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.
Josepha Wessels (2026) studied this question.