Sensuous Scholarship Research Articles

Multisensory approaches in migration research: reflections and pathways

The rapidly developing field of visual methods and growing body of literature employing visual methodologies in the collection of data have contributed to the acknowledgement of the senses with a prevalence of sight in the research process. Yet, the ‘sensuous scholarship’ is not always considered in the systematic methodological process when visual methodologies are at stake. The aim of this paper is to problematise this stance in the context of the particular field of migration research. Our aim is to ‘de-essentialise the visual’ by presenting cases from our studies on immigrant communities in Norway, Turkey, Israel, and Portugal, and to exemplify how the embodied knowledge gained by both the researcher and research participants can contribute to research findings. We argue that sensuous experiences are part of researchers’ positionality and influence the intellectual outcomes of our work. We support this stance with four claims that relate to a researcher's physical presence in the field. We claim that (1) our work suffers an intellectual bias, (2) our geographical bias influences the interpretation of sensory experiences, (3) we tend to overstudy groups for which we have sympathy/empathy, and (4) the sensing scholar does physical labour. As for the perspective of research participants, we argue that the attention to their sensory experiences may bring knowledge on important aspects of their livelihoods and can give in-depth insight into micro, meso, and macro processes the respondents are entangled with. We claim that (5) senses influence the inclusion-exclusion dynamic, (6) senses are drivers of ethnic boundary maintenance, and (7) emplacement is mediated by senses.

Storying Sensuous Atmospheres of Peaches and Wheat

Policy initiatives, research, and professional advice concerned with sustainable food systems remain largely stuck conceptualising individual consumers as rational subjects in need of technocratic interventions to induce behaviour change. While critical approaches do account for the relevance of socio-ecological, political, and economic circumstances, the affective, sensuous, and im/material relations — sensuous atmospheres — that are indissoluble from everyday life are either left out, or effectively conceptualised as the inert, given background on which life plays out. Taking the imagination as a key political participant in the struggle for a more just and sustainable world, this article aims to ‘story’ the sensuous atmospheres of everyday life in agricultural practice, making sensuous atmospheres visible as the sensory-material substance that socio-ecological, political, and economic formations take. Drawing from sensuous (auto)ethnographic encounters on a farm in northern Italy, I ask: what kinds of stories are the sensuous atmospheres of techno-industrial and alternative agricultural practices made of, what kinds of stories do they tell, and how might they help to imagine new horizons of possibility in the making of more sustainable food systems? I begin the article with a discussion problematising food systems and the inadequate approaches often used to render them sustainable. I then conceptualise the notion of ‘storying sensuous atmospheres’, presenting the sensory ethnographic material in the style of ‘sensuous scholarship’ in which the fieldwork is simultaneously analysed and evocatively storied. I conclude the article by suggesting that the storying of sensuous atmospheres is one strategy to precipitate new horizons of imagining — in food systems and beyond — a more sustainable world.

Introduction to Paul Stoller’s sensory poetics

To accept sensuousness is … to lend one’s body to the world and accept its complexities, tastes, structures, and smells … sensuous scholarship is ultimately a mixing of head and heart. It is an ope...

Sensuous futures: re-thinking the concept of trust in design anthropology

ABSTRACT This article sets an agenda for and outlines a sensuous futures scholarship. Its aim is to suggest a starting point for this practice and to invite scholars and researchers to engage in its advancement. By way of example, I examine how the anticipatory concept of trust can be re-worked theoretically and ethnographically through a sensuous approach to scholarship articulated through design anthropology and futures anthropology. I thus argue for a sensuous scholarship that participates in both academic debate and in designing for ethical futures.

Am I a Generalist or a Linguist? Or, How Relevant Are Emotions and Refracting Methodologies to the Academy? An interview with Joshua Nash

Author(s): Nash, Joshua; McShane Lodwick, Leslie; Wander, Maggie | Abstract: In his piece “Linguistic Spatial Violence: The Case of the Muslim Cameleers in the Australian Outback,” Joshua Nash utilizes innovative methodological approaches, spatial writing, and sensuous scholarship to explore the architectural and linguistic traces of Muslim cameleers crossing the Australian desert in the late 19th and early 20th century. Refract’s editorial board saw a unique opportunity to highlight interdisciplinary methodologies and diverse approaches to scholarship through an interview with Nash, who is currently Associate Professor at Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies in Denmark. Editorial board members Leslie McShane Lodwick and Maggie Wander interviewed Nash in August 2018 to learn more about the methods he employed to write his contribution to this issue. The following is the result of the email exchanges between Nash, Lodwick, and Wander.

The poetics of peace: From aesthetic knowledge to reconciliation

This article is inspired by the need for research methods that would discover the interrelationships of reconciliation and culture, specifically analysing the behaviour of field researchers originating from different lifestyles or culture, observing and participating in the artful expressions of research subjects. The purpose of this article was to present an overview of research into poetics as a source of information that contributes to existing bodies of knowledge and the finding of practical solutions related to peace-building in African communities. The authors argued that knowledge could be discovered from various forms of poetics through sensuous participation and intellectual interpretation and could be applied to the process of reconciliation. In support of this argument, the research was conducted with the San, the First People of southern Africa, in the context of a broader research project that aims at finding and publishing theory for dispute resolution in Africa. The discussion contains a conceptual framework of philosophy and theories that elucidates the concepts of poetics, the aesthetic domain and its relevance to peace and reconciliation in Africa. The transdisciplinary research methodology borrows from ethnographic methodologies including sensuous scholarship and participant observation of ritualistic experiences. The authors conclude that the creative, ritualistic and artistic lifeworlds of communities, in or recovering from conflict situations, are deeply relevant to any real motion towards reconciliation and healing.

Video Methods, Green Cultural Criminology, and the Anthropocene: SANCTUARY as a Case Study

ABSTRACTDocumentary criminology is a burgeoning, open-ended methodological technique that crafts and depicts sensuous knowledge from the lived experiences of crime, transgression, and harm. This ‘video ethnography paper’ examines my 74 minute documentary, SANCTUARY, as a case study to demonstrate how documentary criminology draws upon green cultural criminology, video methods, and sensory studies to provide an experiential understanding of crime (in this case, against donkeys) and rehabilitation in the contested notion of an ‘anthropocene’ epoch. I trace how documentary criminology can evoke and enact the lived experiences of “donkey rehabilitation” as sensuous scholarship.

Moon: A sensuous scholarship of the art of costume breakdown in film

Abstract Cloth has a particular relationship with the human body. It is always in contact with, or imagined to be in contact with, the skin, our largest sense organ. Cloth is our interface with the outside world, and the way in which we cover that interface has meaning. The important relationship that we have with cloth to protect and augment our bodies performs as a prosthesis of touch that, in its everydayness, offers a constant opportunity for expression and fetishization within the various discourses of identity in art, fashion and lifestyle. This article aims to explore the way in which cloth as costume in the medium of film, having been ‘broken down’ to naturalize the piece to its setting, stimulates an embodied relationship between the audience, the actor and the film itself. Following Laura Marks and her theories on visual haptics, the piece is a sensuous scholarship of an-often overlooked and under-researched textile art whose effect, the article argues, is that of reinstating the ‘aura’ that Walter Benjamin stated is lost by the mechanical intervention of the movie camera.

Hypersensitive tourists: The dark sides of the sensuous

• Illustrates the shattering effects of the sensuous in tourism. • Calls into attention hypersensitivities in tourism. • Suggests four analytic dimensions for critical sensuous scholarship.

Rhythms of Global Urbanisation

Since global interdependencies are a feature of urbanisation, Kwame Anthony Appiah's pleading for an education in 'cosmopolitan citizenship' is forward-looking. Given increasing mobility, handling different urban rhythms is as important as dealing with different languages. Actors explore how airports, supermarkets and cemeteries react to gait, respiration and heartbeat and how people adopt or impose rhythms. Such investigations might appear superficial from an academic perspective, but they bear resemblance to ethnographic fieldwork.We (an actor and an anthropologist) refer to the shift from participant observation to collaboration proposed by George Marcus, and conjointly explore rhythmic aspects of urbanisation, which are difficult for scholars to grasp. Our aim is to expand anthropological concepts, methods and forms of representation. In reference to Paul Stoller, we consider acting methods a 'sensuous scholarship' and argue that rhythm allows us to explore preverbal aspects of feelings of belonging or alienation in the urban space.

Asia. An ethnography of fragrance: The perfumery arts of ‘Adan/Lahj By Dinah Jung Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011. Pp. 284. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Appendices, Index.

An ethnography of fragrance: The perfumery arts of 'Adan/Lahj By DINAH JUNG Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2011. Pp. 284. Maps, Plates, Notes, Bibliography, Appendices, Index. doi:10.1017/S0022463414000654 This interesting and theoretically engaged ethnography is valuable and relevant in several respects. First, in poststructural and postmodern anthropological and ethnographic analysis there has been a critical awareness of culture-bound limitations of social science paradigms based on the privileging of the visual in knowledge construction, meaning interpretation, and social practice. This bias derives from Enlightenment and positivist traditions in the Western sciences and humanities, and until recently has influenced both choice of research topic and method of analysis. In the wake of ethnographic critique over the past twenty-five years (James Clifford and George Marcus, Writing culture, 1986; James Clifford, The predicament of culture, 1988; Susan Rasmussen, 'Making better scents in anthropology', Anthropological Quarterly, 1999; Paul Stoller, The taste of ethnographic things, 1989, Sensuous scholarship, 1997), many scholars now recognise that additional sense modalities, for example olfaction, are highly elaborated in many cultures where sense modalities are given diverse meanings and uses in various contexts, and change in meaning over time. In Europe, scent formed part of the medicine cabinet, but later became part of cosmetics, and acquired more frivolous associations, despite its partial resurgence in aromatherapy (Constance Classen 1997, 'Foundations for an anthropology of the senses', International Social Science Journal, 'Engendering perception', Body and Society, 1997; Constance Classen, David Howes and Anthony Synnott, Aroma, 1994; Alain Corbin, The foul and the fragrant, 1986). In many parts of the world today, scent or aroma is a culturally-elaborated medium of communication and mode of aesthetic creativity. Dinah Jung's fascinating study of the cultural, aesthetic, social, and ritual meanings and uses of perfumery in South Arabia and southern Yemen, specifically in 'Adan/Lahj, shows how the elaboration of 'natural' scents into cultural perfumes, incense, and other aromatic forms enjoys much prestige, and carries complex meanings transcending art and pleasure (though these, too, are important). This ethnography contributes to efforts in cultural studies, Middle Eastern studies, and socio-cultural anthropology to better understand diverse aesthetic and philosophical worlds, specifically, attitudes toward scent in diverse cultural settings and changes in these attitudes over time. Jung discusses current meanings and uses of scent and the art of perfumery, and also traces transformations in this practice (as affected by changes in gendered constructs, the political economy, new environmental concerns, and popular tastes) under the successive impacts of British colonialism, postcolonial relationships in Yemen, and globalisation. Jung's research is also timely, given the general tendency to emphasise politics, violence, and conflict in Middle Eastern studies in recent years; there is a need for more truly cultural studies of Arab-speaking and Muslim societies, in particular, their artistic and symbolic traditions. This study provides rich insights into the manufacture, uses, roles, and meanings of local perfumery (including what in English would be classified as both 'incense' and oil-based 'liquids'--though these labels do not do justice to the intricacy and vast array of local aromatic categories) in historical and contemporary perspective, and more: this author also relates perfumery culture and aesthetics to religion and ritual, gender, social stratification, politics, and globalisation, and traces perfumery transformations (in its manufacture, uses, changing forms, materials, and tastes) over different eras and in response to wider events. …

Cycling into Sensoria: Embodiment, Leisure, and Tourism

A self-supported long-distance bicycle tour in Hawai'i is the context for theoretical musings about the role of the sensuous in leisure and tourism scholarship. Autoethnography and narrative inquiry was chosen to underscore the experiences and critical insights from self-supported long-distance bicycle touring leisure research for three leisure scholars. Sensuous scholarship complements Lefebvre's spacetime that placed the human body and everyday life at the center of his theorizing. Kānaka Oiwi's scholarship and critique of Eurocentric leisure supports the value of sensuous scholarship as enhancing Eurocentric leisure practices as well as supporting decolonizing processes relevant to leisure/ tourism research. Taking the body–mind–spirit and "body-on-a-cycle motion" seriously highlights the power of sensuous scholarship, interrogates dominant narratives of leisure, and demonstrates the power of paying attention to the everyday features and the production of leisure spacetimes.

Olfactive Frames of Remembering: Theorizing Self, Senses and Society

By analysing sensorial aspects of social memory and emotions, this paper theorizes the social significance of olfaction and other senses towards reconfigurations of self and social interactions through embodied identity work. The research question that this paper addresses is: how is the self perceived through memories that are mediated by smells? Olfactive frames of remembering are employed in order to explicate sensory meta-narratives including sensory relations (pertaining to familial and other ties), sensory memory, time and space, and sensoryscapes. This article also elucidates upon the various moral, cultural and aesthetic codes that may be discerned in biographical narrations of social actors drawn from narrative interviews. Furthermore, it highlights a need to consider sensorial-bodily experiences in qualitative inquiry and thereby conceptualize how actors articulate their sense of self, and how they reformulate their experiences and relationships with others vis-à-vis emotional discourses of happiness, sadness and nostalgia in the maintenance and continuity of selfhood. The paper therefore contributes to sensuous scholarship by explicating how smells and memories operate in conjunction toward shaping self-identity and social relations.

A phenomenology of embodied senses: the 'making' of sense in organisational culture

Following the recent turn to senses and affect across the social sciences this article discusses the contribution of a phenomenology of senses as bodily and cultural phenomena and discusses their affective, pathic and emotional qualities. Correspondingly, organisations will be interpreted as sensuous embodied socio-cultural life-worlds and the significance of embodied sense-making and bodies at work are discussed. In addition to practical and political implications, perspectives on embodied research practice are offered as part of a sensorialised or sensuous scholarship. Finally, the conclusions address some limitations and perspectives on a phenomenological sense-making orientation.

The senses in self, society, and culture: a sociology of the senses

Selected Contents:Part 1: Understanding Sensory Studies. 1. Toward a Sociology of the Senses. 2 The Sensual Body. 3 Sensual Ritual and Performance. 4 Sensuous Scholarship. Part 2: Doing Sensory Research. 5. The Sensuous Self and Identity. 6. A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time. 7. The Sensory Order. 8. Media, Consumer, and Material Culture.

Performing Taste at Wine Festivals: A Somatic Layered Account of Material Culture

Sensuous scholarship refers to research about the human senses, through the senses, and for the senses. Sensuous scholarship asks us to recognize the meaningfulness of our somatic experience of the world, to understand the skilful activities through which we actively make and remake the world through our senses, and to develop evocative strategies of representation— to write sensuously. In this article, the authors reflect on one particular genre of sensuous scholarship, which they refer to as the somatic layered account. The authors draw upon participant observation data collected at wine festivals at seven sites scattered across western British Columbia and Southern California. The authors examine how people express taste sensations and preferences to others, as well as what role wine’s material properties play in these social dramas. In formulating and developing the concepts of somatic accounts, taste vocabularies, and somatic joint acts, the authors contribute to a growing understanding of the social aspects of the senses and of sensations, as well as how people perceive the material world—and the sense of taste in particular—in active and reflexive ways.

Sensuous Ethnography, African Persuasions, and Social Knowledge

This article suggests that transnational complexities require a more sensuous approach to ethnography, an approach in which local epistemologies and sensory regimes are more fully explored. More specific, the purpose of this article is to suggest that sensuous descriptions improve not only the clarity and force of ethnographic representations but also the social analysis of power relations-in-the-world. African states, as the author attempts to demonstrate, have been particularly adept at manipulating sensory regimes to establish and reinforce their power. In the end, the author concludes that a fully sensuous scholarship not only propels social scientists to reconsider the analysis of power-in-the-world but also compels them to rethink their scholarly being-in-the-world.

Sensuous Scholarship

Sensuous Scholarship

Sensuous Scholarship

Sensuous Scholarship

Sensuous Scholarship

Sensuous Scholarship