Sensory Ethnography

We can avoid becoming a failed species. Yet nearly all of humanity steers clear of ever discussing how close we are moving towards ending our perceptions on this troubled earth. The social acceleration of modern times has reached a point of absolute tension, whereby human workers are running out of time in their competition against the emergence of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Bourgeois digitizers and false utopians have been granted control over the attempt to avoid this end of humanity through false and manipulative dreams of effective altruism, and through their solipsistic focus have come to believe the world wants what they are offering as a curative when nearly all, especially the workers of the world, would deny the future that those digital accelerationists want to create.

The center of gravity within sensory history has been pulled by the force of multiple philosophical fields throughout the twentieth century. During the middle of the twentieth century, when sensory history first gained a footing within broader dialectics under other theoretical and disciplined names related to the embodied analysis of persons within historical settings, existentialism was situated at the raging core of the humanities. Sensory history was born from part of that search for the identity of the self in Western narratives of understanding existence within time and space through connections to the history of “mentalities” in the Annales School and within the historical phenomenology of Johan Huizinga.

This essay examines David E. Sutton’s Secrets from the Greek Kitchen (2014) to explore how culinary knowledge is produced, transmitted, and transformed in social contexts. Sutton’s ethnography of Kalymnos demonstrates that cooking expertise relies less on written recipes than on sensory apprenticeship, interpersonal negotiation, and embodied memory. Through detailed portraits of women cooks across generations, he shows that culinary practices are dynamic, shaped by gendered authority, intergenerational tension, and the introduction of new ingredients and media influences. Using Sutton’s insights, this essay interrogates key issues in the anthropology of food, including the transmission of skill, the negotiation of authenticity, and the concept of “living tradition.” Comparative engagement with scholars such as Appadurai, Bessière, Graf, Bauman, Noyes, and DeVault highlights how culinary traditions endure precisely because they are flexible, continually adapted, and deeply embedded in social, economic, and gendered relations

Le Zhineng Qigong, 智能气功, est un Qigong créé dans les années 1980 par le professeur
d’université en médecine traditionnelle chinoise Pang Heming, à Huaxia à Pékin. Pour
faire court à propos des Qigong des années 1980 nous nous appuierons sur l’ouvrage de
David Palmer : La Fièvre du Qigong (Plamer, 2005), qui fait l’inventaire des différents
Qigong modernes apparue en Chine depuis la création du concept moderne de Qigong
en tant que pratique de santé sous le maoïsme. Le Zhineng Qigong a comme
particularité de proposer une pratique s’appuyant sur des études en médecine
traditionnelle chinoise, se voulant sa débarrasser des aspects de croyances sur
lesquelles s’appuient la plupart des Qigong, c’est-à-dire, sur des mouvements plus
rituels qu’ayant un sens dans leur exécution. Si la MTC 1 n’est pas exactement une
médecine rationnelle, du point de vue des paradigmes scientifique de la médecine
général occidentale, elle fait l’objet de recherche scientifique dans les universités de
médecine chinoise en Chine. Basée sur une logique de circulation du Qi : 氣, (se
prononçant « tchi » en français : tʃi, en phonétique internationale), la MTC permettrait
alors de donner au Zhineng Qigong une dimension ontologique, puisque basée sur un
système logique qui se rationnalise de part cette grille de développement.

This portfolio unfolds across three thematic strands: Technologies, Knowledge and Power, and Green Spaces, to explore the layered and often overlooked ways in which plants shape, and are shaped by human life. Through multisensory engagements with plants, fibres, and soil, this portfolio traces the evolution of ecological entanglements, from great apes to humans, exploring how these relationships have shaped cognition, culture, and ecological understandings of health.

Is there a material signature for slavery and colonialism? Is there a place where you can see, perceive, and touch how the Global North became rich, leaving the Global South in a state of dependency? The coast of Ghana, with its European forts and castles, is one such place. The transatlantic slave trade remains a deeply sensitive and globally significant topic, drawing international attention and scholarly interest. Between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, it profoundly impacted African economies within the Atlantic sphere and drastically altered countless lives.

Ever since the Meiji period, the kimono has been commodified — nationally and internationally — as the Japanese national dress, symbolising Japan as a land full of exquisite, exotic traditions. While kimono production is now in decline, its image is still thriving, actively promoted and marketed to attract tourists — domestic and international ones alike — in quest of an “authentic”, sometimes premium, Japan experience. As a result, the kimono consumed by visitors in Japan, especially in the emblematic “traditional” Kyoto, becomes an object that can be placed at the nexus of content and fashion tourism as well as pilgrimage, with the rental kimono practices or second-hand kimono purchases employing similar liminal dynamics. This article analyses the interactions the kimono entertains between design and marketing, experience and global consumerism, tourism and pilgrimage; mapping the different territories shared by kimono pilgrims and their communitas by first looking at kimono as co...

Sensory anthropology has explored sensation as a fruitful but poorly examined domain of cross-cultural research. Curiously, sensory anthropologists have mostly ignored scientific research into sensation, even that which addresses cross-cultural variation. A comparative study in two Amazonian societies (Matsigenka, Yora [Nahua]) documented the role of the senses in medicinal plant therapy and benefited greatly from theoretical insights gleaned from sensory science. The study reveals a complex interweaving of cultural and ecological factors in medicinal plant selection, with sensation standing at the culture-nature nexus linking medical ideas with medical materials. By synthesizing (rather than antagonizing) scientific and anthropological insights, sensation can be understood as a biocultural phenomenon rooted in human physiology yet constructed through individual experience and culture. Overcoming the limitations of a narrowly defined sensory anthropology, sensory ecology is here proposed as a new theoretical perspective for addressing humanenvironment interactions mediated by the senses.

The Routledge History of the Senses presents readers with an overview of the field. As well as pointing to directions for the future of the discipline, it illustrates the extent to which the subject offers considerable space for the exploration of diverse historical topics through the lens of sensory experience. The handbook brings together essays and case studies from some of the leading academics on the history of the senses. Together, they not only chart topics and arguments in existing scholarship but introduce fresh methodologies for future analyses. Specifically, the chapters collectively show that the senses of the historical body often portray the intensity of the invasion of capital upon the functions of the mind throughout global history. As a global history, this work arrives at a time when many sensory historians are looking for a touchstone for moving beyond the often heavily Western frameworks that dominate the existing literature on the historical senses. Not only will this book appeal to students and scholars of the history of senses, visual studies, art history, food studies, and many of the social sciences, but individual chapters also offer useful reading material for a wide range of historical modules and contemporary topics.

This research delves into the powerful synergy between contemporary music and contemporary dance, exploring their potential as a unified interdisciplinary art form. Rooted in the natural harmony of sound and movement, it seeks to rediscover their historical connection while addressing modern societal challenges such as intellectualism, relativism, and the pursuit of meaning in an age of chaos. Through structured improvisation, this study reimagines their relationship, emphasizing their capacity to evoke profound emotional resonance and poetic storytelling. Building on traditions from jazz, folk, and techno, this project integrates creative experimentation with academic reflection, embracing improvisation as both a method and a philosophy. By weaving the expressive capabilities of music and dance into a cohesive medium, it aims to bridge the gap between the abstract and the tangible, bringing art closer to the lives of communities and fulfilling its essential role in society. The investigation culminates in performances, workshops, and reflective documentation, offering new pathways for artists and audiences to connect deeply with art. By grounding itself in the longing for beauty and the need for renewal, this work contributes to a burgeoning discourse on interdisciplinary art, inspiring a new Renaissance for contemporary music and dance.

Steven Shapin's Eating and Being offers a cultural history of taste, dietary customs, and eating to explore larger discourses on the emergence of expertise in the West. In the tradition of Food Studies, as from Stephen Mennell's All Manners of Food (1985), and touching on class issues linked with Norbert Elias' Civilizing Process (1939) and Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction (1984), Shapin's intellectual history focuses on dietetics through reading traditional aspects of food culture and medical knowledge as they influenced Western worlds during changes that led to a supposedly unified modernity.

Accounts of the creative process tend to be retrospective and implicitly ground the creative act within the person, the mind, the moment, the idea; in doing so, they often miss the larger sociomaterial qualities that can provide us with important insights about the social relationality and playfulness of the creative process. In this article, we examine the creative process through an antenarrative lens that we consider very useful for theorizing the creative process from a cultural and sociomaterial perspective. More specifically, we argue that ‘having an idea’ is a contextualized and embodied process that can be regarded as an antenarrative of the overall creative process. We also discuss how the paradoxical relation between the formative and sudden manifestations of the creative act can be understood through the notion of play.

What can we learn about the therapeutic landscapes of in-patient psychiatric care by focusing on the invisible, the seemingly unimportant? To explore how mental affliction and caregiving acts are connected to other-than-human dimensions and sensory experience, I analyse the role of trees and forests in a Swiss in-patient psychiatric clinic. Using ethnographic vignettes and introducing the forest as a therapeutic landscape, I discuss the role of trees in a ward's day-today life, a psychiatric sufferer's modes of self-perception in the forest, and a physiotherapist's active 'tinkering'. My central argument addresses a problematic element in the research on psychiatric care in Switzerland: it is largely devoid of anthropological attentiveness to sensory perception and the atmospheric. I propose an alternative view where the experiences of illness, recovery, and violence are fundamentally co-created by a sensory context-including its marginalised, nonhuman, and atmospheric dimensions-and a conceptual framework informed by an anthropological adaption of feminist notions of 'matters of care' as well as sensory and ecological anthropology.

The interrelationships between humans, smells and the built environment have been the focus of increasing numbers of research studies in the past ten years. This paper reviews these trends and identifies the challenges in smellscape research from three aspects: methodological approaches, artistic design interventions and museum practices, and odour policy making. In response to the gaps and challenges identified, three areas of future research have also been identified for this field: smell archives and databases, social justice within odour control and management, and research into advanced building materials.

When it comes to implementing the rule of law on the European continent,
one can rely on guidance from the Venice Commission [1]. The Benchmarks identify the right to be heard as one of the additional fair trial standards.Ukrainian procedural legislation expands this to submitting statements and motions, providing explanations to the court, presenting arguments and opinions on issues arising during the trial, and objections to other persons’ statements, motions, arguments, and opinions [2]. But is that enough for a comprehensive evaluation and fair resolution of a case? What role do senses play when a party to a case needs to communicate all circumstances to the court, and when the court needs to interpret them correctly?

This paper explores how a wardrobe study, the dress audit, was combined with literature on the dress archetype to create a brief for fashion design practice that aims to increase the active wearing of dresses. Overall, clothing utilisation has declined by over a third in the last 15 years, with dresses being the least worn of any significant item. Unworn dresses amount to hidden wardrobe waste, and increasing their utilisation could reduce fashion overconsumption. A cultural examination of the dress through a lens of sustainability reveals an archetype of the Western fashion system, tied to production and consumption discourses with complex socio-political dimensions. In contrast, the wardrobe study provided vital insights into dress-wearing experiences. Most dresses are now mass-produced, creating a disconnect between designers and wearers, and this paper highlights some of the implications of this divide. The wardrobe study identified three leading factors that impact wearing: fit, occasion, and style. If designers address these three factors alone, it could mitigate up to 80% of low usage issues. These findings helped develop five baseline parameters and create a new brief for fashion design practice that prioritises greater garment utilisation by incorporating the lived experience of wearing within the design process.

This article explores documentary film production in Turkey, focusing on sensory ethnographic cinema, an artistic approach that highlights local cultural practices through the lens of the body, senses, and emotions. While not explicitly categorized as sensory ethnography, certain Turkish documentaries such as Life on Their Backs (Yeşim Ustaoğlu, 2004) and Last Season Shawaks (Kazım Öz, 2009) embody similar artistic elements. By highlighting the key characteristics of these two films - such as immersing the audience in a 'being there' experience, their expansive views including non-human aspects, and their distinct regional focus - the article suggests that the geographical scope of sensory etnography extends beyond the works produced by the Sensory Ethnography Lab where this genre originated. Accordingly, the article conducts a comparative analysis of Life on Their Backs, Last Season Shawaks, and Sensory Ethnography Lab's Sweetgrass (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, 2009) within the theoretical frameworks of new materialism and actor-network theories.

Since its arrival in 2010, Airbnb has transformed the local tourism economy, aligning with Sustainable Development Goal 8 by fostering economic growth and employment. However, recent platform updates, especially the 2022 algorithmic changes colloquially termed “#Airbbust”, have generated substantial disruptions. These include reduced visibility for established hosts, unequal booking distribution, and growing concerns regarding data privacy, platform dependency, and transparency in AI decision-making. This paper aims to explore the ethical and sustainability implications of emerging digital technologies—particularly artificial intelligence (AI)—within fragile tourism environments, focusing on the short-term rental market in Riviera Maya and Cancun, Mexico. Drawing from anthropological perspectives, digital ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and case study methodology, the research investigates the socio-economic and ethical impacts of AI integration into sharing economy platforms such as Airbnb.
Findings highlight a polarized landscape: while some actors embrace AI tools to optimize their business models, others express apprehension over the opacity of algorithms and potential ethical violations. Importantly, the study reveals the absence of robust regulatory frameworks in Mexico, which exacerbates vulnerabilities in already fragile socio-technical ecosystems. The paper argues that the increasing digitalization of tourism infrastructures necessitates a more equitable, transparent, and inclusive integration of AI. It also calls for a transdisciplinary effort to ensure that AI development aligns with ethical and sustainable principles, particularly in peripheral and ecologically sensitive regions.
By emphasizing the co-constitutive relationship between digital technologies and society, this work contributes to ongoing debates on Sustainable AI and digital governance, urging for the design of socio-technical systems that prioritize justice, inclusivity, and human autonomy in contexts of accelerated technological change.

This Special Issue collects ethnographies that analyse the variety of ways that health is produced,
shaped and experienced through entanglements, relationships, encounters and affects among
more-than-human beings (which include animate and inanimate beings, regarded as belonging
to the “natural realm,” the “technological realm” and the “spiritual realm”) through a
multiplicity of ethnographic contexts and theoretical approaches. Science and Technology
Studies (STS), Multispecies Ethnographies, Anthropology of Religion, Indigenous Ethnographies,
new approaches to materiality, and Posthumanism are all combined with Medical Anthropology
to create interdisciplinary approaches that offer original insights into the interplay of various
more-than-human beings in the production of health,

The first-ever book to systematically and comprehensively investigate the unique sound worlds of the Global South, Sonic Perspectives from the Global Souths outlines the historical and aesthetic developments of sound practices in some of the key regions of South Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. It examines the sonic aesthesis and thinking in these regions in the light of a complex and fraught colonial relationship with the West to bring forward the under-engaged and often underrepresented artists and thinkers and sonic epistemologies from the Global South. The book is auto-ethnographic in approach, informed by the author’s own practice and migratory background, and draws insights from long conversations with prominent sound practitioners based in the Global South or part of their diaspora. The book traces a decolonial milieu of sounding and listening and offers embodied perspectives on the unheard reciprocity, resonant relationality, and the aural confluences.

Nous proposons dans cet article d’explorer de quelle maniere la materialite est porteuse d’ambiance, en quoi elle participe a la definition du monde sensible. En envisageant certaines evolutions au cours de l’histoire des techniques, cette approche invite a montrer comment les facteurs d’ambiances peuvent jouer un role dans le design du monde materiel. Nous nous appuyons sur une investigation d’ordre documentaire et experimental en cours sur ces questions dans notre programme de recherche personnel.

Today, the transformation of the economy and politics into fundamental factors shaping social life, the integration of technological advancements and the effects of globalization into every aspect of life, have made modern living a highly fragmented process. The hypothesis of the research is that the disappearance of experience and the highly fragmented process in question tend to increase with digitalization. The aim of the study is to deeply understand the concept of experience and discuss its disappearance through transformed bodyspace relationship. Two main research questions are posed: "What are the values that constitute experience?", "Can the disappearance of experience be analyzed in the context of the body-space relationship in the digitalizing world?" Initially, the components of experience were analyzed based on written data obtained from 29 students. Five main components that make up the experience have been discovered: establishing meaning, randomness,
remembering, sense and feeling. These discovered components were evaluated in the context of the evolving notions of body and space with digitalization. It was concluded that digitalization has the potential to expand how we interact with the world, but it also poses a risk of altering the very essence of what it means to experience.

Este estudo objetivou investigar as experiências multissensoriais de trabalhadoras e trabalhadores da comunidade escolar de Pinheiros (Espírito Santo) com~na 4 natureza. Trata-se de uma pesquisa pautada em referenciais ecofenomenológicos, que considera as dimensões ecológicas e filosóficas do ser humano nas diferentes interações com os maisque-humanos. A produção dos dados aconteceu a partir da observação participante e de caminhadas com quatro participantes da comunidade escolar. Foram realizados registros em fotos, vídeos e descrições, apoiados no movimento metodológico denominado como etnografia sensorial, dos/nos mergulhos multissensoriais das experiências estéticas dos participantes da pesquisa. As experiências de cada participante originaram (eco) narrativas, as quais foram analisadas segundo os referenciais da fenomenologia. Os aspectos emergentes surgiram a partir da triangulação das (eco)narrativas e respondem a nossa questão de pesquisa. Portanto, os aspectos emergentes são concebidos como as experiências multissensoriais que afloraram durante as caminhadas com as trabalhadoras e os trabalhadores da comunidade escolar: 1) Finitude da existência humana frente à Mata Atlântica; 2) Protagonismo dos mais-que-humanos; 3) Fluidez dos microclimas da Mata Atlântica; 4) Correspondência entre corpos. Embora este estudo não tenha objetivado prescrever as caminhadas na natureza como manual a ser seguido para práticas de educação ambiental menos antropocêntricas, advogamos que essa forma de ocupação da natureza pode implicar em práticas de educação ambiental nas quais mais-que-humanos estejam em condições simétricas no processo e, também, despertem sentimentos éticos de respeito à alteridade de outros elementos, para além dos seres humanos. Palavras-chave Educação da atenção-Etnografia sensorial-Mundo mais-que-humano-Walking Ethnography-Correspondência.

Initiated as a curated collaboration, this trialogue traces the exchange of walking practices between three artists, Marta Branco Guerreiro, Katarzyna Laskowska and Elena Peytchinska, who individually created and performed walkshops during different parts of "The Lost-and-Found" symposium that took place between December 2023 and June 2024 in Lisbon, Warsaw and Riga. The first walkshop, enacted by Marta, happened in the gardens of the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, while the remaining two were led by Katarzyna and Elena in June 2024 in Riga's urban environment. For the purpose of the trialogue, and based on the experiences during the symposium, Marta, Katarzyna and Elena decided to design three walkshops, the reenactments of which were to be exchanged between them. Each artist performed the walkshops of the other two colleagues in the context of their respective cities of residence: Lisbon (Portugal), Sierosław (Poland) and Vienna (Austria). Whereas Marta's and Elena's walkshop procedures approximated those performed during the symposium, Katarzyna developed a new walkshop scenario specifically designed for this collaboration. During the reenactments, the artists' attention was particularly drawn to non-human agencies, encountered along or emerged through the walks. Applying different artistic methods and media-in accordance with each artist's specific approach-and situated within the urban landscape of the different cities, the reenacted walkshops provided additional performative material, which in turn initiated the weaving of this transmedially articulated trialogue. This essay is presented in two different parts: the first one interweaves a collective map of the walks and a poetic approach arising from the artists' online dialogues during the summer of 2024, while the second explains the artists' theoretical approach to walking, weaving and writing, This is an slideshow article, please visit the source article to view it. "The Lost and Found' symposium (2023 24) proposed to find new ways of revising art stories in search of https://parsejournal.com/article/walking-weaving-writing/ 1 / 12

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Based on a walking ethnography, this photo essay employs sensory ethnography to explore multispecies relationality in steljniki, plots of land traditionally used for grazing and the harvesting of common bracken. Through work in subsistence-based extensive farming, humans have formed multispecies relationality, and, beyond use value, have attributed aesthetic value to the cultivated landscape. This essay presents the micro-processes of relational, affective, and material entanglements of humans with more-than-human worlds in steljniki, particularly with common bracken.

Focusing on the body beyond the face allows multispecies anthropology
to embrace a multisensory perspective, opening new possibilities
for detecting and understanding the subtleties of
interspecies connectedness. The body, transcending any single
sense, reveals its multisensorial potentialities: touch evokes emotions,
sight inspires visions, hearing deepens into attentive listening,
taste fosters companionship, and smell rekindles memories.
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s views on the body
and my ethnographic work with pigeons and donkeys in Pakistan,
this article contends that a bodily oriented, sense-based approach
has the potential to generate new forms of knowledge and reimagine
relationships that transcend species boundaries.

This chapter aims to present the strands of knowledge produced in anthropology since the sensorial turn, particularly regarding environmental inquiry. Firstly, the study provides an overview of the existing literature and traces how multisensorial synesthesia has steadily replaced earlier concerns with representation and the concept of sensory mediation. Secondly, the chapter explores the epistemological ties that have already emerged between sensory anthropology and environmental research, with the resulting methodological implications being critically ana lyzed. Thirdly, it advocates for a sensory perspective in ecological research on pastoralism, arguing that this approach produces not just additional knowledge but qualitatively different knowledge. What benefits arise from the attempt to approach the landscape as a synesthesia of various sensory acts that constitute it? What kind of quality do sensory approaches bring to the ethnography of pastoralism? And what does multispecies ethnography have to do with the entanglement of the sensory and the ecological? These specific questions are explored to articulate what conducting sensory anthropology and environmental research may mean. The chapter concludes by envisioning developments in the future.

This study critically reflects on the limitations imposed on ethnographic fieldwork in Chukotka following recent geopolitical developments, particularly the interruption of cross-border contact and travel. Drawing on long-term anthropological engagement with Russian Yupik and Chukchi communities, the paper proposes a methodological reorientation toward visual ethnography in digital environments. It explores how visual traces shared through instant messaging platforms—especially WhatsApp—enable continued inquiry into the everyday, sensory, and moral worlds of interlocutors, even amidst restricted physical access. Engaging with theories of visuality, absence, and archival practices, the study interweaves analog home photography and digital image sharing, treating both as generative archives. Through case studies of intimate online exchanges—marked by personal transformation, militarisation, and loss—the paper discusses the evolving dynamics of self-formation, mediated sociability, and visual witnessing. It concludes with a call for a “spherical” ethnographic method, inspired by Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of the montage-sphere, to navigate fragmented and layered narratives. This approach privileges simultaneity, contingency, and sensory immediacy over linear coherence, aiming to reframe the anthropological understanding of presence and field amid contemporary ruptures.

A critical attention to religious sounds can respond to the call for a sonic
turn in the study of religions, while also contributing to a trajectory for
the interdisciplinary study of sound to grow out of its secularist and
ethnocentric paradigms. After defining the key concepts and intellectual interventions of the book, this introduction offers a summary of the
chapters, elucidating how they contribute to an acoustemology of the
post-secular rooted in Asia as method. Then, it presents cross-cutting
themes—senses, media, and power—and discusses religious sounds as
inextricably connected with synesthetic bodily experiences and with
configurations of space, while being always mediated and enmeshed with
power structures. The final section links the rich and diverse empirical data
of the chapters with broader debates in the study of religion and sound.

Fifty people compiled diaries in which they described the sounds of their daily life in cities around the world. Of the 940 hours of observation there were 200 entries that referred to sounds of laughter, both live and recorded. The participants of the research always identified laughter sounds explicitly, unlike other urban sounds. The sound of laughter has a powerful culturalsymbolic superstructure. Learning how we use laughter, what we hear and how we react when someone laughs can help us to understand the key processes taking place in the urban space today. Laughter can at once attract and repel, signal danger and relieve social tension. It can lead equally to social agents' inclusion and exclusion in the situation of interaction, and can largely determine the form and extent of their inclusion. A citizen's interpretation of the sound of laughter depends directly on the media technologies which predominate in the urban environment and channel their cultural experience and sonic imagination.

This dissertation examines the care work of music therapists in North American hospitals. Based on sixteen months of fieldwork conducted between 2019 and 2020 in Canada and the United States, this ethnography investigates the clinical aesthetics of music therapy, or how music therapy is sensed and made sense of in the clinic. I show how, through its foundation in Western art music traditions, the profession of music therapy is depoliticized-grounded in the values of universality, rationality, and objectivity-and aligned with biomedicine. It is through an association with biomedical knowledge systems that, I argue, music therapy is made into a health profession. I found that music therapists struggle to have their work taken seriously as they care for patients on the margins of hospital systems. Music therapists are in pursuit of what I call clinical recognition-being seen and valued from a biomedical perspective. As they strive to be recognized as indispensable to biomedical care, I show how music therapists attempt to ameliorate biomedical care structures from within. They cultivate sensitivities to sensory experience, especially to sound, that inform their movement through hospitals and guide their interactions with patients and staff. By intervening in what I describe as the clinical sensoriumthe dominant structuring of sensory modes of attention that shape what is sensible in the clinicmusic therapists disrupt the stultifying anaesthetic, or numbing, qualities of the clinic by reconfiguring clinical attunements, composing atmospheres of care, and structuring feelings in their extra/ordinary care practices. These care practices, I argue, are grounded in reciprocity; through musical gift exchange, music therapists foster affective connections and attachments for hospital patients that reimagine care in ways that remain partially tethered to yet exceed biomedical logics. Mobilized for and against biopolitical care regimes that attempt to delineate, capture, and govern life and death, I argue the care practices of music therapists reimagine the sensory-affective possibilities of living and dying in the clinic.

Sleep is a key factor in health and well-being outcomes, but its issues and opportunities are underexplored in institutions. The prevalence of poor sleep quality and insomnia is higher in institutionalised populations than in the general population, stimulating adverse mental and physical health and well-being outcomes, including violence. With supporting evidence from an ethnographic study in an adult male prison, this policy-oriented commentary discusses the relationship between sleep and behaviour, the lived experience of sleeping in institutions, and the opportunities to improve behavioural outcomes. It concludes that sleep deprivation contributes to a downward spiral and proposes three areas of intervention to promote a more person-centred sleeping environment for health and safety.

Prisons are places of power and resistance. When the staff oppress prisoners, the latter participate in various forms of resistance, such as violence, substance misuse, riots, or protests to communicate a sense of injustice. Many of these struggles have been documented and discussed at length, revealing and communicating the national and local structures that produce them. However, potting remains a taboo on the wings and in criminological literature, where the use of bodily fluids as a means of prisoners rejecting penal power is rarely discussed beyond macro-political contexts. Drawing on symbolic interactionism and phenomenological approaches to knowledge, this paper challenges that taboo and proposes that potting is an embodied expression of oppression, a symbolic representation of prisoners' defilement and a physical transference of their sense of injustice. Potting is a pervasive and perverse form of resistance.

Little has been written about the specific and complex environments of the studio and the art school. A ‘material culture’ approach to art and design can throw light on the multi-materiality of works of art and design, and on the affective resonances of artefacts. We complied this special issue of the journal 'Studies in material thinking' with particular focus the multisensorial and affective materialities in relation to the objects, meanings and practices of art and design and art education. While many writers have noted that the multi-sensual aspect of material culture is also that which resists attempts of narration or rationalisation, we discuss how this raises particular concerns within some of the less well theorised or observed fields of art and design, where practitioners may themselves believe that ‘theory’ is not part of practice. We examine the formation of identity also, as art school students can be thought of as self-fashioning professionals, young adults enga...

Revue d'anthropologie des connaissances 19-1 | 2025 Modalités sensibles du connaître dans le care Dossier thématique Vers une approche ethnographique des modalités sensibles du connaître dans les activités de care Towards an ethnography of sensible modalities of knowing in care activities Hacia una etnografía de las modalidades sensibles del conocimiento en las actividades asistenciales Auf dem Weg zu einer Ethnographie der sinnlichen Modalitäten der Kenntnis in Care-Tätigkeiten

The claim of Eileen Jeanette Garrett's first memoir to be a search for truth is continued 85 years later in Behind the Medium's Mask. In this major reassessment of the medium's origin story, Elisabeth J.C. (Lis) Warwood of Adelaide, South Australia, shares her exhaustive examination of Garrett's background before 1930. Lis Warwood has decades of experience in historical study of Spiritualism and psychical research. With increased online access to genealogical records, and leaving no stone unturned, she has identified Garrett in all the official records that one would expect for an individual of humble origins. Her research is testimony to the value of genealogical investigation that academic historians often ignore. Warwood presents her painstaking analysis of statements in the medium's three memoirs (originally published in 1939, 1949, and 1968), compared to the evidence in primary source documents, to disprove claims Garrett made about her life before the age of 30. That task required a level of patience that few biographers would muster. The discrepancies are wide-ranging and include descriptions of the circumstances around her birth, parentage, education, marriages, children, and business ventures.

The claim of Eileen Jeanette Garrett's first memoir to be a search for truth is continued 85 years later in Behind the Medium's Mask. In this major reassessment of the medium's origin story, Elisabeth J.C. (Lis) Warwood of Adelaide, South Australia, shares her exhaustive examination of Garrett's background before 1930. Lis Warwood has decades of experience in historical study of Spiritualism and psychical research. With increased online access to genealogical records, and leaving no stone unturned, she has identified Garrett in all the official records that one would expect for an individual of humble origins. Her research is testimony to the value of genealogical investigation that academic historians often ignore. Warwood presents her painstaking analysis of statements in the medium's three memoirs (originally published in 1939, 1949, and 1968), compared to the evidence in primary source documents, to disprove claims Garrett made about her life before the age of 30. That task required a level of patience that few biographers would muster. The discrepancies are wide-ranging and include descriptions of the circumstances around her birth, parentage, education, marriages, children, and business ventures.