Sensing Life

The Social Organisation of the Senses in Interaction

Will Gibson, Natalia Ruiz-Junco, Dirk vom Lehn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040638934
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Conceptualising Sensory Practice in Everyday Life
• 3 Multisensoriality at Work: Touching and Looking at Bones in Forensic Examinations
• 4 Professional Touch and Projected Experience in a Lingerie Trade Fair
• 5 Wheeling and Dealing with Flowers: A Sensory Exchange between a Shopkeeper and a Wholesale Merchant
• 6 Sensing the Atmosphere in Tightly Controlled Settings
• 7 Guiding, Sparring and Rolling: Sensing Consent in Cooperative Sporting Interactions
• 8 Shpilkes and Other Needles: The Sensory Experience of Being Tattooed
• 9 The Senses-In-Action: Visual and Haptic Encounters with Occasioned Environments
• 10 Intercorporeal and Intersensorial Empathetic Proprioceptive Practices as Social Action in Rock Climbers’ Collaborative Ropework Supported Activities
• 11 The Consequentiality of Sticky Ham Salad: A Post-Praxeological Study of Visually Impaired People’s Sensory Experiences of Food Items
• 12 Semanticizing Non-Common Sensory Experiences
• 13 “Sauna Hot”: Instructed Sensing in Firefighting Exercises
• 14 Exploratory Touch in Children’Interaction: Perceiving, Approaching, and Categorising Body-Subjects
• 15 On Transcendence: Embodiment, Interoception and the Somatosensorium of Altered States of Consciousness
• Index