The Social Life of Things in Interviews: Activating Non-Human Informants in Empirical Research

This article develops a methodological framework for leveraging the entanglement of practices and things in interviews. Our praxeological approach offers a processual heuristic for activating things as research participants. Adapting Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things, we analyze this activation through the triad of candidates, context, and phase. Drawing on posthumanist inquiry, we demonstrate how objects and interviewees momentarily fuse into a hybrid, collective informant. This approach operationalizes the methodological imperative to “follow the updates,” treating technological change as a primary guide to past social and cultural practices. The framework allows researchers to critically engage with the material agency of technical disruptions while foregrounding the researcher’s ethical responsibility and the necessity of ethnographic “aftercare.” Our findings illustrate how things in interviews function not merely as mnemonic devices, but as active directors of the research encounter.