This paper makes a case for multi-sensory research. By engaging with questions of ethnicity, culture, space and sound, the discussion will show how taken-for-granted, everyday practices can be part of the ways in which whiteness is produced within health care spaces, affecting how different bodies are able to move through and occupy space. The paper addresses questions of ethics and responsibility in multi-cultural contexts, suggesting how a multi-sensory orientation can uncover often hidden relationships of power that can help us to better understand and attend to the demands that ethnic and cultural difference can make upon caring relationships and multi-cultural hospitality.If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar, which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity (Eliot, 1872(Eliot, /1965 It is now difficult, if not impossible, to think about questions of race equality and cultural inclusivity in the health services without also thinking about policies, targets, equality impact assessments and professional education and training initiatives. These are important areas of work, yet they rarely come close to the ordinary, lived experience of difference or to the mundane and shape-shifting machinations of racism. In this article, I want to circumvent some of the more usual ways in which race equality and cultural sensitivity have been approached in the health services by putting bodies, or more accurately sensuality, back into the midst of our analytic frameworks and thinking.In what follows, I will advocate for what I find to be an important, if still marginal, development in how research concerned with 'race' and ethnicity is conceptualised and practiced. This development involves two movements: a recognition of a growing 'disenchantment' (Sui, 2000, p. 322) with the dominance of the status given to seeing and what is seen in Western culture; and second, a move towards an engagement with other bodily senses and the possibilities that they might open up for our knowledge and understanding of the social world and the specific ways in which ethnic and