarely been addressed.

On justification was influential in pointing to the need to study situations of dispute as processes of justification, critique, and pragmatic compromises between a plurality of ‘orders of worth’. Compared to its main adversary at the time, Bourdieu's critical sociology, Boltanski and Thévenot's sociology of critique offered another ontology of the ‘critical capacities’ of ‘ordinary people’ and of power, not imbued in the unconscious or false consciousness and symbolic violence but in composite ‘arrangements’ that are occasionally questioned and reshaped. This novel, and at the time provocative, displacement in attention of the empirical object of analysis also came with some key methodological arguments and ideas. In taking ‘ordinary’ actors’ critical capacities and actions seriously and describing them with the same analytical model that could be used to describe the critical actions of the sociologist, Boltanski and Thévenot argued for a ‘symmetry’ between the researcher and the actor being researched (Breviglieri & Stavo-Debauge, 1999, p. 15).

Studying critique in a symmetrical way entails both a ‘pragmatic situationalism’ exploring disputes as they unfold (Diaz-Bone, 2011; see also Barthe et al., 2013) and a nominalist approach to interpreting them (Hansen, 2016). This obliges the researcher ‘in her description to adhere as closely as possible to the procedure the actors use to establish proof in a given situation’ (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p. 12). In terms of methods, the symmetrical approach poses only limited additional epistemological challenges, since one of the key requirements for justification and critique is that they are public and prepared for a third other. In this way, disputes are interpretable by the researcher, keeping in mind the epistemic gap between the practical and intuitive mastering of orders of worth of ‘ordinary actors’ vs. the theoretical conception of the researcher (Lemieux, 2014, p. 155).

Methodological debates related to French pragmatic sociology have concerned questions of generalisation and theorising as well as how to study justification and critique through analyses of discourse. Regarding the former, Boltanski and Thévenot suggested that it was possible to study macro-sociological phenomena related to politics and morality through micro-situations of everyday disputes. In one of the few articles discussing On justification in relation to ethnography, Dodier and Baszanger (1997, p. 51) point to how the orders of worth model presents a ‘non-cultural conception of the field’ seeking to understand the ‘dynamic concrete activities of persons in the context of complex normative, situational and non-unified references’. French pragmatic sociology operates with a ‘combinatorial ethnography’ instead of the ‘integrative ethnography’ of interactionism and grounded theory (Dodier & Baszanger, 1997). The emphasis on situations as composite, ‘non-unified’, and ‘non-cultural’ has also been labelled ‘descriptive pluralism’ (Bénatouïl, 1999, p. 382).

Regarding the study of discourse, methodological contributions have departed from ethnography to documentary analysis, sometimes developing and using software and quantitative methods (see, e.g., Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999; Chateauraynaud, 2003). Lately, this has been developed into a distinct model of ‘justification analysis’ for studying argumentation in conflicts and public debates (Ylä-Anttila & Luhtakallio, 2016; see also Eranti, 2017; Patriotta et al. 2011). However, apart from a recent paper on the importance of materiality in On justification emphasising how objects, things, and spaces are activated in moments of dispute (Pires & Alperstedt, 2022), questions of ethnography have faded away.

Even though methodological questions of ethnography in relation to Thévenot's work have only been explicitly addressed in a few studies (e.g. Bullinger, 2014; Carlsen, 2020; Hansen, 2023; Hansen et al., 2016; Thévenot, 2020), studies that build on this sociology, including Thévenot's own, often make use of ethnographic methods (Blok & Meilvang, 2015; Breviglieri et al., 2003; Centemeri, 2017; Cheyns, 2014; Luhtakallio, 2012; Thévenot, 2002). The lack of methodological debate around this choice of ethnography is thus unfortunate since, as we will show, SRE reaccentuates the question of the sensitivity of ethnographic methods by extending the original sociology of critique and public disputes to a much broader sociology of action, going from the intimate and often unspoken to the public spheres of everyday life, as well as from coordination with oneself to coordination with others (Hansen, 2023).

Thévenot studies smaller-scope formats in which intimate experiences and personal concerns are transformed into common formats. He calls this a ‘reverse view of politics’ (Thévenot, 2019, p. 222) because it starts from personal concerns rather than from the level of the public sphere, which would imply the exclusion of anything ‘below’ this level from our understanding of politics. Thévenot (2020, p. 224) describes this as a shift from the visible coastline of politics to the continent that lies beyond. Capturing tacit, bodily, and idiosyncratic forms of engagement that may be expressed in gestures of doubt, trust, (un)ease, and (dis)comfort requires another sensitivity than that needed for mapping justifications and critique prepared for a third other. Therefore, the existing methodological debates around Boltanski and Thévenot's sociology of critique are insufficient to address the challenges posed by SRE. In particular, SRE challenges the idea that people's engagements can be observed from the outside. In other words, it requires another epistemology.

It is the attention towards the proximate, situational, and material that renders SRE prone to ethnographic methods. Definitions of ethnography are legion, and there is a lively discussion of ethnography as a discipline that is always ‘about’ something and of the relation between ethnographic theory and method (e.g. Ingold 2014). However, in this article, we focus on ethnographic methods, following Willis and Trondman's (2000, p. 5) definition of ethnography as a methodology that draws on a family of methods involving direct and sustained social contact with agents. To this, we may add that ethnography requires an open empirical inquiry with ‘direct observations, in situ, of activities taking place in a field’ (Dodier & Baszanger, 1997, p. 38). However, this definition is still insufficient to capture the sensitivity that SRE requires.

As pointed out by Centemeri (2017), the methodological challenges of studying proximate forms of engagement resonate with the sensory (Pink, 2009), non-representational (Thrift, 2007; Vannini, 2015), and affective (Gherardi, 2018) turns in ethnography. As a response to the representational problems of the linguistic turn, the interest in affect and embodiment problematises the foregrounding of discourse and signification by arguing for a turn away from cognition, symbolic meaning, and textuality (Lorimer, 2005) towards capturing everyday life as ‘a mix of taken-for-granted realities, habit, and routine as well as impulse, novelty, and vivaciousness’ (Vannini, 2015, p. 320). For instance, sensory ethnography has drawn attention to how the senses mediate our engagement with the world (Low, 2015; Pink, 2009) and rethought experiences as embodied (Okely, 2007; Low & Abdullah, 2021). While the studies of affect, the senses, and embodiment each have a distinct field of research and are associated with a different theoretical approach, they share an interest in exploring non-representational methodologies. Although non-representational methodology is often linked to and has gained significant influence in human geography (see, e.g., Anderson & Harrison, 2010; Thrift, 2007), it resonates with a much broader ethnographic interest in moving beyond representation.

A common denominator in this literature is the ambition to develop methodologies that can sensitise the researcher (Thrift, 2007, p. 18ff). For Vannini (2015, pp. 318-9), this entails an ‘impressionistic and inevitably creative’ researcher who ‘flirts with reality’, emphasising possibilities rather than trying to represent (see also Crouch, 2010). Others point to the need to produce ‘emotionally sensed knowledge’ (Hubbard et al., 2001) by working on the researcher's own emotional responses, such as the uncomfortable (Evans et al., 2017), fear (Duvoux, 2015), and the uncanny (Beyes & Steyaert, 2013). Unsurprisingly, this literature argues for a more engaged, immersed, and performative researcher with a ‘capacity to affect and be affected in order to produce interpretations that may transform the things that they interpret’ (Gherardi, 2018, p. 742).

However, the affinities between SRE and non-representational ethnography are not straightforward. First, a fundamental difference between SRE's intention to get close to the non-verbal, embodied, and affective and the similar ambition in non-representational methodologies is SRE's intention to follow the transitions from the non-representational to the representational, or, to use Thévenot's vocabulary, from the particular to general forms. This difference is important to consider in light of a persistent methodological debate in non-representational ethnographies about the ‘distortion’ of lived experience through representation, which has resulted in a tendency to idealise the non-representational as a truer form of knowledge (Barnett, 2008; Juhlin & Holt, 2022). SRE, by contrast, is only concerned with the immediacy of experience insofar as it provides a window into the cognitive formats with which actors engage and shift their engagement.

Second, while SRE's main concern is ontological, in the sense of theorising how and by what means people engage, non-representational ethnography has been criticised for overemphasising epistemology and the researcher's own engagement. For instance, some prominent anthropologists have indeed lamented a crisis of ethnography, pointing to the dangers of limited ambition to theorise and, thus, to a potential situation of ‘intellectual suicide’ in which the discipline fails to produce new and original insights (da Col & Graeber, 2011, p. ix). Others have stressed the ontological commitment of ethnography (Ingold, 2014, p. 388), recasting the relation between methodology, ontology, and epistemology and pushing for an ‘ontological turn’ in anthropology (Holbraad & Pedersen, 2017). Intervening from the discipline of sociology, Wacquant has called for binding ‘ethnography more firmly to theory, against the epistemological illusions of Geertzian “thick description”, the philosophic naïveté of Chicago-style empiricism, and the glamorous seductions of postmodern storytelling’ (Wacquant, 2015, p. 4).

While these critiques may jeopardise the shared ground between SRE and new approaches to ethnography, the ‘ontological commitment’ of SRE is not necessarily aligned with the critics mentioned above. For instance, Wacquant's commitment to ‘detect and document (…) the cognitive, conative, and affective building blocks of habitus’ differs from SRE's commitment to map engagement's moral, composite, and versatile nature (Hansen, 2023). Thus, the coming sections explore the methodological implications of the distinct ontological commitment of SRE. In other words, what does methodological sensitivity entail? This serves two purposes. First, the article adds to the methodological debate within French pragmatic sociology by, for the first time, discussing the role of ethnography in SRE. Second, by doing so, the article also presents an intervention in debates about ethnography by giving nuance and clarity to our understanding of the complex role of engagement as an important ontological phenomenon rather than (merely) an issue related to the researcher's immersion/detachment (Pilbeam et al., 2023) or ethical commitments (Low & Merry, 2010; Pacheco-Vega & Parizeau, 2018). We do so in the following by discussing three key focal points—plurality, investment, and versatility—of the ontological commitment of SRE.

This section introduces the different regimes of engagement that form the basis for the subsequent sections and are at the core of Thévenot's sociology. We briefly unfold how each regime relates to a notion of good and of reality and how they can be tested and lead to material, moral, and political adjustments. We then discuss how studying plural regimes of engagement, unlike the ‘descriptive pluralism’ of orders of worth, brings a classic ethnographic question of the researcher's own engagement or even immersion to the forefront. We relate this classic ethnographic question to its recent treatment in non-representational methodologies and show how SRE adds nuance to the methodological ambition of getting close to the field. Notably, it adds a sensitivity towards not just actors’ plural forms of engagement, at both the representational and non-representational levels, but also how the researcher's engagement must take different forms.

In SRE, the ‘descriptive pluralism’ of the model of orders of worth is extended to a plurality of regimes of engagement. The regimes of engagement (Thévenot, 2011) comprise engaging in familiarity, exploration, plans, and justification. In familiar engagement, people invest in the environment by continued use and by seeking comfort or ease in their surroundings. This regime of engagement is sustained through the comfort of familiarity and therefore requires a union between bodily gestures and an environment adapted to provide local convenience (Thévenot, 2000, p. 70). Unlike familiarity, which reaches into the past through habit, the regime of engaging in exploration² is purely present-oriented. It seeks constant novelty by reconfiguring the environment and one's own body to produce ‘the shock of the new’ and is tightly linked to contemporary forms of production and consumption (Thévenot, 2014a, p. 15). As opposed to both familiarity and exploration, engagement in plans is future-oriented, as it entails the capacity to project oneself into the future through a rational and functional relationship with one's surroundings. Lastly, the regime of justification refers to engagement in justification, critique, and pragmatic compromises between a plurality of ‘orders of worth’ with various temporal orientations depending on the order of worth.

Thévenot's development of French pragmatic sociology towards a plurality of cognitive and evaluative formats centres around the ways in which people coordinate with themselves and their environment; it is this coordination Thévenot captures with the notion of ‘engagement’. Each engagement values a particular good and provides different frameworks for apprehending one's reality (Hansen, 2016, p. 132). While often studied as part of the practice turn in sociology, the term ‘engagement’ is chosen over ‘action’ or ‘practice’ because the latter tend to focus on the human agent (Thévenot, 2007, p. 415). In contrast, engagement emphasises the dependency on the environment to support and challenge cognitive formats (Thévenot, 2000, p. 72). As a term, engagement also implies a commitment to a good or a quest as the cognitive format through which the environment is understood (Thévenot, 2007, p. 415). Such commitments, or rather investments, are subject to reality tests when they are realised in the evaluation of some performance (Thévenot, 2000, p. 68). Pragmatic tests lead to tensions that give rise not only to material adjustments but also to adjustments of moral or political positions (Thévenot, 2000, p. 68). In sum, ‘regimes [of engagement] are social devices which govern our way of engaging with our environment inasmuch as they articulate two notions: (a) an orientation towards some kind of good; (b) a mode of access to reality’ (Thévenot, 2000, p. 75). Regimes of engagement thus add a moral element to the interest in practices absent from frameworks building on a notion of already negotiated social norms (Thévenot, 2000, p. 67).

To answer the question of what kind of methodological sensitivity the plurality of engagements requires, the researcher needs to consider possible ways to methodologically embrace more proximate and intimate forms of engagement that are more demanding to observe (Thévenot, 2020, p. 230). Thévenot's extension of French pragmatic sociology's ‘descriptive pluralism’ from a focus on disputes to engagement and social action brings it close to classic questions in ethnography concerning the engagement and ‘immersion’ of the researcher that will enable her to map the ‘lifeworlds’ of people (Dumont, 2023; Pilbeam et al., 2023). In classic early ethnographic field research, duration was seen as essential, with many arguing for long-term fieldwork of as long as several years (e.g., Malinowski, 1922). More recently, scholars have lamented ‘quick-and-dirty’ ethnography (Geertz, 1998, note 3). In response, other studies using non-representational and sensory approaches have argued for more ‘intense’ routes to knowledge and have shown how short-term field studies can also offer deep understanding (Pink, 2009). Thus, non-representational ethnography argues that (even) more attention should be paid to the ‘habituated and routine nature of everyday existence’, the ‘precognitive, non-discursive’ (Vannini, 2015, p. 322, p. 318), and to ‘embodiment as an affective experience’ (Gherardi, 2018, p. 747) and emotions (Hubbard et al., 2001).

In this way, SRE resonates with non-representational ethnography's epistemological considerations of embracing more ‘impressionistic’ methods in which the researcher is not only capturing affect but is also affectively tuned (Vannini, 2015, p. 321) and moves from ‘being there’ to ‘being with’ in the field (Gherardi, 2018, p. 745). Thévenot has addressed the dynamic between the engagement of the researchers and the engagement they are trying to capture. For instance, he argues that in studies of familiarity, the researcher needs to give something of himself in the interaction, to be emotionally involved, and to confide in the other, thus moving the format from an interview to a ‘conversation’:

Yet it is important to note that the ontological commitment of SRE differs from that of non-representational ethnography. In its ontological commitment, non-representational ethnography wants to access a more authentic level of everyday life, such as the ‘temporal complex lifeworlds’ and the ‘enchanting processes through which life constantly mystifies us’ (Vannini, 2015, p. 320). In this sense, non-representational ethnography tends to idealise closeness.

SRE intends to follow the transition from the particular and proximate to general and public forms. On the one hand, non-representational ethnographies are cautious about what they see as domesticating lived experience through such representation (see Wetherell, 2013, for a critique). SRE, on the other hand, approaches representation and generalisation as something that not only researchers but also actors do. Whereas the methodological interest in affect and embodied knowing thus tends to prioritise the non-representational (Barnett, 2008, pp. 188ff), SRE is interested in how actors transform something non-representational (familiar engagement) into something representable and in how they handle tensions between different regimes of engagement—for instance, how formats for expressing concern and the embedded moral justifications in standards favour some engagements over others (Cheyns, 2014; Thévenot, 2009).

Thus, whereas non-representational methodologies ‘fix’ actors’ experience in an immediacy that does not refer to anything outside itself, SRE studies actors’ capacity to shift between engagements. Thus, SRE requires a more ‘mixed’ methodology. The mixed methodology has implications for capturing engagements in both space and time. We will return to the question of spatial positioning from intimate to public venues in the next section, focusing for now on the methodological considerations related to the way the plurality of engagements entails differing temporalities.

The plurality of engagements and their differing temporalities also opens and nuances methodological considerations of time. In studies of engagements, the question of time is not solely a matter of short- or long-term fieldwork but must relate to each of the four engagement regimes’ distinct temporal orientations. Explorative engagement is exclusively present-oriented (Brahy, 2014), while engagement in a plan implies projection into the future, and familiar engagement is reassured through past habituation (Thévenot, 2014a, pp. 13–15). The same variety is evident within the regime of justification depending on the order of worth. Methodologically, this challenges the researcher, who needs to consider that while, for instance, explorative engagement is momentaneous, familiar engagement's idiosyncratic customs, habits, and repetitive patterns of actions can require time in order for the researcher to be able to notice and recognise them. This affects the possibility of ‘intense routes to knowledge’ (Pink & Morgan, 2013).

In particular, the differences between explorative, planned, and familiar engagements have, in our research, presented methodological challenges connected to the question of time (Carlsen, 2020, 2022). While actors engaging in the exploratory regime's present-oriented quest for ‘shock of the new’ can be studied with more intense methods, more time seems necessary to be able to recognise repetition and patterns of accommodation, for instance, through the observation of the recurrence of acts, movements, people, and things that are particular to the familiar engagement. In addition, to understand the engagement in justification (and critique), it is important to know how present and past compromises came about. Such inquiries may entail archival research and interviewing actors with memories of past events. To conclude, a combination of ethnographic methods should be able to both get close to people in their familiar and intimate environment and capture the representational and discursive level. This is necessary to grasp the actor as she engages differently with herself and the world and shifts between engagements.

In this section, we focus on the relation between regimes of engagement and the material environment. We show how the emphasis on the material environment in SRE relates to politics because it relates to the connection between personal investments and what can be seen and studied as public or common. The question of how to study materiality and space is also of central concern to non-representational methodologies. Here, space is often associated with that which exceeds the cognitive. We compare these approaches to the study of materiality to show how SRE connects an interest in the environment and materiality to the methodological and political question of making personal investments and concerns available to others.

Forms of engagement take place in response to environments that are formatted to provide support for cognitive formats. The environment (once put in the right format) helps to reinforce a particular form of engagement, such as when engaging in familiarity ‘accommodates things in the environment with which idiosyncratic dependencies are woven’ (Thévenot, 2019, p. 228). The environment is thus a spatial extension of forms of engagement, which makes it possible to study materially the transformation of an engagement ‘from intimate formats of closeness to formats required for commonality and politics’ (Thévenot, 2019, p. 228). To study physical and spatial environments is, therefore, to study how these environments are formatted to support a particular engagement. This also calls attention to the ‘investment in forms’, such as classifications, standards, rules, measuring units, benchmarks, and tests, that format people's engagement, enabling both coordination and subordination (Thévenot, 1984, 2014a).

The regimes of engagement add a moral element to the interest in space and materiality, where non-observable elements are often disregarded as representational discourse. In SRE, adding a moral element to spatial analysis is also a precondition for studying politics. Salminen's (2018) study of how people reason spatially as they justify their views shows, by using written arguments in online discussions as empirical material, that people refer to spatial metaphors and material objects when they work to establish a common ground through shared moral values. Spatiality and a shared living environment (Thévenot, 2019) thus support moral ideas. Spatial analysis can overcome the methodological challenge of studying familiar engagement because it does not involve verbal appeals to public justification or expressions of individual opinions and plans. Spatial analysis might, then, be used to study personal concerns as they are expressed non-verbally through use. In fact, familiar engagement might be difficult to express in words but has to be ‘proved’ through presence or via ‘personal affinities to common-places’ (Thévenot, 2019, p. 228). Yet, in SRE, personal concerns or familiar engagement must always go through a formatting process, making communication possible. Therefore, even when the researcher takes space seriously in social analysis, spatial observations must be combined with in situ interviews that situate such observations. While material configurations are extensions of and provide support for regimes of engagement, they rarely explicate the moral goods, intentions, plans, or evaluations invested in them. In other words, space and things in SRE do not speak for themselves. Without this, a spatially sensitive analysis misses out on how reality is engaged in practice (Thévenot, 2000). In short, we need to understand how human beings qualify their formation of space and things. To assess the level of qualification, spatial observations must be supplemented with the context given by in situ conversations—conversations in and around space.

As engagements are characterised by a personal investment in a good, engagement studies begin from the single actor's engagement and coordination with others, their environment, and their physical surroundings. Rather than taking shared collective norms as a starting point, SRE takes the actors as its starting point to understand how shared coordination is formed. Methodologically, some known and developed ethnographic methods such as shadowing (Czarniawska, 2007; Wolcott, 1973) and the walking interview/go-along (Kusenbach, 2003) offer themselves as valuable tools for understanding actors’ close attachments to the environment and materiality and for observing a person's activities and movements across various contexts, environments, and situations.

A walking interview is a conversation form that situates close attachments in space and materiality while bringing about a tentative transformation of personal concerns to something communicable. It depends on language, but language is connected to a practical engagement in the situation (in this case, walking through a space that is the object of familiar engagement). Walking interviews make room for reflexive evaluations as part of practice—woven into space through judgements made along the way—rather than as retrospective discursive sense-making. The combination of participant-observation and interview in walking interviews makes it possible for the researcher to ask questions, listen, and observe (Kusenbach, 2003). When struggling to understand what we can learn about social processes from spatial change—something which spatial observations alone cannot arrive at—walking interviews help link spatial change to changing forms of engagement. Kusenbach (2003) emphasises that walking interviews (or go-alongs) should always be conducted as ‘natural go-alongs’, meaning the researcher should follow the informants on trips and outings they would generally go on because this is close to the subjects’ authentic practices and interpretations (Kusenbach, 2003, pp. 463–464). As the ambition for SRE is not to get closer to some authentic practice of the actor but to understand the different engagements and the moral goods invested in specific forms, the researcher does not have to follow actors in their daily routines (even though this is also relevant) but can arrange an interview in an environment of analytical interest and still learn about the moral goods, intentions, plans or evaluations that are invested into the formation of space. Space is of interest to the researcher only insofar as it gives an insight into the engaged reality of a situation, but this does not reduce space to the mere representation of forms of engagement: space also works performatively on forms of engagement.

In the method of shadow observations, the researcher shadows a single individual in their activities and movements across various contexts, environments, and situations for a specific duration. This approach allows for observing shifts or tensions in the engagement enacted and experienced by the individual over the selected period (Carlsen, 2022). The focus on specific personal acts of proximity, bodily gestures, and movements can reveal shifts in engagement and attempts to engage others in a particular manner. Therefore, shadow observations have proven to be a valuable tool in our study of both close forms of engagement and shifts between engagements. Getting acquainted with an actor's behavioural patterns supports attention to shifts in the person's actions and expressions in her interactions with the environment and others.

These two methods can help the researcher pay attention to closeness. Both walking interviews and shadowing thus help transform proximate investments into a format the researcher can understand. The transformation is not a ‘domestication’ in reducing non-representational experience into mere signs of that experience. However, it points the researcher in the direction of the politics involved in having to transform one's close engagements with others. First, as ‘closeness’ invokes space, we must consider the spatiality of our methods when attempting to study close attachments, such as how a space is deliberately maintained or neglected or how material measures are taken to secure either privacy or exposure of certain activities. However, getting close to such material details is not an aim in itself, as in the idea of ‘immersion’ (Wacquant, 2015), but is intimately tied to an analytical ambition to understand the ‘closeness of politics’ (Thévenot, 2020).

Thévenot emphasises how space must be taken seriously when analysing how personal concerns become political. Because orders of worth are not necessarily made explicit by actors who engage in close attachments where explicit value claims are rarely present, the relation to space and materials gives the researcher an alternative access to these orders of worth. This allows the researcher to move from the facts of materiality (fieldwork) to the values at stake in urban politics (analysis). Therefore, getting close is not enough—one must also maintain enough analytical distance to catch a glimpse of how subjects try to ‘overcome’ this closeness. This means that when we aim for closeness methodologically, it is with the ambition of studying the formation of this closeness into common formats—that is, into politics. Closeness in SRE maintains an analytical distance, which is at risk of disappearing in more radical appeals to closeness (Juhlin & Holt, 2022). Therefore, getting close to the person is not about getting closer to a certain kind of authenticity, as in non-representational methods. It is about understanding the actors’ investments in a moral good. The analytical distance is necessary to understand how close attachments can make it difficult for subjects to coordinate and obtain situational power.

In this section, we focus on a key ontological commitment and theoretical invention of SRE, which we call the versatility of engagement, and the challenges and possibilities this commitment poses for ethnography. Versatility means that actors can move between a trusting and a doubtful relationship with themselves and the world. We describe the ethnographic sensitivity required to capture trust and doubt and the ambition in SRE to understand how personal and weakly formatted concerns are made (or not made) into common issues.

An essential aspect of regimes of engagement is that there is a certain versatility to engagements (Thévenot, 2019). This versatility is the oscillation between two attitudes or stances: trust and doubt. For actors involved in any situation, there are the possibilities of either trusting the engagement or doubting it and the associated sacrifice. These movements between trust and doubt can be subtle shifts, adjustments, or powerful statements of critique. Either way, Thévenot describes this dynamic as the difference between closing or opening your eyes or between the two meanings of ‘conventional’ (Thévenot, 2009). When closing one's eyes, actors have blind confidence in the conventional form agreed upon by other actors and supported by the material equipment of the situation. Conventional here means what is established and accepted. Shifting from closed to open eyes, the actor experiences doubt and suspicion towards her material environment and the people around her. Here, the conventional becomes the arbitrary, inauthentic, and conformist—something that is ‘just’ a convention. This movement between closing and opening one's eyes is a fundamental aspect of the uncertain coordination among actors and between actors and their surroundings. The two stances, doubt and trust, look different in each engagement regime. Trust in familiarity is engaging routinely with the world, while trust in the regime of justification relies on public conventions.

The uncertainty of coordination requires the researcher to pay close attention to everyday tensions and everyday situations of critique, as well as critiques that are expressed more generally, for instance, in the public sphere. However, it also points to the importance of considering the good that comes from conventions. As Thévenot points out, sociology generally has a degree of scepticism towards conventions and often exercises a critical capacity in doubting formalities and conventions (Thévenot, 2015). This suspicion comes from the idea that the conventional sacrifices sincerity, authenticity, and actuality. While SRE is also often critical towards conventional forms such as standards and statistics, it also points to the ways in which the conventional has coordinating powers. It can bring people together to ‘the same meeting point’ (Thévenot, 2015, p. 196). It is, therefore, not enough to study either the conventional (or representational) agreed-upon forms or the insecure and doubtful engagements of actors. One is not more authentic than the other; they are two sides of the same coin. In SRE, the researcher should study the move from one of these sides to the other and the sacrifice that lies in both closing and opening one's eyes.

To study how and in what ways engagements are opened and closed, Thévenot suggests studying how engagement moves around invested forms (Thévenot, 2014b). This implies identifying situations of trust where the engagement is supported by the form and situations in which the form and the sacrifice it involves are doubted. Methodologically, this could involve the researcher using visual material, such as video (Breviglieri, 1999) or photography (Breviglieri, 2006; Meriluoto, 2023), to observe gestures of doubt and trust and to prompt emotion by bringing people back to situations that are visually captured by the researcher or by the participants themselves. Since the changes between doubt and trust in some of the regimes, especially the regime of familiarity, are not easily communicated in language and in a public way, studying these shifts ethnographically also challenges traditional ways of writing (Thévenot, 2014a). Here, literary forms, fictionalised in genres such as novels or more essayistic forms such as journals or memoirs, offer possible ways of communicating such ethnographies. At the same time, the researcher must be aware of these same forms in interviews or observations. If changes in trusting or doubting the form are articulated, it is often through literary or artistic forms, such as irony, comedy, artistic mimicry (such as telling one's life story as a fairy tale), or other forms of imitation. These methodological ideas can be useful, but how to precisely capture and communicate the very subtle shifts between opened and closed is still, we think, an open question.

Research that draws on artistic forms resembles the idea in non-representational ethnography of the creative and impressionistic researcher (Vannini, 2015). The ambition in SRE, however, is very different. While some non-representational literature seeks out creative processes for the sake of performativity and to ‘flirt’ with and avoid mere representation of reality (Vannini, 2015, p. 319), SRE is interested in following the different ways that doubt and trust manifest themselves and the way actors invest in conventional forms. How such forms are supported, closed, or opened is key to understanding actors’ coordination and engagement in the world. The challenge of SRE is to find formats of communicating research that represent the versatility of engagements. Approaching engagement as trusting and doubting is another important difference from non-representational methodology. Engagement remains evaluative even in its proximate forms of plans, familiarity, and exploration (Thévenot, 2023) rather than merely affective and pre-cognitive as in non-representational ethnography (see Barnett, 2008).

Invested forms can be small, for a small group, and short-lived, but they can also be enduring and common structures. SRE does not study contingency, doubt, and discomfort to show that these states exist in everyday life or to get closer to authenticity or vitality; instead, it is to understand how personal and weakly formatted concerns are made (or not made) into common issues. Studying situations of doubt and trust is thus a way of studying politics. This is very different from non-representational ethnography, which has been criticised precisely for not paying attention to issues of power and politics (Vannini, 2015, p. 324) by refusing to explain away affects with the reproduction of structures. Trying moments and tests, even subtle experiences of doubt such as unease, reveal actors’ moral and political engagements with the world, even if these engagements do not become fully articulated critiques.

From our discussion of three important focal points—plurality, investment, and versatility—of the ontological commitment of SRE, we suggest how future research interested in issues of affect, embodiment, and materiality with and beyond the analytical framework of SRE can explore the methodological advantages of this theoretical approach.

First, the idea in SRE of a plurality of the regimes of engagement leads to the question of how to capture this plurality. To understand the plurality of engagements, the researcher needs a combination of methods composed to capture the differing engagements. Methods, such as interviews, are formatted to gain insight into the engagements that are easily communicated verbally and thus already formatted to a ‘public’ level. Other methods, such as observations or in situ interviews, can more easily reveal engagements ‘below the public’. What is important in SRE is that these engagements are related, hence the analytical interest in the shifts and tensions between the different engagements. In line with a non-representational methodology, it is important to go ‘below’ the discursive and representational level, but this should be combined with methods that capture this level and, most importantly, the relationship between these.

Second, the idea of investment in form leads to the question of how to be sensitive to people's attempts to invest in their environment to secure goods, including the most intimate and proximate. Combining different methods can help the researcher capture this. However, more specifically, hybrids between participant-observation and interviews (Kusenbach, 2003), such as the walking interview or shadowing, help transform close attachments into formats that researchers can understand. In addition, they help the researcher gain insight into how actors transform personal attachments into public concerns and the moral investments they make in their material and physical environment. Unlike a non-representational methodology, getting close to the person is not about sharing unmediated lifeworlds with research participants. Instead, it is about, on a more ontological basis, understanding the goods people are invested in and the sacrifice this entails.

Third, SRE's idea of versatility and the two different stances of doubt and trust lead to the question of how to study these two states, especially the subtle changes between them. Methodologically, this is still, as we see it, an open question, but drawing on artistic formats, such as different poetic or literary writing styles (Thévenot, 2014b; Van Buskirk & Zorin, 2012) or incorporating images and pictures (Meriluoto, 2023; Thévenot, 2022) into the data collection, could be one way of approaching this. Even though these ideas resemble the non-representational idea of a creative and impressionistic researcher, the ambition in SRE is different. SRE studies situations of trying and test because they show us how personal and weakly formatted concerns are made (or not made) into common issues, and what is at stake in this process. Studying situations of doubt and trust is thus a way of studying politics insofar as politics is understood as making something available for dispute.

Thévenot is, he states, ‘deeply concerned by the various ways the natural and artificial equipment of the human world is involved in diverse conceptions of the good’ (2000, p. 65). The sociology of engagement enquires into this dynamic adjustment. While emphasising embodied knowledge on the limits of language, a methodology for the sociology of engagement remains attentive to the capacity to take part in ‘games of giving and asking for reasons’ (Barnett, 2008, p. 187). It balances between the implicit (embodied knowledge, affect, emotion) and that which is made available for and by analysis: ‘What is shared is not the gesture which might be hardly understandable, but the mode of engagement from which this gesture gets its propriety’ (Thévenot, 2000, p. 74). An example of how the sociology of engagement remains willing to take part in games of giving and asking for reasons is its view on politics. The point of expanding the scope of politics towards affect is not to remove the study of politics from its concern with language or to rethink politics altogether but to seek out the relations between the personal and existing political formats.

Looking at the current turn towards non-representational methodologies, we have found inspiration to discuss methodological challenges within SRE and to suggest its lessons for current interests in affect, materiality, and embodiment. We suggest that studies within SRE require the researcher's personal and bodily engagement with the people in the field while asking them questions, observing them, or walking with them. Through personal engagement, the researcher gains access to situations in which engagements unfold themselves, between different regimes as well as between eyes open and closed, and at the same time uses the experience of, for instance, surprise, ease, groping, hesitation, or unease as setoffs for further investigations in the field. In other words, method within SRE is also a matter of engaging with engagements. What is different from non-representational ideas in this methodological effort is that SRE's concern with the immediacy of experience is also a concern with the way actors invest in common forms, in the way that personal engagement does or does not transform into public forms or is oppressed by such. Thus, understanding actors’ cognitive formats, which are not directly observable, is an integral part of the methodological challenge.

As non-representational ethnography has been criticised for overemphasising epistemology, the ambition in SRE is ontological. How can we understand engagement as an empirical phenomenon? Engaging oneself as a researcher and ‘getting close’ is not a goal in itself but is intimately tied to an analytical ambition to understand the role closeness plays in politics and to catch a glimpse of how people try to ‘overcome’ this closeness and transform personal, local engagement into public justifications and critique. This ambition requires the researcher to work with an analytical gaze that allows them to translate close attachments into public engagement. In this way, the researcher can unfold engagements’ moral and political dimensions, human beings’ efforts to make themselves heard, and the ways in which their voices are being formatted. Insights into engagements are achieved through continuous methodological experimentations and reflections about the researcher's own engagement in the field and about how this possibly opens or delimits insights into engagements.

All authors contributed equally to the article.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).