Sarah Bro Trasmundi is a cognitive ethnographer, who combines ethnography with the theory of radical embodied cognition to investigate how humans manage cognitive events in different settings such as reading, emergency medicine, dance and psychotherapy:
– This interdisciplinary focus emphasizes how professional action underlines various forms of cognitive and social life that involves language, tools, organizational procedures, shared expertise, cultural values and social rules, Trasmundi explains.
At LCE she is going to investigate how embodied imagination emerges in reading and how the imagination relates to breaks and pace-making in reading. The objective of Trasmundi’s project is to provide a new model that grounds reading in embodied imagining. The project focuses on the function of the messy and ruptured nature of reading (breaks) – which is underexplored in the reading literature.
The project thus tests the overall hypothesis: Readers who enact a ruptured and unpredictable reading flow outperform readers who enact a less ruptured reading flow when measured in terms of imagining quality. Trasmundi uses cognitive ethnography to investigate how skilled university students’ imaginative reading is constrained by reading tasks and media (such as reading for pleasure and for a test on screen or on paper) and reading flow (how breaks serve as functional ‘time-outs’). It uses video-observations, interviews, physiological measures (such as heart rate), personality and creativity tests to test how readers engage with the texts. The project results open up new ways to organize reading practices for instance by manipulating breaks during reading.
Trasmundi looks forward to the interdisciplinarity in LCE, which she finds inspiring:
– I look forward to working with literary scholars, psychologists and linguists at LCE and to engage in critical dialogues with them.
Trasmundi explains that she herself works at the intersection between cognition, language and imagination, and she expects collaborations with people who work with slightly different, yet compatible approaches to hers .
– I am especially eager to get to discuss current work on imaginative reading with experts in fields spanning literature studies and book history, affective-cognitive science, neuroscience and also the phenomenological aspects of experience, she says.
For further information on Trasmundi’s work