In this article, I draw on material from an ethnographic and phenomenological study of knowledge and professionalism among registered nurses working in a cancer unit at a Norwegian hospital. During the study, the use of the senses stood out as an important skill in nurses’ work with patients. The question to be investigated in this article is how the nurses acquire and use sensory knowledge in their clinical work. Building on a notion of knowledge as situated, embodied, and sensory, and learning as embedded in doing, this article contributes to and expands on the study of sensory knowledge in two respects. First, it foregrounds the processes and practices in which sensory knowledge is actually formed and used at a microlevel. Second, it highlights how an ethnographic and phenomenological exploration of the acquisition and use of sensory knowledge can contribute new insights into how expertise is cultivated in everyday clinical practice.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.