Dr Sarah Pink
Loughborough University, Department of Social Sciences
s.pink@lboro.ac.uk

The Sensory Home: An Anthropological Approach

Drawing from recent social anthropological and interdisciplinary theories of sensory experience in this paper I will discuss the concept of the ‘sensory home’ – an environment that is both constituted by and constitutes the identities and practices of those who inhabit it. I will suggest that this notion of the home as a sensory domain might underpin research in the home across a range of disciplines – both academic and applied – that seeks to understand how people experience their domestic environments and their material cultures and how they conceptualise and represent these experiences in terms of different sensory modalities. To demonstrate this I will discuss a set of case studies from my own applied visual ethnographic research about housework, laundry and home decoration.