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Un/making the ‘sensory home’: tastes, smells and sounds during disasters

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journal contribution
posted on 2021-12-01, 10:08 authored by Gemma Sou, Ruth Webber
In this paper, we further develop the notion of the ‘sensory home’. We reveal how gustatory, olfactory and sonic experiences shape where and when one feels ‘at home’. We draw on a qualitative, longitudinal methodology to explore how low-income Puerto Ricans experienced domestic tastescapes, smellscapes and soundscapes during the first 12 months after Hurricane Maria in 2017. We first show how the sensory home is made with familiar and routine sensory experiences, and unmade by intrusive and unfamiliar tastes, smells and sounds. Second, the sensory home is temporally dynamic as it is constituted by changing processes taking place on multiple scales and by multiple actors–particularly the state and neighbourhood. Thus, un/making the sensory home is inherently political as it is tied to state-citizen power relations–our third contribution. Finally, in disasters people asymmetrically recover not just economically or materially, but as we show, sensorially.

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy

Published in

Social & Cultural Geography

Volume

24

Issue

6

Pages

949-967

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© Taylor & Francis

Publisher statement

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Social & Cultural Geography on 26 Sep 2021, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14649365.2021.1984554.

Acceptance date

2021-08-13

Publication date

2021-09-26

Copyright date

2021

ISSN

1464-9365

eISSN

1470-1197

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Ruth Webber. Deposit date: 29 November 2021

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