This course explores how knowledge is produced through sensory experience and multisensory research practice, and how are different ways of sensing trained, mediated, validated, translated, or excluded within research?. Moving beyond the idea of the senses as neutral channels of perception, it examines how seeing, listening, touching, smelling, moving, and sensing are culturally learned, technologically mediated, and shaped by power, expertise, and disciplinary conventions.

Drawing on sensory ethnography, STS, environmental humanities, artistic research, and multispecies studies, the course develops four connected perspectives: sensing as epistemic practice; the social organisation of the senses; mediated and more-than-human sensing; and multisensory research practice. Students examine how perception becomes observation, evidence, interpretation, and argument; how institutions, disciplines, technologies, bodies, and environments shape what can be sensed; and how sensory inquiry can be designed, documented, analysed, and communicated as a rigorous form of research rather than as a merely illustrative exercise.

The course is assessed through continuous participation and project-based work. Students are expected to engage actively in discussions, readings, sensory exercises, and field-based activities. Assessment consists of:

• active participation and completion of in-class and field exercises (20%);

• a sensory field journal or short reflective assignments documenting students’ methodological and conceptual development through in-class exercises and collective fieldwork (30%);

• a final individual or collaborative sensory mini-project. Students design and carry out a sensory inquiry and present it in a format appropriate to the project. Possible formats include sound, video, photography, mapping, installation, performance, text, drawing, or a combination of media (50%).

Assessment focuses on the project’s engagement with the course’s conceptual questions, the coherence between the chosen sensory methods and the object of inquiry, reflexivity regarding the research process, and the clarity and inventiveness of the final presentation.

A detailed course handout and reading list will be provided closer to the course dates. Please note that this is an intensive one-week course. Students are therefore expected to attend all sessions, participate actively, and engage fully in the practical exercises, collective fieldwork, and project development throughout the week.