Knowing through the Racialized Senses

by Sachi Sekimoto and Christopher Brown 

In this chapter, the authors draw attention to sensing race in the practice of sensory ethnography. By drawing insights from Frantz Fanon’s phenomenology of racialized embodiment, they bring sensorial awareness to the implications of race in ethnographic inquiry. First, they articulate racism as a formation of racialized relations of sensing between the sensing subject and the sensed object, which cumulates into a community of sensing/sensed bodies along the color lines. Second, they bring attention to the racialized body—and how it learns to feel and be felt in the social world. Lastly, they discuss the notion of emplacement through the phenomenology of racialized embodiment. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of racialized sensory awareness in the practice of sensory ethnography and considers how sensory ethnographers may exercise critical self-reflexivity with their racialized embodiment, emplaced bodies, and relations of sensing that are formed in ethnographic practice. 

Sachi Sekimoto, PhD. is Professor and Chair in the Department of Communication Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. As a native of Tokyo, Japan, who resides in the U.S., her scholarship is inspired by the experiences of traversing and adapting to multiple sensory and cultural paradigms. Her scholarly interests include phenomenological and sensory experiences of culture, identity, and embodiment. She has written various articles and book chapters on issues related to the embodied politics of transnational identity, phenomenology of racialized and gendered embodiment, and intercultural communication in global contexts. She is a co-author of Race and the Senses: The Felt Politics of Racial Embodiment (Routledge, 2020) and Globalizing Intercultural Communication: A Reader (Sage, 2016). 

Christopher Brown, PhD. is the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He  earned his PhD in Intercultural Communication with emphasis in race and philosophy from the University of New Mexico. His research interests explore the discourses of white supremacist groups, white-male elites’ constructions of race, and phenomenology of racialized embodiment. He is a co-author of a forthcoming book, Race and the Senses: The Felt Politics of Racial Embodiment (Routledge, 2020). He has published books chapters, encyclopedia entries, book reviews, and articles in such journals as the Communication Monographs, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Communication Studies, Howard Journal of Communications, and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly. He received an Executive Leadership Fellowship from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently a Luoma Leadership fellow.

Getting a grip on new objects, technologies, and sensations through aura, presence, and mimesis

by Mark Paterson  

Everyday life is full of artificially engineered sensations which become habitual over time. During ethnographic fieldwork in labs and startups at the turn of the millennium, technologies such as virtual gearboxes, simulated syringe injections, and haptic bodysuits were experienced, which all tried to engineer the right “feel” for the user. How is a social scientist to get a grip on the empirical material, to convey through ethnography what these novel sensations felt like in person? Ultimately the analogy of ‘getting a grip’ on such sensations breaks down, it eludes our grasp. These concerns coincided nicely with the flowerings of ‘non-representational theory’. Consequently, some reflection on the development of sensory ethnography in the early days is offered which involves crossover with non-representational modes of encounter. Along with ‘presence’, some concepts from Walter Benjamin – ‘aura’ and ‘mimesis’ – are offered as ways to analyze recreations of sensory experience achieved through digital means.

Mark Paterson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh (USA). Along with articles published in humanities and social science journals he is author of the books The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Routledge, 2007), Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), and co-editor of Touching Place, Spacing Touch (Routledge, 2012). His most recent book is the third edition of Consumption and Everyday Life (Routledge 2023). His current research project is concerned with affects and the senses in human-robot interactions. He is on the Editorial Board of the journals The Senses and Society, Emotion, Space & Society, and Multimodality and Society.

Sensory Futures Ethnography 

by Sarah Pink 

In this chapter I outline and demonstrate sensory futures ethnography. What does the future feel like? How can sensory futures ethnography help us to constitute trusted futures in a world of climate change and automated systems and technologies? Ethnographic practice has conventionally remained ethically and theoretically focused on the present, as it slips over into the past. Now, I call for opening up ethnographic practice to the anticipatory modes through which we sense and experience immediate near and far futures. This means expanding theoretical and conceptual frameworks beyond the study of the senses and futures towards the experiential and anticipatory. It requires new experimental ethnographies capable of invoking futures in collaboration with participants, modes of being in simulated futures, and interdisciplinary ethnographic teamwork. I explore these questions with reference to two documentary filmmaking events, focused on air technology futures. 

Sarah Pink (PhD, FASSA) is Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab at Monash University, (Australia). Sarah is a design and futures anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, known for her innovative digital, visual and sensory methodologies, published in works including Doing Sensory Ethnography (2nd edition 2015), Doing Visual Ethnography (4th edition 2021), Digital Ethnography (2016) and Design Ethnography (2022). Other recent works include her books Energy Futures (2022), Anthropology of Technologies and Futures (2023) and Emerging Technologies / Life at the Edge of the Future (2023) and documentaries Smart Homes for Seniors (2021) and Digital Energy Futures (2022). 

Awareness, focus and nuance: reflexivity and reflective embodiment in sensory ethnography

by John Hockey and Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson

This chapter explores the “thorny issue” of engaging in reflexivity in sensory ethnographies and autoethnographies, considering why reflexivity is so important. Drawing on the authors’ experiences of undertaking sensory ethnographic studies of sports and physical cultures, and of the British army, it considers the role of reflexivity in this research, and how it has played out in various research settings. To give a feel for the challenges confronting the authors as sociologists and sociological phenomenologists, throughout the chapter key points are illustrated with detailed, grounded examples, to “show” how both have (jointly and individually) sought to engage in sustained reflexivity, particularly within those cultural and physical-cultural settings with which they are particularly familiar. Such settings have often generated experiences of intense sensory embodiment. The chapter portrays practical ways in which heightened reflexivity has been pursued, offering suggestions that might be useful to others contemplating sensory ethnographic research opportunities.

John Hockey is a sociological ethnographer at the University of Gloucestershire (UK). He has published research on sensory perceptions in work and sport as well as other small but fundamental things: ritual, routine, space, place and time, which are also present in sport and organizations. His original ethnographic work was a study of the UK infantry subculture. In 2010 at the British Sociological Association Conference, he was awarded a Sage Prize for sociological innovation, following a published paper on organisational senses. He continues to try and keep the ageing ethnographic eye sharp, via a combination of distance running and modern jazz.

Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson is Professor Emerita at the University of Lincoln (UK). A qualitative sociologist, she entered academia relatively late in life, initially working as an administrator in higher education, and then crossing the border into contract research. She has undertaken a range of ethnographic and autoethnographic studies, many of which could be deemed ‘insider’ (to various degrees) research. Her investigations into sensory, often ‘intense embodiment’ experiences include ethnographic research on physical cultures such as distance and cross-country running. She continues to supervise doctoral students, and to undertake research, grappling with the heady combination of sociology and phenomenology.

Sensing the city: multi-sensory participant observation and urban ethnography

by Cristina Moretti

What can sensory anthropology bring to the study of urban lives, encounters, and transformations? This chapter argues that an attention to the senses, embodiment, and sensory emplacement goes beyond providing a more comprehensive description of urban environments. It can help us attend to different ways of knowing in place, rethink some of the paradoxes and debates that animate city changes, and privilege our interlocutors’ insights, theoretical interventions, and enacted knowledge. Drawing from ethnographic encounters in Milan, Italy, and in Vancouver, Canada, this chapter follows three women’s sensed stories and observations of gentrification and housing precarity. Their multisensorial engagements attend to places “in between” and in transformation, and constitute openings for them to participate and intervene in urban debates.

Cristina Moretti is a sensory and urban anthropologist interested in how people inhabit, narrate, theorize, and co-imagine city spaces. She is an Assistant Professor at Simon Fraser University (Canada), a co-founder of the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography, and the author of Milanese Encounters: Public Space and Vision in Contemporary Urban Italy (2015).

Talking about felt spaces: on vagueness and clarity in interviews

by Mikkel Bille 

In recent decades atmospheres have become a central object of study in urban and sensory studies. How does a place feel? How can such a sensuous and affective phenomenon challenge conventional theories of space and perception? Particularly in phenomenological and affect theory approaches there is the fundamental premise that atmospheres cannot be reduced to words. Quite the opposite actually: Identifying, articulating and representing atmospheres fixates and reduces them to something that defies the very nature of atmospheres as a concept. Rather, they must be felt. This raises questions about how we can know something about them. While the theoretical elaborations of the concept of atmospheres have been dominant, methodological discussions of the experiences of atmospheres are rarer and have ranged from ethnographic fieldwork to artistic explorations and auto-ethnography. This article takes a slightly different approach by asking: What do words reveal about atmospheres? Agreeing that there is something about atmospheres that are beyond words, the article nonetheless explores how people talk about atmospheres, and how vague articulations are part of describing atmospheres as an aspect of lived life. Based on two examples from an extensive interview material on atmosphere, lighting, and experiences of the city, the article discusses interview technique, vagueness and sensory ethnography, by honing in on the small details of everyday life. From the feeling of bringing “life” to a home through lighting, to the difficulty describing a square, the central argument is that by attending to the words we actually get an understanding of the cultural role of sensory and atmospheric experiences of urban life that make up not only what atmospheres are, but also what they should be.

Mikkel Bille is Professor in ethnology at University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London, and works on urban sensory ethnography, lighting technologies and materiality. He is the author of The Atmospheric City (with Siri Schwabe, 2023 Routledge), Living with Light (2019, Bloomsbury), Being Bedouin around Petra (2019, Berghahn), Materialitet (with Tim Flohr Sørensen, 2012 and 2019, Forlaget Samfundslitteratur), co-editor of special issue on “Staging Atmospheres” (2015), “Phenomenographies” (2019), and co-edited books Verden ifølge Humaniora (2019, Aarhus Universitetsforlag), Elements of Architecture (2016, Routledge), Politics of Worship in Contemporary Middle East (2013, Brill), and An Anthropology of Absence (2010, Springer).

Participatory sensory ethnography: a collaborative methodology for understanding everyday journeys of disabled people 

by Gordon Waitt and Theresa Harada

The chapter explains how the use of participatory sensory ethnography helped to understand how sensations affect the daily experiences of disabled people who rely on powered assistive technologies. The chapter is structured in three sections. The first outlines the research design background and its grounding in disability studies. The second discusses our participatory sensory ethnography under the headings: recruitment, embodied methods, and participatory data analysis. Co-researchers were both verbal and non-verbal. To conclude, the chapter outlines methodological learning working across critical disability studies and participant sensory ethnography,

Gordon Waitt is a Senior Professor in the Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space, School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong (Australia). His work has focused on generating positive social change through embodied spatial concepts. His significant contributions are in the fields of sexuality, gender, household sustainability, everyday mobility, and most recently domestic energy consumption. His co-authored books include Gay Tourism; Culture and Context (Haworth Press, 2006); Household Sustainability: Challenges and Dilemmas in Everyday Life (Edward Elgar, 2013) and Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures: Revealing Bodies (Channel View Publications, 2013).

Theresa Harada is an Associate Research Fellow in the Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space, School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong. Her research focuses on the intersection of climate change knowledge and household behaviours. It investigates why increasing awareness and knowledge of the impact of climate change has not significantly altered domestic household practices especially in the light of modes of personal mobility. Her interest in creative research methodologies is underpinned by the desire to critically engage with contemporary debates about social justice and environmental sustainability.

Sensory explorations of digital touch: tactile apprenticeship with new industrial robots

by Ned Barker and Carey Jewitt 

New waves of digital touch technologies are stretching the possibilities for how we “feel” the world around us and how we interact with each other, or with technologies such as robots. Sensory ethnography holds great, but relatively untapped, potential for researching this expanding landscape of digital touch. In light of this, this chapter introduces and reflects on the model of becoming a tactile apprentice that guided ethnographic research on the effects that new industrial robots have on manual labourers day-to-day experiences of touch. Methodological reflections foreground a set of challenges that were encountered when applying this hands-on participatory approach. Three touch filters are then offered as analytical and methodological concepts that were developed and applied to navigate these challenges. The chapter concludes by asserting the value of sensory ethnography, and in particular the model of becoming a tactile apprenticeship, when exploring new forms of digital touch. 

Ned Barker is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL Knowledge Lab. His work is focused on exploring the complex relationships between the body, technology, and society. Ned’s current project, BiohybridBodies, is funded by the Leverhulme trust and aims to better understand how Living Machines may come to affect our bodies, lives, and societies. His recent methods related publications include Moving Sensory Ethnography Online (Sage 2022), An Ethnographer Lured into Darkness (Springer 2020), Interactive skin through a social-sensory speculative lens (with Jewitt & Steimle, The Senses and Society, 2022) and A Collaborative Research Manifesto! An Early Career Response to Uncertainties (with 14 colleagues, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2023).

Carey Jewitt is Professor of Technology and Learning at the University College of London (UK) Knowledge Lab in the Dept of Culture, Communication and Media (IOE, UCL’s faculty of Education & Society), and Chair of UCL Collaborative Social Science Domain. Her work explores how the use of digital technologies shapes interaction and communication, engages with interdisciplinary methodological innovation and contributes to the development of multimodal theory. Carey is Director of InTouch an ERC Consolidator Award which investigates the sociality of digital touch technologies for future communication. She has led many interdisciplinary research projects funded by the ERC, ESRC, EPSRC, British Academy and a number of charities. Carey is a founding editor of two SAGE journals, Multimodality & Society, and Visual Communication. Her recent publications include the book, Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication (2020) and alongside articles including in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Qualitative Research, The Senses and Society.

Political, economic, and relational production of sense: negotiating sensory inequality and access in research on cochlear implantation in India

by Michele Friedner

Cochlear implants (CIs) are increasingly considered the “gold standard” in intervening on deafness and countries around the world have started programs providing them to children. This chapter draws from ethnographic research conducted from 2016-2022 in Indian clinics, hospitals, schools, and therapy centers and interviews with families, surgeons, government administrators, cochlear implant corporation representatives, audiologists, and speech and language therapists, among other stakeholders. The chapter analyzes the distinct kinds of sensory infrastructures that bring a normative sensorium—through cochlear implanted hearing—into being and how relationships between the state, CI manufacturer, family, and individual change over time and produce different kinds of outcomes. The chapter argues for the importance of exploring how the sense of hearing—and other senses—are politically, economically, and socially produced and maintained over the life course. The chapter also argues for the importance of intersensory research and for seeing all research as intersensory.

Michele Friedner is a medical anthropologist and associate professor in the University of Chicago’s Department of Comparative Human Development (USA). Her research focuses on deafness and disability in India and she is the author of Deaf Futures: Deafness and Cochlear Implant Infrastructures in India (2022, Minnesota UP) and Valuing Deaf Worlds in Urban India (2015, Rutgers UP). She is interested in how cochlear implants and other technologies both enable and constrain different sensory, modal, and relational ways of being in the world and she analyzes the Indian state’s interventions in the realm of disability. She has also published widely in anthropology, sensory studies, south Asian studies, and disability studies journals as well as written commentaries/perspectives pieces for the New England Journal of Medicine and Scientific American.

Sensory degradation and somatic labor: critical sensory ethnography in hypermodern times

by Simon Gottschalk

Combining scholarship on the senses, on sensory ethnography, and on hypermodernism, this chapter presents a number of arguments about sensory degradation, somatic labor, and the importance of a critical sensory ethnography for the present moment. The first section discusses three major sources of sensory degradation (confusion, acceleration, and interactions with digital devices). The second reviews key innovations and challenges of sensory ethnography. The third section proposes and illustrates the concept of somatic labor, and suggests that it can serve as a lens that could inform critical sensory ethnographic projects. The concluding section suggests some research topics for critical sensory ethnographic projects and discusses their relevance for the present moment.

Simon Gottschalk is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (USA). For the past several years, Gottschalk’s work has revolved around the social and psychological effects of our increasingly online lives in areas such as work, education, family life, cognitive and emotional aptitudes, interactions, and our sense of self, etc. He has been interviewed extensively by the local media, and is cited in Cnet, the New York Times and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. He is a former president of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and former editor of its flagship journal Symbolic Interaction. He also is an associate at the Paris-based International Research Center on Hypermodern Individuals and Societies. Gottschalk is the co-author of The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture (Routledge, 2012), and the author of many book chapters and articles that provide a critical social psychological approach to topics such as computer-mediated communication, hypermodern theory, mass media, popular culture, terrorism, mental disorders, youth cultures, and others.

Playful Sensuous Pedagogies: Observations and Reflections on Teaching Sensual Ethnography

by Dennis Waskul

This chapter reflects on the unique challenges of teaching ethnography that emphasizes the value and potential of sensual ethnography. Grounded in over two decades of the author’s experiences teaching ethnography this chapter offers observations and reflections on what the author has learned. Based within snippets of ethnographic purposive storytelling, and reflections on those experiences, this chapter seeks to offer useful pedagogical ideas. The author grounds and reflects on the unique challenges of teaching what can be learned but not taught, how to encourage students to recognize and expand on modalities of data collection and re-presentation, and concludes with general commentary on sensuous pedagogy and the merits of embracing play as a strategy for learning.

Dennis Waskul is a Professor of Sociology and Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Minnesota State University, Mankato (USA). He has authored or co-authored numerous books including The Supernatural in Society, Culture, and History (Temple University Press, 2018), Ghostly Encounters (Temple University Press, 2016), Popular Culture as Everyday Life (Routledge, 2016), The Senses in Self, Culture, and Society (Routledge, 2011), Body/Embodiment (Ashgate, 2006), net.seXXX (Peter Lang, 2004), and Self-Games and Body-Play (Peter Lang, 2003). He has published many journal articles and book chapters, including numerous ethnographies. 

Elemental

by Kathleen Stewart

This piece writes with the elemental in a walk’s encounters or a winter’s skid. A thisness momentarily skews experience in the making; consciousness and the nonconscious co-compose at an edge; feeler and felt are mutually included. The elemental is a movement of involution, an immersion in a hue, the sensation of a disturbance, the non-things in which things form, a fugitivity experimented. Speaking elementally, you speak not as the representative of a common rational discourse, but as a you absorbed in the effort to convey.

Kathleen Stewart is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin (USA). She writes on affect, the ordinary, and modes of attunement based on speculative curiosity. A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an `Other’ America (Princeton, 1996) portrays a dense and textured layering of sense and form laid down in social use. Ordinary Affects (Duke, 2007) maps the force of present moments lived as immanent events. The Hundreds (with Lauren Berlant, Duke 2019) is a writing experiment in dwelling in a history of the present. Her current work, Worlding, approaches generative ways of collective living through sensing out what happens.

Sensuous ethnographies of running: Comparing Running with Walking

by Jonas Larsen

Drawing on and contributing to the growing literature on the senses of running (Allen-Collinson et al. 2021; Allen-Collinson & Owton, 2015; Hockey 2006, 2013), this chapter explores the sensuous geographies of urban running. In part, it discusses the uniqueness of running with respect to its sensuous nature by comparing it with walking. The first part establishes what a sensuous ethnographic account of running must entail. The second part highlights the sensuous features and differences between walking and running as embodied, emplaced practices. The third part establishes some of the unique sensuous geographies of urban running—in the ground and air, and weather worlds, in environments charged with certain atmospheric qualities and social relations. The chapter concludes by extending the discussed sensuous approach to all sensory ethnographies concerned with bodily movement.

Jonas Larsen is a Professor in Mobility and Urban Studies at Roskilde University (Denmark). He has published extensively about tourist photography, tourism, cycling, running and mobility more broadly. He has a long-standing interest in tourist photography, tourism and mobility more broadly. More recently, he has written extensively about urban cycling and running. He has just finished a book on urban marathons (2021, Routledge) and is the key academic expert in a new research project on urban walkability and new methods. His books have been translated into Chinese (both in China and Taiwan), Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean  and Turkish (in the process). He is on the editorial board of Mobilities, Tourist Studies and Photographies.

The “Full English:” British Muslims, British food and a community project 

by Alex Rhys-Taylor

This chapter looks at the relationship between taste, culture and identity articulated through a community arts project. Drawing on the work of a community arts initiative it posits that community art and development work can find significant value in ‘thinking with the senses’. At the same time, in engaging with the minutiae of everyday life, such activities can provide useful resources for sensory scholarship, revealing the rhythms and textures, fears, and sources of joy, of what are often mis-represented areas of life. Community arts are not only well positioned to generate ethnographically rich representations of urban sociality. Rather, they can also often go beyond simple representation and toward enacting forms of sociality and community that they present. 

Alex Rhys-Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths University (UK). He specializes in urban sociology with a particular focus on the relationship between our sensory experiences of cities and histories of change. His work focusses on the multisensory experience of urban space the forms of association and exclusion related to it.

Constellations of (sensual) relations: space, atmosphere, and sensory design

by Erin Lynch

In the context of the experience economy, everything from city streets to virtual interfaces are increasingly designed to appeal to all the senses. Appeals to the more-than-visual senses have become an avenue for curating atmospheres designed to resonate with consumers amidst the ongoing hyper-visuality of modern life. This does not mean that designers and marketers have abandoned eye appeal; rather, that they increasingly play to the other(ed) senses in a bid to offer more immersive and engaging experiences - opting instead, in other words, for “sense appeal.” This chapter situates sensory ethnography as an ideal method for exploring the lived experience of sensory design. Drawing from research in a trio of increasingly curated atmospheres (in the casino, the spa, and the augmented city), it argues that sensory ethnography offers us critical purchase on the emergent constellation of sensory-spatial relations that at once complicate and enrich the experience of sensory design.

Erin Lynch is an interdisciplinary scholar and Senior Fellow at Concordia University’s Centre for Sensory Studies (Canada) who works at the intersection of space, mediation, culture, and the senses. She holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Analysis from Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author of Locative Tourism Applications: A Sensory Ethnography of the Augmented City (Routledge, 2022) – a multi-sited sensory ethnography that explores how city-sanctioned mobile tourism apps mediate users’ experience of urban destinations in 12 cities around the world. Erin is currently co-authoring research on the sensory design of spas and urban festival atmospheres.

Feeling helium

by Marina Peterson

Contours of feeling move across helium as matter and affective force. I trace this movement along helium’s forms as it comes into perceptibility and withdraws, the pleasure of its lift turning to the melancholy of loss. This play across matter and affect settles in the concept of “atmosphere,” which tends to be conceived of as alternately air or affect, the gaseous medium that makes earth habitable or mood, the elemental or a mode of attunement. Atmosphere affords attention to the diffuse and indeterminate, to that which falls outside of objective categories, and to its coalescence as elemental, sensory-affective, and concept. Helium itself withdraws. Generally inaccessible to immediate human perception, helium is present in its traces. These both contain (or release) helium and anchor affect, doing work that is at once physical and discursive.

Marina Peterson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin (USA). She is the author of Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles (2021, Duke UP) and Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles (2010, Upenn Press), and co-editor of Global Downtowns (with Gary McDonogh, 2012, Upenn Press), Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader (with Gretchen Bakke, 2016, Bloomsbury), and Between Matter and Method: Encounters in Anthropology and Art (with Gretchen Bakke, 2017, Bloomsbury).

Towards a multisensorial engagement with animals

by Natasha Fijn and Muhammad A. Kavesh

This chapter intertwines the emerging fields of multisensory with multispecies ethnography and suggests that by moving beyond prevailing methodological praxis, there is a possibility of unraveling different forms of knotted entanglements with more than just humans. By paying attention not only to vision but to different forms of perception, such as hearing, touch, or movement, the chapter explores the production of innovative and exciting forms of inquiry to reach wider audiences beyond an academic few. A multisensorial, multispecies engagement promises to open new pathways in examining the dynamics of more-than-human relationalities and to expose the potential for interdisciplinary and collaborative engagements. An approach that involves a weaving of ethological and ethnographic techniques, drawing from natural history, while engaging with observational and experimental filmmaking, can shed light on new modes of knowledge-making while allowing us to rethink our interconnections with other animals into the future.

Natasha Fijn is Director of the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. As an ethnographic researcher and observational filmmaker she has conducted extensive field research in remote places, including the Khangai Mountains of Mongolia and Arnhem Land in northern Australia, focussing particularly on multispecies ethnography, including more-than-human sociality and concepts of domestication, while observational filmmaking and photographic essays are integral to her research output.

Muhammad A. Kavesh is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the Australian National University.  He is the author of Animal Enthusiasms (2021, Routledge) and co-editor of two special journal issues (Anthropology Today [Feb 2023], The Australian Journal of Anthropology [2021]). He has also published with American Ethnologist, Journal of Asian Studies, Oxford Journal of Development Studies, South Asia, Society & Animals and Senses & Society among others. He is currently working on his second book project (spy pigeons) and a co-edited volume (Nurturing Alternative Futures, Routledge).

Sensing the Cloud: Research Creation as Sensory Anthropology

by Kate Hennessy, Trudi Lynn Smith, Steve DiPaola, and Amineh Ahmadi Nejad

Sensing the Cloud explores research-creation as sensory anthropology through a large-scale video projection artwork titled white clouds in blue sky (2021). The authors consider how the use of AI-systems as generative sensing tools for this project created critical engagement with the cloud as a deeply sensory phenomenon, entangled with human labour and intuition. As an extension of their research-creation work with fugitive archival collections and the material politics of anthropological documentation, the work shows how improvisation and collaboration are deeply relational and sensory modes for art making and ethnography. Can a sensory anthropology of the multimodal be one of the ways through which we come to understand anthropological mediality in this new age of artificial intelligence and media making, so that we might counter rather than reproduce dynamics of extraction and exploitation? 

Kate Hennessy is an Associate Professor specialising in Media at Simon Fraser University’s  School of Interactive Arts and Technology (Canada). As an anthropologist of media and the director of the Making Culture Lab, an interdisciplinary research-creation and production studio, her work uses collaborative, feminist, and decolonial methodologies to explore the impacts of new memory infrastructures and cultural practices of media, museums, and archives. She values working across disciplinary boundaries in her practice as an artist, curator, and scholar, with research-creation including expression in video, photography, 3D modelling, and virtual exhibition, and was a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective.

Trudi Lynn Smith is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria (Canada). Trudi specialises in interdisciplinary research-creation and collaboration, working with human and more than human communities at the intersection of experimental art, ethnography, and political ecology. Her practice is grounded in a concern with the embodiments, relationships, techniques, and ethics of image-making and explorations of impermanence and uncertainty in photography. She was a founding member of the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective. 

Steve DiPaola is a Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. DiPaola’s primary research areas are cognitive, character and expression based artificial intelligence, interaction and computer graphics. His computational artwork was notably commissioned by video artist Nam Jun Paik for his work Fin de Siecle II, which was recently reinstalled as part of the new computer programmed art retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art “Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018”. 

Amineh Ahmadi Nejad is a graduate MSc student in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University, with an interdisciplinary focus on generative AI systems and dance through a Feminist lens. With a background in Computer Engineering and a passion for dance, they use research-creation methodology to make AI-generated videos, image collages, and dances with embedded sociopolitical messages.  

Beyond the human: a sensory ethnographer’s gaze on sportfishing practice

by Vesa Markuksela

This chapter explores the act of gazing at the performance of a water-based leisure activity. The examination of sportfishing introduces the use of a practice-based sensory ethnography in considering the gazing act in ways that recognize the role therein of embodied, multi-sensuous movement, particularly the agency of bodies other than humans. The method enables us to investigate the sportfishing practice and the embodied and sensuous material encounters of human and nonhuman entities in the water environment, both above and below the surface. It illuminates the complex intra-actions within sportfishing between the anglers, the fish, the water, and the weather. The chapter aims to make sense of the entanglement of senses, mobility, and rhythms—to gain sensory wisdom. The aspiration here is to create an embodied connection and sensorial understanding of how mobile human and nonhuman bodies ‘do’ practice, as well as what dynamic practice does to those bodies

Vesa Markuksela is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lapland in Finland. He is a sensory scholar at the interface of organization, marketing, and tourism studies. His research engages posthuman philosophical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to examine more-than-human encounters and performance in a nature-based context, especially in the waterscapes. Recently, he embarked on a grounded framework to study the entanglements of the weathered year-round MTB riding and trail building, in the dirt and on snow. His long-term grounding concern is in the entangled bodily and sensory encounters with human and non-human material actors in the nature-based leisure and touristic servicescapes.  

Sensory ethnography as a more-than-human approach to urban inequalities

by Elisa Fiore 

How do the sensory and material qualities of place relate to, and become vectors for, the inclusion or exclusion of specific lifeforms in/from the city? Based on the assumption that power materialises in the sensory-spatial textures of place, this chapter foregrounds everyday sensory experiences and their associated affective intensities as powerful means to investigate how the material conditions of urban life intersect with questions of power. Sensory ethnography is deployed here as a methodology capable of capturing the commingling of bodies and spaces and revealing the contribution of material agency in the ontology of the urban social. To illustrate these arguments, this chapter presents a sensory ethnography of urban waste in Tor Pignattara, a gentrifying multicultural suburb in Rome, Italy. Following residents’ sensory revulsion, the analysis sheds light on the active contribution of “dirty” matter in the social production of urban difference and the shifting moral geographies of urban renewal.

Elisa Fiore is Assistant Professor of Urban Geography at Utrecht University (NL). She does research at the intersection of feminist theory, sensory studies, urban studies, and affect theory. She is author of, inter alia, “Navigating Danger Through Nuisance: Racialised Urban Fears, Gentrification, and Sensory Enskilment in Amsterdam” (forthcoming, City and Society), Gentrification, Race, and The Senses: A Sensory Ethnography of Amsterdam’s Indische Buurt and Rome’s Tor Pignattara (PhD dissertation, Radboud University Nijmegen), “Food and White Multiculturalism: Racial Aesthetics of Gentrification in Amsterdam’s Indische Buurt” (2021, Space and Culture), and “A Posthumanist Microethnography of Multiculture: Olfactory Assemblages in Rome’s Banglatown” (2016, Pulse). She has also published contributions in The Posthuman Glossary edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (Bloomsbury 2018).

Resonance: engaging with the more-than-human through Ladakhi soundworlds

by Christopher Wright

The high mountains of Ladakh in the western Himalaya resonate, they emit/transmit low frequencies often verging on infrasound. This chapter will explore this more-than-human mountain resonance and the usefulness of practically and creatively ‘staying with the senses’ - thinking through their physiology as well as their cultural framings - for anthropological research. Taking this sensual experience as a starting point, the chapter discusses resonance from a range of different perspectives; Tibetan Buddhism, cinema, law enforcement, Doom metal music etc. It will also explore the role resonance can play practically in the creation of collaborative artworks that address important contemporary Ladakhi concerns with human created climate change and the rapid retreat of Himalayan glaciers. In demonstrating ways of staying with the senses through research the chapter will draw a range of connections between Ladakhi soundworlds and suggest how that can contribute to the creation of new formations of sensory attention. 

Christopher Wright originally trained as an artist, producing work in painting, photography, and video. He then worked for several years in independent filmmaking making feature length Super 8 and 16mm films, before becoming the photographic archivist at the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1992. During his time at the RAI, he was awarded a three-year Leverhulme Trust award to return three major collections of nineteenth-century anthropological photographs to their source communities in the southwest USA, Sikkim (Himalayas), and the Solomon Islands (south Pacific). He has curated a number of exhibitions, including “The Impossible Science of Being” at the Photographer’s Gallery, London (combining nineteenth-century anthropological photographs with responses to the archive from contemporary artists and photographers), and has co-organised major conferences like “Fieldworks: dialogues between art and anthropology” at Tate Modern in 2003. He taught as a visiting tutor in the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths (UK) in the late 1990’s before doing his PhD at University College London and then returning to the department as a lecturer in 2002. He has published widely on the connections between anthropology and contemporary art and has recently completed a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship project entitled ‘A Life More Photographic”. He continues to collaborate creatively with local community groups and charities where he lives, and experiment with the practical possibilities of using audiovisual media within anthropology.

Sensory engagements with lively data: attuning to the convivialities of more-than-human worlds 

by Deborah Lupton Orcid, Ash Watson and Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor

The digitisation of human bodies and health states should take account of the sensory, embodied and material forms that health data take: marks on the body, feelings, sounds, scents, details relayed in conversations or gauged from practices and environments. This chapter describes processes of facilitating more-than-human sensory engagements with these lively data. Sensory ethnography is brought together arts-based, creative and interactive research methods for participant engagement and research translation, aligning with the sensory pedagogical and sensory museology approaches. The methods used in the ‘Creative Approaches to Health Information Ecologies’ project are discussed, which in turn contributed to the production of a short film for showing at our ‘More-than-Human Wellbeing’ exhibition. This exhibition, designed for research-creation and public engagement and research translation, rested on the standpoint that human states of embodiment, health and wellbeing are always entangled in the complex dynamics and materialities of planetary health.

Deborah Lupton is SHARP Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design & Architecture, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney (Australia). Her research is interdisciplinary, spanning sociology, new media studies and cultural studies. She is located in the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre, leading both the Vitalities Lab and the UNSW Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Lupton is the author/co-author of 20 books and editor/co-editor of a further ten volumes. She holds honorary doctorates awarded by the Universities of Copenhagen and Skövde.  

Ash Watson is a Research Fellow with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney, Australia. Her research explores how emerging technologies are imagined, designed and implemented across contexts of health and wellbeing. Ash is author of the sociological novel Into the Sea (2020), creator of the public sociology project So Fi Zine (sofizine.com), and Fiction Editor of The Sociological Review.

Vaughan Wozniak-O’Connor is a media artist and emerging technology researcher. He is also a postdoctoral fellow with the UNSW Sydney (Australia) Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Vaughan’s practice explores the different ways that site-specific art and emerging data practices frame site and materiality. He has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally, including projects at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Australia), Museu de Aveiro (Portugal) and the Holocenter (USA).

Sound walks

by Tim Ingold

Does a falling tree make a sound if no-one is around to hear? It depends on what is meant by sound. If it is a physical impulse, transmitted through the aerial medium, then ‘yes’; if it is something we register in our minds, then ‘no’. But must we choose between these alternatives? In a storm, the sounds of trees falling, wind gusting, and thunder rumbling are not objects of perception but the reverberations of a consciousness that has opened to the sky, to merge with the cosmos. In this sense, sounds are neither mental nor physical but atmospheric. This leads us to think differently about ears, not as anatomical organs primed to respond to acoustic signals, but as the attentiveness of a body placed on aural alert. This aural attention gives voice to the tree, the wind and the thunder. Hearing, thus, doesn’t provide a portal for the human mind to take possession of a world. Rather, it is in taking possession of its human inhabitants that the world makes itself heard. 

Tim Ingold is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Lapland, and has written on environment, technology and social organisation in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. His recent books include The Perception of the Environment (2000), Lines (2007), Being Alive (2011), Making (2013), The Life of Lines (2015), Anthropology and/as Education (2018), Anthropology: Why it Matters (2018), Correspondences (2020) and Imagining for Real (2022).  Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022 he was made a CBE for services to Anthropology.

Defamiliarizing the Sensory

by Tim Edensor

This chapter explores how experiences in which the world suddenly becomes utterly unfamiliar might provoke us into interrogating the normative regimes of the sensible within which we habitually live. Such experiences help to decentre any claim that the senses provide unmediated access to reality and reveal their situated partiality. The chapter first considers those moments when we are immersed in settings in which unfamiliar sounds, sights and smells assail us. Second, the discussion moves to explore how unfamiliar sensory experiences are temporarily sought through contemporary leisure practices. Third, the progressive political potentialities of undermining our unreflexively and habitually apprehended everyday worlds through the ways in which light, colour and dark are manipulated in a range of creative interventions.

Tim Edensor works at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK) as a Cultural Geographer. He has written Tourists at the Taj (1998), National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (2002) and Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (2005), From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom (2017), Stone: Stories of Urban Materiality (2020) and Landscape, Materiality and Heritage: An Object Biography (2022). He has also edited or co-edited Geographies of Rhythm (2010), The Routledge Handbook of Place (2020), Rethinking Darkness: Cultures, Histories, Practices (2020) and Weather: Spaces, Mobilities and Affects (2020). 

Sensing the Afterlife: Multisensorial ethnography and injured minds

Michelle Charette and Denielle Elliott

Altered neurological states resulting from disease/injury often result in profound changes in self-awareness, something that many find difficult to explain to those who have never experienced brain trauma. A diagnosis, a bike crash, or a violent encounter can leave one forever changed; an ‘afterlife’. This chapter explores the sense of afterlife, a transformation of the self, or the rebecoming that results from injured minds through sensory ethnography. While sensory ethnography carves out new terms, territories, and modalities of sense, there is a private element to sensation that can never be fully exhausted by description. The afterlife forces us to come to terms with the limits of sensory ethnography and to reimagine the possibilities of sensory inquiry in a context in which selfhood seems foreign or unconveyable. Our chapter asks, how might we examine these entangled layers of sensation, that is, inner or subjective sensations and sociocultural mediated sensations?

Michelle Charette is a PhD candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at York University. Her research focusses on digital health technologies designed to enhance care for individuals living with chronic pain. She holds a SSHRC doctoral award and has published in Science as Culture, Multimodality & Society, and Catalyst. 

Denielle Elliott is a socio-cultural anthropologist at York University. She is the Deputy Director of the Institute for Technoscience and Society, and the Director of the Science and Technology Studies Graduate Program. She is the co-editor of A Different Kind of Ethnography (University of Toronto Press, 2017) and the French translation Réinventer L’ethnographie: pratiques imaginatives et méthodologies créatives (Laval, 2021). She is also co-editor of the forthcoming collection, Naked Fieldnotes (Minnesota). 

Non-representational sensory ethnography: creation, attention, and correspondence

by Phillip Vannini and April Vannini

This chapter presents a non-representational approach to sensory ethnography. Non-representational ethnographies emphasize the fleeting, viscous, lively, embodied, material, more-than-human, precognitive, non-discursive dimensions of spatially and temporally complex lifeworlds. Non-representational ethnographies are experimental in nature and often blend traditional research methodologies with imaginative elements. In this chapter we build on Tim Ingold’s recent work on “Imagining for real” to articulate how non-representational sensory ethnographies emphasize the importance of imagination by relying on creation, attention, and correspondence. To exemplify our argument we draw upon recent ethnographic research we conducted on the subject of wildness and natural heritage.

Phillip Vannini is a Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal Roads University (Canada). He is author/editor of 19 books including the most recent Inhabited (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021, with April Vannini) and In the Name of Wild (UBC/On Point Press, 2022, with April Vannini). Earlier books, published by Routledge, include The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video (2020), Non-Representational Methodologies (2015), The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture (2013, with Dennis Waskul and Simon Gottschalk), and Doing Public Ethnography (2018). From 2010 to 2020 he was the series editor for Routledge’s Innovative Ethnographies Series. Phillip’s documentary films have been distributed worldwide through television, in both movie theatres, as well as through SVOD platforms such as Amazon Prime, iTunes, Google Play, Kanopy and more.

April Vannini teaches in the School of Communication and Culture at Royal roads University. Together with Phillip Vannini she is the author of Wilderness (Routledge, 2015), Inhabited: Wildness and the vitality of the land (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021), and In the Name of Wild (UBC/On Point Press, 2022). She is also the co-producer and writer of four documentary films, such as Inhabited (2021) and In the name of wild (2022).

Staging unmemorials, being haunted: the grievability of Japanese sex workers in the transpacific underground

by Ayaka Yoshimizu

This chapter is based on my embodied engagement with the materiality of the memorials (or lack thereof) of Japanese sex workers who died in British Columbia, Canada, at the turn of the 20th century. Doing archival research and fieldwork at old cemeteries, I encounter the “ungrievability” of deaths that occurred in the underground migrant society: headstones that seem unattended, and absence of markers that make invisible their burial locations. Those are what I call “unmemorials,” memorial objects or sites that are meant for commemorating lost lives or past events but whose intentions are undone or undermined due to the absence of the memorial objects, commemorators, or narratives that enable commemoration. Embodied engagement with unmemorials through performative sensory ethnography, however, makes their ungrievablity sensible, and opens up a possibility to apprehend, if not remember, migrant women who lived in underground transnational spaces.

Ayaka Yoshimizu is Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia (Canada). Her research is concerned with transpacific migration and cultures, memories and senses, and embodied methodology and pedagogy. She is the author of Doing Ethnography in the Wake of the Displacement of Transnational Sex Workers in Yokohama (Routledge, 2022). Her other recent publications include “Unsettling Memories of Japanese Migrant Sex Workers” (Topia, 2021) and "Doing Performance Ethnography among the Dead, Remembering Lives of Japanese Migrants in Transpacific Sex Trade" (Performance Matters, 2018).

Sensing scenes: doing sensory ethnography in queer space and time

by Kerryn Drysdale and Jan Filmer

Though ubiquitous in our everyday language to describe forms of more or less dense and enduring social connection, the investigation of queer scenes has proved somewhat elusive. Rather than assume particular intersections of people, practices or places as queer, a sensory ethnographic approach requires researchers to consider how queerness manifests and materialises beyond the spectacle, antinormativity or transgression often demanded of it. And much like scenes themselves, queer space and time requires us to attune ourselves to their affective potentiality. In this chapter, the everyday lived realities that variously constitute a form of ordinary queerness highlight the importance of looking to queer space and time’s sensory resonances that, in turn, are made to matter to those who are invested in their emergence, maintenance, and their scholarly exploration. Thus, the conceptual and the methodological are necessarily entwined in the investigation and representation of queer (everyday) scenes.

Kerryn Drysdale is a Research Fellow at UNSW Sydney (Australia). She conducts research at the intersection of social inquiry and public health, particularly in the experiences and expressions of health and wellbeing among marginalized and vulnerable communities. Kerryn has a particular interest in social configurations for lesbian and queer women, with a specific focus on scene-making in precarious urban infrastructure. Her first monograph, Intimate Investments in Drag King Cultures: The Rise and Fall of a Lesbian Social Scene, was published by Palgrave in 2019.

Jan Filmer is a Research Fellow at the University of Cologne (Germany). His research combines cultural studies perspectives and qualitative methodologies to particularise the sociocultural and geographic dimensions of sexuality and intimacy. He is interested in how power relations are experienced and negotiated in everyday mundane practices and spaces. Jan’s current research considers how new forms of resistance to (1) sexual and gender rights and (2) young people’s access to sexual knowledge in schooling coincide with heteronormative national imaginaries. 

Learning to see, or how to make sense of the skilful things skateboarders do 

by Sander Hölsgens

Skateboarding is a mystery. It looks like an austere practice, a tool for social good, a discipline of failure. It presents itself as a subculture, an Olympic sport, a slice of masculinity, an embodied pedagogy. So, what are the skills needed to become a skater? This chapter zooms in on the things skateboards do–how these devices twist and turn, scratch the surfaces of architectural furniture, become one with their users. It positions sensory ethnography as a set of approaches and sensibilities well-equipped for studying how skaters learn to see, listen, and move. The overarching aim is threefold: first, to draw useful connections between the phenomenology of skill acquisition and sensory ethnography; second, to apply this approach to the study of bodily skills; third, to show how sensory ethnography affords experiential and multimodal outputs. Along the way, the chapter touches upon some of the intricacies of skateboarding itself. 

Sander Hölsgens (PhD, UCL) is an anthropologist working across experimental media, installation, and performance. Trained as a visual anthropologist, he currently interrogates the intersection of documentary practices and activism. Sander curates the Rotterdam-based media festival Field Recordings and acted as the Visual and New Media editor of Cultural Anthropology between 2015 and 2019. In 2018, he co-founded Pushing Boarders to build a platform for and support skateboarders who effect social change. In 2021, Sander published his monograph Skateboarding in Seoul: A Sensory Ethnography. At Leiden University, Sander teaches practice-led courses in visual and multimodal ethnography, interactive experiences, and storytelling.

Archiving the senses: an ethnography by design

by Rupert Cox and Junko Konishi

This chapter reflects on the cultivation, through extended fieldwork practices of sound recording in Okinawa Japan, of a sensory attunement to the differences between hearing and listening. It considers how this distinction may be explored through the multimodal form of a sound archive which may act in a multi-sensory register so as to describe elements of the sound environment of Okinawa. The “Okinawa island” archive is a new (2022) part of Alexander Street Press’s Ethnographic Sound Archive collection and the recordings are the result of interdisciplinary, collaborative research carried out across Okinawa between 2007 and 2019 by acoustician Kozo Hiramatsu, anthropologist Rupert Cox, sound artist Angus Carlyle, musicologist Junko Konishi and more recently by bio-acoustician Nicholas Friedman. The curated selection of their recordings presents a particular type and arrangement of descriptions of environmental sound in Okinawa, organised thematically via the layered architecture of the archive in terms of locations, events, practices. The essay makes a case for the sound archive as a layered form of sensory ethnography not only through its multi-modality but also because the sound recordings which comprise the collection are rooted in an ethno-aesthetic attention to the language used by research subjects in Okinawa to talk about sound and listening, as well as the artistic genres, conventions and conversations that are particular to Okinawa in representing the sound environment. The making of sound recordings that we discuss were guided by these contextual reference points. They allow us to examine not just what sounds were present in any environment to be recorded, but to explore first how perception works in the context of the field site and then look at how certain spaces may “speak” to allow us to listen to the sounds that remain in place.

Rupert Cox is the director of the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, at the University of Manchester (UK) and an anthropologist, filmmaker and artist collaborator with a long-standing interest in Japan. His research has been on varied topics including the Zen Arts, the idea of Japan as a copying culture, the environmental politics of US military bases and most recently on the relationship between bioacoustics and citizen science in Colombia. His interests are in the intersections between art and science and anthropology that draw on practices from sound art, documentary and landscape film and are directed towards forms of public engagement.

Junko Konishi is Professor of Ethnomusicology at Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts. Her research concerns with applied ethnomusicology, ecomusicology, soundscape studies, and historical ethnomusicology. Her research areas include music and dance in islands of  Micronesia, Okinawa, Ogasawara, and the other Japanese remote islands.

Multisensory storytelling: inciting polyvocal polemics in participatory ethnography

by Beth A. Uzwiak

In this chapter, I reflect on my participation as an applied ethnographer part of a “community catalyst” residency in North Philadelphia.  For two years, I collaborated with an artist collective, local non-profits and residents to document local histories and assets while addressing long-term histories of racialized disinvestment. To do so, we transformed an underutilized historic house into a public platform for experiments in civic engagement.  I consider how sensory ethnographic methods contributed to these efforts, including what I call walking laments and stoop speakeasies, as well as multimodal installations of photographs, youth-made videos and audio clips from oral history interviews.  These sensory experiments in storytelling brought community legacies to the fore while contesting typical “outside” representations of the neighborhood.  In particular, I consider how multisensory storytelling captured a polyvocal polemic that moved the project from documenting local assets to challenging the knowledge extraction often embedded in development projects, offering methodological considerations for a more equitable engagement process.

Beth A.  Uzwiak is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar with a PhD in anthropology.  She directs Story Research, a consulting firm that specializes in qualitative research methods and arts-based community engagement.  She is also research consultant with the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy and adjunct fellow with the Center for Public Health Initiatives, both at University of Pennsylvania.

Reframing deafness: vision as fieldwork method and documentary art

by Andrew Irving

Routinely excluded from many social and learning contexts, many deaf young people find the spoken and written word practical and psychological barriers, especially in terms of education, expression and representation. By contrast visual practices offer a deaf inclusive means of knowledge acquisition and relating to others that do not start from models of disability and impairment or the translation and adaptation of pre-existing hearing-based pedagogies but instead proceed from people’s existing sensorial lifeworlds and ways of being. As such this chapter responds to many deaf people’s embodied visual understanding of, and practical orientation, to the world and considers the educational and cognitive possibilities of using photography and film as means of enabling deaf children to understand and engage with the world in which they live. From this perspective, vision is not simply a means of seeing or perceiving but of interacting, intervening and worldmaking, especially in contexts of elision, exclusion and marginalisation. Based on extended practice led photography and filmmaking workshops with deaf young people in six schools in Soweto and Durban, the chapter considers how a visual orientation to the world can be a starting point to inquire into a diversity of issues—from the most playful to the most challenging of subjects—to facilitate new modes of thinking and reflecting on identity, society and the body.

Andrew Irving is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manchester (UK). His research areas include sensory perception, time, illness, death, urban anthropology and experimental methods. Recent books include The Art of Life and Death: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice (2017) and Beyond Text? Critical Practices and Sensory Anthropology (2016). Recent film and multi-media works include See, Make, Sign (2019, Children’s Museum of the Arts, New York). Wandering Scholars: Or How to Get in Touch with Strangers (Live film and sound installation: Österreichisches Museum für Volkskunde, Vienna, 2016) and the play The Man Who Almost Killed Himself (BBC Arts, Edinburgh Festival 2015).

Sensory verité: the intersection of sensory ethnography, sensory biophilia, and cinema vérité

by Kathy Kasic

This chapter introduces an extension of the sensory ethnographic film style the author calls sensory vérité.  Sensory vérité goes beyond the speciesism and human-focused linguistic simplicity of “sensory ethnography” and finds the voice and sensory expression from the inclusive perspective embracing all natural and unnatural worlds. As its title suggests, the chapter locates sensory vérité at a filmic intersection of sensory ethnography, sensory biophilia, and cinema vérité. Like the sensory ethnographic film, sensory vérité allows a viewer’s senses to come into focus through haptic, synesthetic images and heightened sound design, but additionally combines that with an interactive, co-creative voice of cinema vérité and the ecological centering of sensory biophilia. Each of these concepts and their vital contribution to the inclusive voice of sensory vérité are discussed and referenced against actual film selected from the body of the author's work. 

Kathy Kasic, a filmmaker and Associate Professor at California State University Sacramento, traded evolutionary biology in the Ecuadorian Amazon for filmmaking. Using a sensorial emphasis on place to unveil the human relationship with nature, her many productions have appeared at international festivals, on television (BBC, Discovery, Smithsonian, PBS, National Geographic), and won numerous awards. Most recently, Kasic field-directed for BBC's Earth Shot: Repairing Our Planet (feat. David Attenborough and Prince William) and directed The Lake at the Bottom of the World, a sensory vérité feature film about an international team of scientists exploring a subglacial lake 3,600 feet beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. 

Epilogue

by Anna Harris

Anna Harris is an Associate Professor of the Social Studies of Medicine at Maastricht University (Netherlands) in the Science, Technology and Society Studies research group, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Working at the intersections of STS and anthropology, her ethnographic research largely concerns the material, sensory and bodily nature of medical practices. She is the author of A Sensory Education (Routledge, 2020), Stethoscope: Making of a Medical Icon (with Tom Rice, Reaktion 2022), and Making Sense of Medicine: Material Culture and the Reproduction of Medical Knowledge (with John Nott, Intellect 2022).