Sensing Life

This book showcases the critical contribution that scholarship in the field of social interaction can make to the study of the senses.

Centred on an understanding of the senses as interactionally configured between people and the ways in which people themselves experience the senses — how they build and negotiate meanings between each other about what is being sensed, what the social implications of the senses are, and how these might relate to sets of activities or interests — it brings together a range of case studies to show how talk, gesture and various aspects of the physical environment can be mobilised to make the senses accountable to others.

Presenting the latest developments in interactionist research on the senses, Sensing Life will appeal to social scientists with interests in interactionist sociology and related approaches to research, and social understandings of the senses.