Doing Sensory Ethnography. Sarah Pink

      Acknowledgments

      Doing Sensory Ethnography is the outcome of several years of research projects, reflections, discussions and readings and experiences of the work of other academics and artists. Without the people who have participated in my research projects, institutions, audiences, authors and practitioners who have supported my work, commented on presentations and articles, and worked as scholars and practitioners in this field, this book would have been impossible to write. Some research participants are mentioned in this book, others have chosen to remain anonymous, but to all I am enormously grateful for their enthusiasm to be involved in my work.

      My sensory ethnography research emerged from two projects developed with Unilever Research in 1999–2000, a collaboration that led to my book Home Truths (2004) which outlines the notion of the sensory home. My The Future of Visual Anthropology (2006) consolidated some of my ideas about the senses in anthropology and began to shape some of the ideas expanded on here. My subsequent publications about Slow Cities in the UK, Spain and Australia all engage (with) the senses for thinking through questions relating to research environments and participants and to understanding the approach of the movement itself. This research was during different stages of its development funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University, a Nuffield Foundation small grant and RMIT University in Australia and hosted by the IN3 at the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona. Other research discussed in this book has been undertaken with colleagues through my CI roles in the ‘Lower Effort Energy Demand Reduction’ project (LEEDR), based at Loughborough University, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UK) through the UK Research Councils’ Digital Economy and Energy programmes (grant number EP/I000267/1), and the ‘Management of OSH in Networked Systems of Production or Service Delivery: Comparisons between Healthcare, Construction and Logistic’ project funded by the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH), UK. For further information about the LEEDR project, collaborating research groups and industrial partners, please visit www.leedr-project.co.uk.

      I have collaborated, talked and corresponded with many colleagues and co-researchers and corresponded with people about sensory ethnography. I thank everyone who has engaged with me in this field and am especially grateful to colleagues and co-authors who have joined me in projects, including: LEEDR colleagues, in particular Kerstin Leder Mackley, Roxana Morosanu, Val Mitchell, Tracy Bhamra and Richard Buswell; IOSH colleagues, in particular Jennie Morgan, Andrew Dainty and Alistair Gibb; Yolande Strengers with whom I have developed our standby consumption research at RMIT; and Lisa Servon and Tania Lewis who have respectively joined me in two Slow City projects in Spain and Australia. I am also especially grateful to the colleagues with whom it has been fantastic to think and work over the last years, and who have definitely helped to shape my thinking about the senses and to affirm that thinking about the senses is a good idea, especially: Elisenda Ardevol and Debora Lanzeni at the IN3 in Barcelona; my colleagues based in Sweden – Vaike Fors, Tom O’Dell, Martin Berg, Robert Willim and Asa Backstrom – for the work we have done together and all the ideas we have discussed over the last years. This second edition of Doing Sensory Ethnography has also been influenced by my research focus on design and futures which has grown since I moved to Australia in 2012, and has been nurtured by my collaborations with Yoko Akama and Juan Francisco Salazar.

      While this book is independently written, some of the ideas and examples have been introduced in earlier articles. Earlier versions of the idea of ethnography as place-making have been developed in ‘Walking with video’ published in Visual Studies (Pink, 2007d) and ‘An urban tour: the sensory sociality of ethnographic place-making’ published in Ethnography (Pink, 2008b); selected examples from these articles are also discussed here.

      About the author

      Sarah Pinkis Professor of Design and Media Ethnography at RMIT University, Australia. She has Visiting Professorships in Applied Cultural Analysis at Halmstad University, Sweden, and in Social Sciences, in the Schools of Civil and Building Engineering and Design at Loughborough University, UK. She is known internationally for her work relating to sensory, visual and digital methodology. Her most recent works in this area include the Energy and Digital Living website (2014) and the books Doing Visual Ethnography (2013), Ethnographic Research in the Construction Industry (co-ed., 2013), Situating Everyday Life (2012) and Advances in Visual Methodology (ed. 2012). Her research is usually interdisciplinary and is both funded by research councils, and developed collaboratively with research partners.

      Introduction About Doing Sensory Ethnography

      In Doing Sensory Ethnography I outline a way of