Walking With 360° Video Immersive Empathetic Ethnographic Encounters With Syrians

Immersive media technologies continue to provide new and challenging opportunities for visual anthropology. Increasingly, ethnographic filmmakers use small 360° video cameras for anthropological fieldwork. In the light of these new technologies, I aim to re-assess empathetic encounter and embodied knowledge, sharing my own sensorial fieldwork experiences, sensory memory, and the sense of presence. This study employs 360° video technology as a qualitative research tool in a multi-sited and multi-modal urban visual ethnographic enquiry with Syrian refugees living in secondary cities in Sweden, Turkey, and Jordan. It explores the everyday experiences of Syrian refugees, namely their life worlds. I use 360° video as a walking method during participant observation of Syrian families, enabling me to take visual fieldnotes and emplacing me in the field. I critically reflect on the affordances of 360° video for ethnographic fieldwork and argue that this method is central to developing more situated and embodied knowledge in the field of sensorial and visual anthropology.