Sensory Transformations and Transgenerational Environmental Relationships in Europe, 1950–2020

Sensory Transformations and Transgenerational Environmental Relationships in Europe, 1950–2020

This is a European Research Council funded project being led by Professor Helmi Järviluoma, University of Finland. It is seeking to understand how we sense the spaces around us and how this has changed and is changing over time.

The project aims at producing new understandings of the changes in people’s sensory environmental relationships in three European cities during a particular period in history, 1950–2020, through a new transgenerational methodology, ethnographic "sensobiography". It seeks to understand how these interactions with environments - how we see, hear, smell, touch and taste - differs across different countries.

The project's three research strands are (1) transformations in mediations of sensory experience, (2) embodied remembering and senses, and (3) sensory commons. These strands are being studied via a research strategy linking individuals and groups to broader social, cultural, and political issues in the medium-sized European cities of Brighton (UK), Ljubljana (Slovenia), and Turku (Finland). Temporally and spatially tightly-focused dynamic ethnography makes it possible to examine multiple modes of past and present sensory experiencing. The project includes the study of artists as people who are asumed to have an advanced grasp of sensory experience.

The project facilitates a significant step from earlier methodologies toward large-scale, multisensory, transgenerational investigation, providing significant insights into culture with a sustainable future.