Page - 13 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Rainer Kazig, Damien Masson, Rachel Thomas | Atmospheres and Mobility 13 method research designs emerged and were discussed. All in all, the still ongoing method- ological innovations contributed to the realisation of numerous empirical studies that helped to understand the (im)mobilities of people – that are mainly in the focus of this special issue – as embodied and embedded practices, but without addressing atmospheres and developing approaches that allow to grasp explicitly, and in a differentiated manner, the sensual qualities of the environment. The research on atmospheres is faced with specific challenges. They are due to their onto- logical character that is already, at a theoretical level, difficult to describe. Böhme (2001) – drawing back on Schmitz – considers them as half-things [Halbdinge], Thibaud (2003) as a medium. The characterisation of atmospheres as medium is quite useful to discuss one impor- tant methodological challenge. It stresses the relational quality of atmospheres that consists in linking the sensual qualities of the environment with the individual state of an individual being in this environment. One major challenge for empirical research on atmospheres is thus to capture the state of individuals in relation to the sensual qualities of their environment and, based on this, to understand and to describe at a small scale level how this relation is established and how it changes in space and time. The existing empirical work on atmospheres meets this challenge only to a limited extent. Very often the relational quality of atmospheres is described only imprecisely. This deficit in the advance of empirical approaches is, to a certain degree, linked to the history of the research on atmospheres. In the English- and German-speaking tradition, it was established initially in philosophy or in human geography and other social sciences in form of conceptual and theoretical writings. As a result, the interest to develop empirical ap - proaches to atmospheres, and a related methodological discussion, was, in the beginning, absent in the research on atmospheres, and emerged only recently (Kazig 2007, Anderson & Ash 2015, McCormack 2015). As already discussed in scientific literature (Adey et al. 2013, Kazig & Masson 2015), the situation is different for the French research on architectural and urban ambiances. Established after all as multidisciplinary approach in the field of research on archi- tecture and urban studies, it went, since the beginning, along with empirical studies and the development of specific atmospheric methods, notably making use of “situated experiments” (Atienza & Masson 2015), like the commented walks [parcours commentés] (Thibaud 2001) and their adaptations that were quite important for the development of the French-speaking empir - ical research on ambiances1. At a very general level, two approaches to capture atmospheres can be distinguished. The first one is built on an experimental research design that is established in order to capture the atmosphere in specific public spaces. The above cited commented walks represent this approach best. It is an in situ approach that consists, on the one hand, on a combination of methods that allow for capturing the changing state of an individual walking as well as the corresponding changing sensual qualities of its environment. On the other hand, it also develops a framework on how to analyse and to relate the different types of data. Due to this combination of different methods of data collection with a theoretically well-justified framework to relate and to ana- lyse the data, it is possible to capture and to describe precisely atmospheres of public spaces at 1 For a complete view on many methods developed to investigate architectural and urban ambiances, see Gros- jean and Thibaud (2001).