The Senses and Society

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Engaging the Senses in Ethnographic Practice

Sarah Pink

To cite this article: Sarah Pink (2013) Engaging the Senses in Ethnographic Practice, The Senses
and Society, 8:3, 261-267, DOI: 10.2752/174589313X13712175020433

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Published online: 16 Apr 2015.

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Engaging the Senses

in Ethnographic
Practice
Implications and Advances

The Senses & Society  DOI: 10.2752/174589313X13712175020433

Sarah Pink

+
Sarah Pink is Professor What has been called the “sensory turn” in schol-
of Design and Media
arship has in recent years generated an increas-
Ethnography at
RMIT University, ing body of written scholarship and arts-based
and Professor of research. Much of this scholarship and practice is rooted in
Social Sciences
approaches to ethnography that engage (with) the senses
at Loughborough
University. and sensory experience. By the end of the first decade of
sarah.pink@rmit.edu.au the twenty-first century a good number of such scholars
were writing reflexively about their practices as ethnogra-
phers (see Pink 2009). Yet, at that time the body of works
that interrogated and reflected on the methodological impli-
cations of taking a sensory approach was less expansive.
There were of course exceptions, which I have discussed
elsewhere (Pink 2009), some of the most prominent being
the work of Paul Stoller (1997), Nadia Seremetakis (1994),
Kathryn Linn Geurts (2002), and Tomie Hahn (2007) as well
as reflections brought to the fore through the writing and
editorial work of David Howes (e.g. Howes 2003, 2005).
There was also a growing focus on the phenomenological
and embodied elements of ethnographic knowing (e.g.
261

Harris 2007). In my book Doing Sensory Ethnography (Pink

 Sarah Pink

2009) I explicitly sought to bring together these existing literatures

to chart how a reflexive approach to attending to the senses as part
of ethnographic practices of research, analysis, and representation
was developing. Now, only four years later, this rapidly developing
field of scholarship and practice is moving on.
The current context is characterized by an increasing interest in
the use of sensory methodologies in research and representation,
and in interrogating the types of knowledge or ways of knowing
generated through these approaches. Significantly the impact of a
sensory approach is developing across a range of the “ethnographic”
disciplines. It is found in both applied and scholarly research agen-
das, and in debates about the theoretical and practical processes of
interpretation and analysis that it is informed by and engages. Indeed,
given that there is growing demand for ethnographic research as a
provider of alternative types of knowledge in, for instance, education,
design, and industry contexts, there are opportunities for a sensory
ethnography focus to propose new ways of knowing and thinking
across established debates and research problems.
The above context forms the background for this special issue.
Its aim is to explore the related questions of how an approach to
ethnography that engages the senses is being advanced method-
ologically, and how it is advancing knowledge in different disciplines.
In doing so it identifies and establishes some of the themes that are
becoming prominent in this field since Doing Sensory Ethnography
was published in 2009. It does this in two ways. First, by bringing to-
gether a set of scholars whose sensory approaches to ethnographic
practice are applied to different but related disciplines and interdis-
ciplinary fields of scholarship (education studies, youth studies, mu-
seum studies, European ethnology, arts practice, anthropology, and
media studies). Second, between them the authors of the articles
included in this special issue consider both applied and scholarly ap-
plications of sensory approaches, thus extending further the already
emergent discussion to the role of a sensory methodology in applied
ethnographic research, as well as its implications for theory-building.
In developing these themes the special issue also brings recent
sensory research in Sweden into the spotlight by featuring the work
of three Sweden-based scholars alongside that of three scholars
based in the UK and Australia.
The articles approach sensory ethnography methodology in dif-
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ferent but complementary ways, each developing and advancing a

specific methodological issue or research field relating to sensory
ethnography. While the ethnographic process is not regarded as
linear the articles are arranged so that collectively they stand for the
building of a narrative through the research process. Each article
emphasizes specific stages or encounters that form part of sen-
sory ethnography. In the first article Vaike Fors discusses a sensory
ethnography that compares teenagers’ engagements with Web-
262

based social media with their encounters with interactive museums.

 Engaging the Senses in Ethnographic Practice

Ethnographically, Fors takes us into the everyday digital worlds of her

teenage research participants. Here a scholarly analysis shows how
vision and touch are part of a tacit understanding of and engage-
ment with everyday worlds and issues; part of the way that they
produce or experience a “feeling” about things. Fors shows how this
sensory methodology enables her to develop a critical approach to
understandings of learning in education studies, specifically in the
context of the way that theories of learning and the senses are ap-
plied in the design of museum exhibits. The article also highlights the
applied implications of such an analysis: Fors shows the importance
of researching, understanding, and attending to the existing forms of
sensory attunement of the target audience in the design of interac-
tive digital museum exhibits, and offers a practical and analytical
pathway through which this might be achieved through a sensory
ethnography approach. In the second article Andrew Irving advances
the work of sensory ethnography to further our understanding of the
relationship between “mind, body, and world.” Irving also draws us
into the worlds of other people in novel ways. His article draws on
recent research that shows how the sensory experience of crossing
bridges can be understood as related to persons’ interior states,
and uses this to explore the relationship between the “thinking,
feeling, moving body” and urban architecture. The innovation here
is in the development of methodologies that can answer such a
research question in new ways, and therefore bring new perspec-
tives to the way we understand the relationship between sensory,
embodied, and affective experiences and urban environments. The
next article by Tom O’Dell and Robert Willim draws our attention to
the, until now, neglected area of the analytical process in sensory
ethnography, through a focus on transcription. They show how
transcription becomes reworked into new categories that go beyond
a process of putting sound on to paper, through engagements with
audiovisual and performative dimensions of sensory methodology in
a digital context. The final article by Kerstin Leder Mackley and Sarah
Pink continues the focus on analysis and representation, taking it
in a different direction. They, like Fors, emphasize the applied pos-
sibilities of sensory ethnography research. Leder Mackley and Pink
explore the practices of analysis and representation through which
the sensory and unspoken ways of knowing created in video-based
ethnography are made accessible as knowledge, which might inform
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interventions in an applied interdisciplinary energy research project.

Each article, in its own right, brings to the fore a set of issues
and challenges that sensory ethnography approaches are perhaps
especially well-equipped to address. Simultaneously, a set of themes
emerges that are evident in two or more articles, as well, I suggest,
as being evident in a wider emergent body of scholarship on this
theme, which I now elaborate on. First, all of the contributors to
this special issue have been committed to developing a reflexive
263

discussion of sensory ethnography practice in ways that make

 Sarah Pink

the processes and techniques through which they have produced

knowledge open and accessible to other researchers. This, as I
have suggested above, adds to the now growing body of reflexive
literature about the senses in ethnographic practice. While the doing
of ethnography of course has a much broader purpose than simply
enabling our reflections on its practice, I believe that a reflexive
engagement with practice and with how our ways of knowing are
produced is an essential element of any research project; how else
are we to understand the meaning of what we have come to know?
The articles offer a series of interesting examples of how knowledge
is produced and how research is done. For example Fors’ work
involves not only studying her participants’ experiences and seeking
to comprehend these, but also critically deconstructing the sensory
ideologies that had informed the making of the museum exhibits to
which these teenagers were the target users. This demonstrates
well how a sensory ethnography approach can move between what
Ingold (2008) describes as an anthropological approach to doing
ethnography “with” people, to a deconstruction of existing cultural
forms (i.e. exhibits/installations) and the discourses they are associ-
ated with. Such approaches attend to the senses in different social,
material, and historical contexts, finally bringing together the materi-
als produced through such different methods to produce knowledge
at the interface between them. Fors’ article therefore shows us
something of the research process, and how different encounters
were brought together analytically to create the knowledge and
meanings that she later used to reflect on how museum installations
might be better designed in the future. Indeed it is particularly signifi-
cant that several of the articles in this special issue interrogate not
only fieldwork techniques and experiences, but also the analytical
practices and processes. In comparison with the established routine
of reflexively interrogating one’s ethnographic fieldwork methods
and experiences, and the existing critiques of ethnographic forms of
representation (e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986; James et al. 1997),
these elements of ethnographic work are, as noted above, perhaps
the least frequently discussed. They are also however those that
commonly mystify those not trained in ethnography. The question
of “how to do the analysis” or what methods can be used is never
easily answered in ethnography. It was a question I was not prepared
to answer in Doing Sensory Ethnography (Pink 2009) by offering a
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method or process that could be followed by others. Indeed there is

no single answer to this question – making it all the more useful that
some of the contributors to this special issue have been concerned
to discuss aspects of analysis – that happen after fieldwork and
before representation.
The articles by O’Dell and Willim and by Leder Mackley and Pink
both take the rather unusual step of exploring these hidden stages
of analysis in sensory ethnography practice, through a focus respec-
264

tively on transcription and the processes of interdisciplinarity through

 Engaging the Senses in Ethnographic Practice

which meanings are negotiated. O’Dell and Willim write about what
they call “composing ethnography,” a concept that acknowledges
“the role of the embodied ethnographer who sculpts, molds, splices,
performs, and does ethnography” (this issue). They apply this con-
cept to the practice of transcription in ethnography – which has until
now received relatively little attention. As O’Dell and Willim show,
however, transcription can imply much more that the mundane and
instrumentalist transferal of spoken words into written words. Their
discussion invites us to consider the multisensorial nature of the
transcribed word, as well as the alternative modes of transcribing
beyond the simple typing out of words recorded. This should make
all of us who have outsourced audio-recordings for transcription
stop for a moment to reflect on how we might have generated
alternative sensory meanings and representations by exploring a
range of other firsthand researcher authored modes through which
to learn from and express their content. O’Dell and Willim’s article
therefore not only brings to the fore an aspect of analysis that is little
discussed. Rather it demonstrates how, by initiating discussions of
little attended to stages in ethnographic research practice, in relation
to recent theoretical and methodological developments, we develop
new appreciations of the value and potential of a creative, reflexive
approach that attends to sensory experience.
Leder Mackley and Pink also focus on analysis, arguing that “it
is precisely through our engagement with how we arrive at ways of
knowing that we can also hope to communicate these to others.”
This article is concerned with how an understanding of analytical
process can enable communication and the sharing of ways of
knowing in interdisciplinary research. As a reflexive note here I should
add that, as will probably be obvious to readers, I am writing about
my own work as a co-author. My decision to develop the discussion
in the third person is in order to maintain a similar style in the discus-
sion of my own co-authored work as that used in the discussion of
my co-contributor’s articles. Drawing on their experiences of working
on a sensory video ethnography project, Leder Mackley and Pink
discuss how by using video as a way to communicate between
disciplines in a context where they argue that “interdisciplinarity does
not happen simply when we bring the findings of different disciplines
together into critical relief, but it also becomes embedded in the
ongoingness of analytical process.” These moves towards making
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explicit how fieldwork practices develop in sensory ethnography re-

search, and how analytical techniques, processes, and practices are
developed and engaged offer a new layer to the reflexivity that has
become commonplace across the ethnographic disciplines. Indeed
it is not only in this field, but in discussions of ethnographic practice
more generally that analysis remains an under-discussed and -docu-
mented process. In part, because analysis in ethnography is messy
and contingent, it involves considering the relationality between
265

different types of materials and ways of knowing and identifying and

 Sarah Pink

creating and correspondences and meanings between them. From

these often non-representational ways of knowing social scientists
conventionally create meaningful written texts or other forms of
representation that communicate our findings to others.
A second theme that emerges across two of the articles is to
demonstrate how sensory ethnography is relevant and of value in
applied research. The sensory ethnography research that Pink and
Leder Mackley discuss has been developed in the context of an
interdisciplinary project in energy demand reduction. Working with
and in relation to engineers and designers, the authors were very
conscious of the question of how to best make their research avail-
able and meaningful to colleagues in these other disciplines. They
discuss how they confronted questions relating to how they made
the sensory qualities of their video research materials participate in
this process, and how they used the findings they had drawn from
the study with its focus on sensory experience to develop new
ways of conceptualizing everyday life in the home. In doing so they
also demonstrate something of the relationship between theoretical
scholarship about the senses and the developing of practical insights
into other people’s worlds, as does Fors through her focus on the
“problem” of how teenagers engage with museum exhibits. In both
cases these articles have implications that could inform the design
of future digital technologies across public and domestic sectors.
Finally, of the articles in this special issue, it is Irving’s discussion
of the crossing of bridges in New York that most brings to mind the
importance of accounting for the relationship between the environ-
ment, body, and affective states. This theme is also evident in the
other articles. For instance, Leder Mackley and Pink’s research took
as one of its foci the experience of sensory aesthetic of home as
an environment and Fors is concerned with the way that teenagers
experience museum environments. However Irving very strikingly
evokes through images, his participants’ words, and his own discus-
sions, the affective consequences of our relationship with the urban
environment. Irving’s work also reminds us, as his article discusses
a research method that has itself developed over several of his
projects and writings, of the important point that research methods
are not fixed or necessarily directly transferable between projects.
Rather, if we are to understand the ways of knowing that emerge
from our projects then we need to reflect not only the method as a
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way to produce knowledge, but on the biography of that method as

technique that changes over time, not only in its form and mode of
application, but also in the theoretical and methodological orienta-
tions it follows. It is for this reason that sensory ethnography is not a
static practice, but one that, as the contributors to this special issue
nicely show, is always moving on.
I would like to end this introduction with an invitation to read-
ers. The invitation is not to test, copy, or imitate the techniques,
266

practices, or projects discussed in this special issue. Rather it is

 Engaging the Senses in Ethnographic Practice

to consider how and where we go next: there are no fixed mod-

els for sensory ethnography – for its research methods, analytical
processes, or representational forms. Instead, as each article has
shown there is enormous potential for exploration, acknowledgment
of the ongoingness of the processes through which we not only
make ethnography, but also how we make methods and learn to
know in ethnographic sites, analytical activities, and in the making
of representations. If we focus on ethnography as a form of what
Ingold (2013) calls “making” and what O’Dell and Willim (this issue)
call “composition,” we can being to see our own work as being inter-
woven in a continuing trajectory of methodological exploration, from
which emerge, projects, publications, and findings. These elements,
with others, are what constitute the ethnographic places in which we
work, in their processual ambiguity.

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