Sensory Ethnography

Sensory ethnography, developed by Sarah Pink, is an approach to fieldwork and representation that treats human experience as fundamentally multisensory and embodied, attending deliberately to smell, touch, sound, taste, and movement alongside the sight and text that conventional ethnography privileges. Rather than reducing fieldwork to what can be observed and written down, it asks the researcher to participate in and reflect on the felt, sensed texture of everyday life. It then seeks forms of representation — evocative writing, audio, video, walking with people — that can convey that sensory knowing to others.