Revealing inequalities and sensory hierarchies embedded in the latest medical technologies and global biotechnical markets What happens when cochlear implants, heralded as the first successful bionic technologies, make their way around the globe and are provided by both states and growing private markets? As Sensory Futures follows these implants from development to domestication and their unequal distribution in India, Michele Ilana Friedner explores biotechnical intervention in the realm of disability and its implications for state politics in the Global South. A signing and speaking deaf bilateral cochlear implant user, Friedner weaves personal reflections into this fine-grained ethnography of everyday negotiations, activist aspirations, and the space of the family. She places sensory anthropology in conversation with disability studies to analyze how normative sensoria are cultivated and the pursuit of listening and speaking capability is enacted. She argues that the conditions of potentiality that have emerged through cochlear implantation have, in fact, resulted in ever narrower understandings of future life possibilities. Rejecting sensory hierarchies that privilege audition, Friedner calls for multisensory, multimodal, and multipersonal ways of relating to the world. Sensory Futures explores deaf people’s desires to create habitable worlds and grapple with what their futures might look like, in India and beyond, amid a surge in both biotechnical interventions and disability rights activism. With implications for a broad range of disability experiences, this sensitive, in-depth research focuses on the specific experiences of deaf people, both children and adults, and the structural, political, and social possibilities offered by both biotechnological and social “cures.”

The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography reviews and expands the field and scope of sensory ethnography by fostering new links among sensory, affective, more-than-human, non-representational, and multimodal sensory research traditions and composition styles. From writing and film to performance and sonic documentation, the handbook reimagines the boundaries of sensory ethnography and posits new possibilities for scholarship conducted through the senses and for the senses. Sensory ethnography is a transdisciplinary research methodology focused on the significance of all the senses in perceiving, creating, and conveying meaning. Drawing from a wide variety of strategies that involve the senses as a means of inquiry, objects of study, and forms of expression, sensory ethnography has played a fundamental role in the contemporary evolution of ethnography writ large as a reflexive, embodied, situated, and multimodal form of scholarship. The handbook dwells on subjects like the genealogy of sensory ethnography, the implications of race in ethnographic inquiry, opening up ethnographic practice to simulate the future, using participatory sensory ethnography for disability studies, the untapped potential of digital touch, and much more. This is the most definitive reference text available on the market and is intended for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers in anthropology, sociology, and the social sciences, and will serve as a state-of-the-art resource for sensory ethnographers worldwide.

This bold agenda-setting title continues to spearhead interdisciplinary, multisensory research into experience, knowledge and practice. Drawing on an explosion of new, cutting edge research Sarah Pink uses real world examples to bring this innovative area of study to life. She encourages us to challenge, revise and rethink core components of ethnography including interviews, participant observation and doing research in a digital world. The book provides an important framework for thinking about sensory ethnography stressing the numerous ways that smell, taste, touch and vision can be interconnected and interrelated within research. Bursting with practical advice on how to effectively conduct and share sensory ethnography this is an important, original book, relevant to all branches of social sciences and humanities.

The senses are made, not given. This revolutionary realization has come as of late to inform research across the social sciences and humanities, and is currently inspiring groundbreaking experimentation in the world of art and design, where the focus is now on mixing and manipulating the senses. The Sensory Studies Manifesto tracks these transformations and opens multiple lines of investigation into the diverse ways in which human beings sense and make sense of the world. This unique volume treats the human sensorium as a dynamic whole that is best approached from historical, anthropological, geographic, and sociological perspectives. In doing so, it has altered our understanding of sense perception by directing attention to the sociality of sensation and the cultural mediation of sense experience and expression. David Howes challenges the assumptions of mainstream Western psychology by foregrounding the agency, interactivity, creativity, and wisdom of the senses as shaped by culture. The Sensory Studies Manifesto sets the stage for a radical reorientation of research in the human sciences and artistic practice.

Sensory environmental relationships – understood as dynamic, embodied, and emplaced affective sensory perceptions in (and of) the environment – invite us to remember the past, infuse our experiences of the present, and entice us to imagine the future. Ethnographically specific, socially and culturally nuanced approaches to environmental relationships require considerable conceptual and practical flexibility and inventiveness. Reflecting this commitment, 'Sensory Environmental Relationships' aims to offer a new anthropological understanding of how, in our individual and collective lives, senses, places, and temporalities intersect. While anthropologists have been studying the sensory environmental relationships in connection to people’s pasts and presents, futures remain conspicuously absent. By bringing different timeframes into the foreground of the analysis, this volume contributes to filling in the gap in our understanding of the human experience. The volume’s ethnographically based contributions address the questions of how embodied and emplaced practices of sensing, while moving or staying in place in diverse environments, engender, inform, and affect the processes of remembering (and forgetting) the past, experiencing the present, and imagining the future. Drawing on the fields of environmental anthropology, sensory studies, studies of movement and mobility, memory studies, and other related (sub)disciplines, as well as diverse, epistemologically and methodologically experimental approaches, the volume explores the ways in which sensory environmental relationships “touch” upon our pasts, presents, and futures.

This volume is a response to the growing need for new methodological approaches to the rapidly changing landscape of new forms of performative practices. The authors address a host of contemporary phenomena situated at the crossroads between science and fiction which employ various media and merge live participation with mediated hybrid experiences at both affective and cognitive level. All essays collected here move across disciplinary divisions in order to provide an account of these new tendencies, thus providing food for thought for a wide readership ranging from performative studies to the social sciences, philosophy and cultural studies.

This book examines emerging automated technologies and systems and the increasingly prominent roles that each plays in our lives and our imagined futures. It asks how technological futures are being constituted and the roles anthropologists can play in their making; how anthropologists engage with emerging technologies within their fieldwork contexts in research which seeks to influence future design; how to create critical and interventional approaches to technology design and innovation; and how a critical anthropology of the way that emerging technologies are experienced in everyday life circumstances offers new insights for future-making practices. In pursuing these questions, this book responds to a call for new anthropologies that respond to the current and emerging technological environments in which we live, environments for which thinking critically about the possible, plausible, and impossible futures are no longer sufficient. Taking the next step, this book asserts that anthropology must now propose alternative ways, rooted in ethnography, to approach and engage with what is coming and to contest dominant narratives of industry, policy, and government, and to respond to our contemporary context through a public, vocal, and interventional approach.