epistemology of everyday life’ (2001: 180). Using a phenomenological methodology he demonstrates how this focus on sound allows us to understand not simply how urban soundscapes are experienced by personal stereo users, but also how practices and experiences of looking are produced in relation to this (2001: 191). Other developments in sociology have continued to focus on social interactions, but rather than focusing on one sensory modality or category, have stressed the multisensoriality and corporeality of these encounters. While not identified as a ‘sociology of the senses’, use of the multi-modality paradigm (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2001) by sociologists has also allowed researchers undertaking observational studies of interaction to acknowledge the sensoriality of these contexts and processes (e.g. Dicks et al., 2006).
Innovative approaches to the senses in sociology
However, of most interest for the development of a sensory ethnography are projects such as the work of Christina Lammer (e.g. 2007) and of Jon Hindmarsh and Alison Pilnick (2007) in clinical contexts and Les Back’s, Dawn Lyon’s and John Hockey and Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson’s calls for further attention to the phenomenology of corporeal and sensory experiences in the sociology of work (e.g. Hockey and Allen-Collinson, 2009; Lyon and Back, 2012) and community (Back, 2009). Hindmarsh and Pilnick’s study of the interactions between members of the pre-operative anaesthetic team in a teaching hospital shows how what they call ‘intercorporeal knowing […] underpins the team’s ability to seamlessly coordinate emerging activities’. In this context they describe how ‘The sights, sounds and feel of colleagues are used to sense, anticipate, appreciate and respond to emerging tasks and activities’ (2007: 1413), thus indicating the importance of multisensorial embodied ways of knowing in human interaction. Lammer’s research about ‘how radiological personnel perceive and define “contact” as it relates to their interaction with patients’ has similar implications. Lammer set out to explore the ‘sensual realities … at work in a radiology unit’ (Lammer, 2007: 91), using video as part of her method of participant observation. She argued that in a context where patients tended to pass through the radiology department rapidly ‘a multisensual approach would encourage empathy and create a deeper sensibility amongst health professionals at a teaching hospital’ (2007: 113).
More recently, the place of the senses in sociological research has become increasingly established. Les Back and Nirmal Puwar (2012) have called for ‘live methods’ in sociology. This approach puts the senses at the centre of their project in that they write:
We are arguing for the cultivation of a sociological sensibility not confined to the predominant lines of sight, the focal points of public concern. Rather, we are arguing for paying attention to the social world within a wider range of senses and placing critical evaluation and ethical judgement at the centre of research craft. (Back and Puwar, 2012: 15)
As part of this, Back proposes that ‘The first principle of live sociology is an attention to how a wider range of the senses changes the quality of data and makes other kinds of critical imagination possible’ (Back, 2012: 29, original italics). Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul and Simon Gottschalk (2012) have sought to write the sociology of the senses through what they describe as a focus on the social, with a commitment to the study of interaction and what they call ‘somatic work’. There, taking a distinctly sociological approach, they bring together sociological attention to the body, the senses and human interaction. Again, the authors’ interest in social interaction tends to define the sociological approach to the senses, making this a distinctive element of what we might think of as a sociology of the senses, which runs through the different works discussed in this section.
Collectively, these works draw our attention to the corporeality and multisensoriality of any social encounter or interaction – including not only the relationships between research participants but those between ethnographer and research participants. Building on this in Chapter 3 I suggest that understanding our interactions with others as multisensorial encounters necessitates a reflexive awareness of the sensory intersubjectivity that characterises such meetings. Thus we might see the sociology of the senses as an important reminder that social interaction is a fundamental unit of analysis for not only understanding what is happening in the world, but also for part of the research process itself.
Sensory ethnography and applied research
The use of ethnographic methods in applied research – whether or not this is led by academic practitioners – is widespread across a range of fields of applied research, including consumer research, marketing, product development, health, education, overseas development and more. In some of these fields sensory analysis is also particularly important. In this section, by means of example, I reflect on consumer research and health studies.
In consumer research a range of methods have long since been used to analyse people’s sensory perceptions of products and brands to the point where now, in a context of consumer capitalism, ‘tapping the subjective sensory preferences of the consumer and creating enticing “interfaces” has come to take precedence over conventional design principles’ (Howes, 2005c: 286–7). In 1999 and 2000 I developed two ethnographic studies with Unilever Research in which the multisensoriality of how people experience their homes, material cultures and domestic products and practices was essential to both the research questions and processes engaged in. Both projects were situated in the domestic sphere and involved using video and interviews to research and represent how cleaning and home decorating (Pink, 2004) and laundry (Pink, 2005b, 2007c) are part of everyday practice, identity and morality. My current and recent applied research with industry partners and with designers also always incorporates attention to the sensory elements of experience and environments. For example, my research about occupational safety and health with Jennie Morgan and Andrew Dainty involved a focus on sensory ways of knowing through the hand in health care (Pink et al., 2015) and on the way other people’s homes are experienced as sites of familiarity or danger by workers in logistics and health care who have to perform home visits as part of their everyday working lives. An ethnographic approach to exploring people’s multisensory relationships to the materialities and environments of their everyday lives, and to their feelings about them, offers a remarkably rich and informative source of knowledge for academic and applied researchers alike. However, in these contexts ethnography has not historically necessarily been the dominant methodology. Indeed, in consumer and marketing research a range of sensory research methods have been developed. Some of these have been qualitative, for example Howes noted the example of ‘“body-storming” focus groups (see Bonapace, 2002: 191)’, which aimed to ‘divine the most potent sensory channel, and within each channel the most potent sensory signal, through which to distinguish their products from those of their competitors and capture the attention of potential customers’ (2005c: 288). Therefore, consumer researchers are interested in and attend to the senses in ways that show there is great potential for sensory ethnography in this applied field.
In health research the applied potential of sensory approaches to research is also becoming evident. Recent studies have focused on contexts of nursing (Edvardsson and Street, 2007), interventional radiology (Lammer, 2007) and anaesthesia (Hindmarsh and Pilnick, 2007). Located academically in sociology some of this research focuses on the embodied and sensory nature of social interactions and environments in clinical contexts, often using visual methods. The importance of acknowledging the sensorial dimensions of biomedical practices is evident from Hindmarsh and Pilnick’s (2007) study. David Edvardsson and Annette Street’s work developed this in a slightly different way by providing a reflexive and ‘insider’ account of health contexts. They discussed the idea of ‘The nurse as embodied ethnographer’ (the subtitle of their article), suggesting that researchers should account ‘for the embodied illness experience’ and ‘the sensate experience of the nurse as ethnographer’, and thus ‘open up nursing practice to phenomenological descriptions’ (2007: 30). Although their work is clearly rooted in academic debates (drawing from the work of Stoller and Emily
