1st Edition

Sensing the Landscape An Ethnography of Blindness

By Karis Jade Petty Copyright 2025
208 Pages 33 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

208 Pages 33 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

208 Pages 33 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This book examines how vision impaired walkers experience and engage with the English countryside through five sensory activities: walking, seeing, listening, seeing in the mind’s eye, and touching. Journeying through woodland and fields, the chapters reveal a landscape alive with memory, the imagination, and suffused with shifting temporalities. Karis Jade Petty develops the concepts of... Read more

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

Biography

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

“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