The sensuous city Sensory methodologies in urban ethnographic research

While urban dimensions of landscapes and the physical environment are often regarded as built structures that relate to functionality in modern life, cities are also sites of human experience that comprise social relationships, memories, emotions, and how they are negotiated on an everyday basis. Em...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEthnography Vol. 16; no. 3; pp. 295 - 312
Main Author Low, Kelvin E.Y.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.09.2015
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Cities
Emotions
Ethnography
Research methodology
Urban areas
Urbanism
Singapore
embodiment
senses
city
sensory methodologies
urban sensory experiences
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Summary:While urban dimensions of landscapes and the physical environment are often regarded as built structures that relate to functionality in modern life, cities are also sites of human experience that comprise social relationships, memories, emotions, and how they are negotiated on an everyday basis. Embedded within these processes of sociality is how the senses mediate one’s engagement with urban life, hence rendering insights into the multi-sensory character of urbanity. This article surveys a range of sensory methodologies that may be harnessed towards articulating the social life of the senses in urbanity such as smellscape walkabouts in order to explicate the doing of sensory ethnography in urban contexts. The aim is to elucidate how place, social actors, and sensory experiences come together in the production and analysis of urban ethnographic research, including the embodied constitutions of researchers in the process of data generation.
ISSN:1466-1381
1741-2714
DOI:10.1177/1466138114552938