Sensing the Landscape

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

• 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

“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