Seeing as accountable action

The interactional accomplishment of sensorial work

Bibliographic Data

ID2306113
AuthorsWill Gibson (0000-0001-9874-5390, University College London Institute of Education, UK, corresponding author), Dirk Vom Lehn (0000-0002-6778-0000, King's College London)
Year2020
Volume68
Issue1
Pages77-96
Publication date2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCurrent Sociology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-3921 • E-ISSN: 1461-7064
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0011392119857460
OpenAlexW2962839688
LanguageEN
Citations received19
References cited53

In this article it is argued that the growing field of the sociology of the senses has had a strong methodological focus on people's accounts of their sensorial experiences at the expense of studying the practical achievement of sense work as an interactional phenomenon. Recent work has called for more innovative methods in sensorial scholarship and the use of creative approaches to explore the senses. While applauding this move, in this article the authors show the importance of a focus on micro-behavioural actions in studying the senses. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, they analyse video recordings of near vision tests in optometry consultations illustrating the highly routinised, but also the embodied and improvised character of the actions through which the vision is made available for scrutiny. They argue that sensorial scholarship has sidelined the study of social context as a lived-order and demonstrate the importance of treating sensorial actions as routinised, embodied and improvisatory. The authors agree that using more creative methods would be valuable but caution against relying exclusively on methods that do not sufficiently contextualise the senses as a lived and practical social accomplishment

Action (physics) · Context (archaeology) · Conversation · Conversation analysis · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Ethnomethodology · Focus (optics) · Phenomenon · Political science · Scholarship · Scrutiny · Social science · Sociology · Communication · History · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Social Representations and Identity