Introduction: the sense of the senses

Making noise in urban Taiwan

“…While some sensory ethnographers and cultural geographers bring scholarly attention to “ephemeral and fleeting senses” (Cox, Irving, and Wright 2016, 5), emergent actions (Thrift 2008), and a “lifeworld … that speak[s] for itself” (Castaing‐Taylor 2016, 151), sono‐sociality serves as an analytic to identify relational processes in everyday deliberations of sound. Not limited to the physiology of hearing, a sono‐social analysis examines how the sonic domain is incorporated into social interactions that convey multiple ways of listening, various attempts to communicate sound to others, and actual relations created by sound.…”

The Embedded Researcher: Experiencing Life in a Probation Approved Premises

“…Despite its resolute interdisciplinarity, criminology has lagged behind other areas of the social sciences in taking the 'sensory' seriously as both a source of knowledge production and means of empirical investigation. Our sister disciplines, however, have embraced the instructive potentials of foregrounding the sensory in recent decades (see Cox, Irving, & Wright, 2016;Howes & Classen, 2014;Pink, 2015). It is not a nascent conversation, nor methodology, but one that has both heritage and legitimacy.…”

“…In the development of this book, the editors faced difficulties in communicating the relevance, importance, and practice of including the sensory in accounts of the field. Part of the problem here, as highlighted by Cox et al (2016) and Howes and Classen (2014), is that our language and disciplines have been constructed through very particular conceptions of the world in which the sensory has been relegated to an amorphous, intangible, and unmeasurable realm. But we do not experience the world singularly.…”

Circulating ethnographic films in the digital age

“…They exist mainly in gallery spaces and on digital platforms and inhabit the category of conceptual/critical art. Anthropology has, in the last few years, begun a fruitful dialogue on how it might rethink its approaches and products and through engagements with the art world and beyond text (Cox, Irving, &Wright, 2016). Much of the work in this move to foreground the affinities between art and anthropology has focused on encounter, method, and relations (Sansi, 2015) rather than thinking through the political economies of circulation that underpin each world.…”