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However, of most interest for the development of a sensory ethnography are projects such as the work of Christina Lammer (e.g. 2007) and of Jon Hindmarsh and Alison Pilnick (2007) in clinical contexts and Les Back’s, Dawn Lyon’s and John Hockey and Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson’s calls for further attention to the phenomenology of corporeal and sensory experiences in the sociology of work (e.g. Hockey and Allen-Collinson, 2009; Lyon and Back, 2012) and community (Back, 2009). Hindmarsh and Pilnick’s study of the interactions between members of the pre-operative anaesthetic team in a teaching hospital shows how what they call ‘intercorporeal knowing […] underpins the team’s ability to seamlessly coordinate emerging activities’. In this context they describe how ‘The sights, sounds and feel of colleagues are used to sense, anticipate, appreciate and respond to emerging tasks and activities’ (2007: 1413), thus indicating the importance of multisensorial embodied ways of knowing in human interaction. Lammer’s research about ‘how radiological personnel perceive and define “contact” as it relates to their interaction with patients’ has similar implications. Lammer set out to explore the ‘sensual realities … at work in a radiology unit’ (Lammer, 2007: 91), using video as part of her method of participant observation. She argued that in a context where patients tended to pass through the radiology department rapidly ‘a multisensual approach would encourage empathy and create a deeper sensibility amongst health professionals at a teaching hospital’ (2007: 113).

More recently, the place of the senses in sociological research has become increasingly established. Les Back and Nirmal Puwar (2012) have called for ‘live methods’ in sociology. This approach puts the senses at the centre of their project in that they write:

We are arguing for the cultivation of a sociological sensibility not confined to the predominant lines of sight, the focal points of public concern. Rather, we are arguing for paying attention to the social world within a wider range of senses and placing critical evaluation and ethical judgement at the centre of research craft. (Back and Puwar, 2012: 15)

As part of this, Back proposes that ‘The first principle of live sociology is an attention to how a wider range of the senses changes the quality of data and makes other kinds of critical imagination possible’ (Back, 2012: 29, original italics). Phillip Vannini, Dennis Waskul and Simon Gottschalk (2012) have sought to write the sociology of the senses through what they describe as a focus on the social, with a commitment to the study of interaction and what they call ‘somatic work’. There, taking a distinctly sociological approach, they bring together sociological attention to the body, the senses and human interaction. Again, the authors’ interest in social interaction tends to define the sociological approach to the senses, making this a distinctive element of what we might think of as a sociology of the senses, which runs through the different works discussed in this section.

Collectively, these works draw our attention to the corporeality and multisensoriality of any social encounter or interaction – including not only the relationships between research participants but those between ethnographer and research participants. Building on this in Chapter 3 I suggest that understanding our interactions with others as multisensorial encounters necessitates a reflexive awareness of the sensory intersubjectivity that characterises such meetings. Thus we might see the sociology of the senses as an important reminder that social interaction is a fundamental unit of analysis for not only understanding what is happening in the world, but also for part of the research process itself.