Sensory transformations and transgenerational environmental relationaships in Europe, 1950-2020 (SENSOTRA)

The aim of the project is to generate a new understanding of shifts in human–environment relations in three European cities over a defined historical period (1950–2020). By introducing a transgenerational methodology—ethnographic “sensobiography”—the project offers a focused lens on cultural transformations of the sensorium. The study capitalizes on a fleeting window in which cohorts born in the 1930s and 1940s—whose formative years unfolded without digital technologies—can still be engaged ethnographically, while simultaneously addressing generations socialized directly within the digital milieu. This juncture is especially apt for examining how both younger and older people can sustain multilayered, situated relations with their environments. The project comprises three thematic strands: (1) transformations in the mediation of sensory experience; (2) embodied remembering and the senses; and (3) sensory commons. These strands will be investigated through a research strategy that links persons and collectives to wider social, cultural, and political formations in medium-sized European cities—Brighton (United Kingdom), Ljubljana (Slovenia), and Turku (Finland). A time- and place-attuned ethnography enables the study of multiple modes of past and present sensing. The project thus marks a significant step beyond earlier approaches toward large-scale, multisensory, transgenerational inquiry.

SENSOTRA significantly contributes to the development of science by examining a specific moment in Europe’s sensory history and, for the first time within such a large-scale ethnographic and comparative framework, explaining how people’s sensory relationships with their environments changed between 1950 and 2020 in three medium-sized European cities (Ljubljana, Brighton, Turku). By developing a transgenerational methodology of sensobiographical walks, it links sensory experience, embodied remembering, and the sensory commons. The project paves the way for further analytical approaches in cultural studies, psychology, human geography, and environmental anthropology. At the same time, the international research network and publicly accessible research resources (for example, the “Sensotra Tour” website) strengthen research infrastructure, enable further comparative studies, and foster new interdisciplinary projects.

The core research question probed differences in the experience of urban milieus before and after the proliferation of digital technologies. Drawing on sensory ethnographic methods, the researchers demonstrated that these technologies do not, in fact, constitute a pronounced rupture. In addition, the project developed and substantiated sensobiographical walks as a technique that enables the systematic and comparative elicitation of insights into contemporary and past lifeworlds. The project advanced contemporary, transdisciplinary sensory scholarship in Slovenia and in the wider international arena.