Paper short abstract:

In 2021 in the digital journal Edgeeffects I published a multimodal essay entitled “Attuning the Senses.” In drawing on aural, textual, and visual writing, and in examining the current controversy between beauty and critique, here I show how multimodal narrative can assist us in fights for justice.

Paper long abstract:

In 2021 in Edgeeffects, I published a multimodal piece entitled “Attuning the Senses,” which had emerged out of an ethnographic desire to bring nature – trees, lichen, leaves, rocks, ants, snails, wrens, etc. – to life. By integrating aural, visual, and textual materials that made perceptible the sound of water, storms, and trees, healing power of walking, and the grace one can find in narrative and writing I created a sensory weave. Once published, the piece received more than 27000 hits, and colleagues responded to let me know how beautiful the essay was. Here I am interested in tracing the afterlife of “Attuning the Senses.” In particular I want to better understand the significance of beauty in creating narratives that support well-being and politically just life.

In the current conceptual controversy between the proponents of art and narrative’s sensory qualities (Scarry 1999; Felski 2020) and critique (Stuelker 2022; Foster 2020; Fassin et al. 2019), beauty is often maligned by the latter. At the heart of their argument lies a question regarding the significance of beauty, which is seen as either too sentimental, romantic, or politically naïve. In arguing for a conceptual space that brings together beauty and critique, I begin by introducing a short excerpt from “Attuning the Senses.” I then move on to present some of the arguments formulated by beauty’s critics to show some of their misconceptions. I end by delineating how multimodal narrative and ethnography can assist us in the fight for environmental and political justice.