Sensing the Landscape: An Ethnography of Blindness

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.

Karis Jade Petty is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her work focuses on sensory experience, landscape, walking, and vision impairment.