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More recently, geographers have continued to develop these core theoretical themes, of space, place and landscape with attention to the senses. For example, Nigel Thrift has conceptualised space through a paradigm that recognises its sensual and affective dimensions (e.g. Thrift, 2006). Other developments include theoretical discussions in the context of urban geography and future geographies. For instance, discussing collective culture and urban public space, Ash Amin discusses what he calls ‘situated surplus’ which is produced out of ‘the entanglements of bodies in motion and the environmental conditions and physical architecture of a given space’. This, he suggests, drawing also from the work of other geographers (citing Pile, 2005; Thrift, 2005) and resonating in several ways with the work of contemporary anthropologists (e.g. Harris, 2007), is ‘collectively experienced as a form of tacit, neurological and sensory knowing‘ (Amin, 2008: 11, my italics). Thrift has moreover speculated about how ‘new kinds of sensorium’ (2004: 582) might develop in an emergent context of ‘qualculative’ space, where new ways of perceiving space and time would develop and our senses of (for example) touch and direction would be transformed.

Geographers who have recently taken ethnographic approaches to the senses include Divya P. Tolia-Kelly’s collaborative work concerning migrants’ perceptions of the Lake District in the UK (2007), Tim Edensor’s writings on industrial ruins (e.g. 2007), Justin Spinney’s mobile (2008) ethnography of urban cyclists and Lisa Law’s (2005) analysis of how Filipina domestic workers negotiated their identities in Hong Kong. Some of this ethnographic work examines the senses through the geographical paradigm of landscape. For instance, Law shows how, amongst other things, Filipina domestic workers produce their own sensory landscapes in public spaces of the city on their days off. Through this she suggests that they evoke ‘a sense of home’, which ‘incorporates elements of history and memory, of past and present times and spaces, helping to create a familiar place’ (2005: 236). In the context of an existing lack of ‘a methodology for researching sensory landscapes’ Law suggests ethnographic research can make an important contribution (2005: 227). This and other work, such as the innovative collaborative arts practice-based methodologies developed by Tolia-Kelly in her work on migrants’ experiences of landscape (2007) demonstrate the potential for ethnographic methodologies in human geography. By focusing the sensory experiencing body and exploring its interdependency with landscape (see Casey, 2001) a sensory ethnography can reveal important insights into the constitution of self and the articulation of power relations.

A particularly important influence in the way the senses have been discussed in human geography has been through the notion of the ‘visceral’. For the geographers Allison Hayes-Conroy and Jessica Hayes-Conroy ‘visceral refers to the realm of internally-felt sensations, moods and states of being, which are born from sensory engagement with the material world’ including that of ‘the cognitive mind’, since they stress: ‘visceral refers to a fully minded-body (as used by McWhorter 1999) that is capable of judgment’ (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008: 462). In their work, which focuses on the visceral nature of food experiences, they connect the politics of everyday life to the way it is experienced, therefore seeing the study of the sensory experience of food as being a route through which to understand how power relations are embedded in everyday life. Their view of what they refer to as ‘visceral politics’ moves away from the idea of ‘individualistic forms of being-political’ and instead they profess to ‘move towards a radically relational view of the world, in which structural modes of critique are brought together with an appreciation of chaotic, unstructured ways in which bodily intensities unfold in the production of everyday life’ (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008: 462). In their later work they move beyond the focus on food experiences and argue for a wider application of a visceral approach in geography; indeed, suggesting that

geographic work demands attentiveness to the visceral realm, a realm where social structures and bodily sensations come together and exude each other, where dispositions and discourses seem to relate as organic-synthetic plasma, and where categories and incarnations defy themselves, daring to be understood. (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010: 1281)

The interests in spatial theory, the senses and the ‘visceral’ that have converged in the work of human geographers create a fertile intellectual trajectory for a sensory approach to ethnography to draw from. In Chapter 2 I take these connections further to suggest how geographical theories of place and space (Massey, 2005) might, in combination with philosophical (Casey, 1996) and anthropological (Ingold, 2007, 2008) work on place and the phenomenology of perception, inform our understanding of sensory ethnography practice. The attention that human geographers tend to pay to the political and the power relations that are embedded in the everyday, the way it is experienced and the spatial relations that it is implicated in, sheds a specific light on the questions that we might ask through sensory ethnography practice.