A sensory education
11/02/21Have you found yourself learning sourdough baking or taking up yoga for the first time in lockdown? Are you craving sensory pleasures away from the screen? Our new Open Access book A Sensory Education explores such themes, and the ways in which sensory awareness is learned and taught in both everyday but also expert settings, like medicine.
In A Sensory Education Anna shows that our sensing is not innate or acquired, but in fact evolves through learning that is shaped by social and material relations. The chapters feature diverse sources of sensory education, including field manuals, mannequins, cookbooks and flavour charts. The examples range from medical training – drawing from fieldwork from the Making Clinical Sense project – to forest bathing and cooking classes. With hand-drawn illustrations and sensory lessons throughout, the book looks at the uncanny and taken-for-granted ways in which adults are trained to improve their senses. It may be of interest to those teaching courses related to everyday life, technologies and the senses or teachers looking for sensory exercises for their students; to students and scholars from across the social sciences, particularly of the senses and embodied expertise; to workshop organisers looking for creative ideas; and to anyone who takes a personal interest in learning sensory practices like cooking, knitting, bird watching, wine tasting and gardening, to name a few.
Thanks to funding from the European Research Council, the book is Open Access and you can download both the chapters and shorter sensory lessons for free from Routledge.