Sensing the Landscape
An Ethnography of Blindness
Published on 10. March 2025
208 pages
978-1-040-32088-4 (ISBN)
Description
This book examines how vision impaired walkers experience and engage with the English countryside through five sensory activities: walking, seeing, listening, seeing in the mind's eye, and touching. Journeying through woodland and fields, the chapters reveal a landscape alive with memory, the imagination, and suffused with shifting temporalities. Karis Jade Petty develops the concepts of inclusive sensoriality and sensorial emplacement, which enable us to revise our understandings of the sensory organisations of experience, animate conceptualisations of landscape, and rethink self-landscape relationality. Reimagining notions of vision and the boundedness of the sensory body, this book will be relevant to scholars from a number of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, geography, visual studies, disability studies, and sensory studies more broadly.
Reviews / Votes
"Sensing the Landscape provides a critically important intervention into the fields of sensory and phenomenological anthropology. Pushing us to consider more carefully the richly textured ways that the world is experienced by people with visual impairments, Karis Jade Petty call for developing a more inclusive sensorality is long overdue."- Professor Jason Throop, University of California, Los Angeles
"In Sensing the Landscape: An Ethnography of Blindness, Karis Jade Petty beautifully explores the intricacies of sight, perception, and embodiment through the practice of walking the English countryside. By embracing perceptual empathy and positional reflexivity, Petty challenges the visual primacy of ethnographic methods, expanding our understanding of multisensory ways of knowing. Her portrayal of diverse sensory experiences skillfully weaves the visual into a dynamic dance with haptic, tactile, auditory, and kinesthetic ways of knowing and being, offering an inspiring new approach to inclusive sensoriality and sensory emplacement."
- Dr. Gili Hammer, Senior Lecturer, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
33 Halftones, black and white; 33 Illustrations, black and white
File size
6,24 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-040-32088-4 (9781040320884)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
approx. 07/2026
1st Edition
Routledge
€57.50
Not yet published
Book
03/2025
1st Edition
Routledge
€205.40
Shipment within 15-20 days
Book
03/2025
Routledge
Unfortunately, price unknown
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Person
Karis Jade Petty is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her work focuses on sensory experience, landscape, walking, and vision impairment.
Content
Precarious visions and emerging landscapes; 1. Reimagining the sensory landscape; 2. To walk in the English countryside; 3. Walking; 4. Seeing; 5. Listening; 6. Seeing in the mind's eye; 7. Touching Trees; 8. Closures
