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Accepted Contribution:
Pushing the boundaries: sensory encounters at the sites of naturalist knowledge making
Lena Ferriday
(University of Bristol)
Using manuals and notebooks, this paper explores Victorians naturalists’ fieldwork as an embodied practice. It makes a case for the senses’ role in the historical production of environmental knowledge, which has been shaped by researchers’ attendance to the lively dynamics of the natural world.
Contribution long abstract:
In this short presentation, preceding the roundtable discussion, I will utilise conceptual and physical sites of ‘boundary’ (or lack thereof) between human and more-than-human bodies and materialities, as a way of exploring ideas about the production of natural scientific knowledge. I consider the interplay between bodies and instruments that took place in the field, which often disrupted researchers’ expectations of their own corporeality. As such I seeks to tell a story of an increasingly embodied collection of natural history knowledges, produced by sensing individuals and through sensory encounters. These researchers frequently diverged from assumptions regarding objectivity and standardisation that have often been attributed to nineteenth century science. The paper thus argues that diverse encounters between bodies in the field formed an explicit part of the research practice and thus that a sensory approach allows us to trace the intricate processes by which ‘official’ scientific knowledge has been produced, via the experiences of those who shape it.