Sensing the Common: On the Mobilities and Makings of Sense

Abstract

AbstractHow should we make sense of our current situation, global and local? What could such a making of sense imply? What, indeed, should we make of the notion of sense in this regard? In this chapter, in the company of Merleau-Ponty, Barad, Ingold and others, the modalities of sense are explored and deployed in interrelation with lived experiences of mobilities at the margins—of nature and culture. More specifically, such ruminations are developed from out of interactions with more-than-human actors such as seabirds nesting on offshore rocks and with concrete, decaying silos at the heart of a small fishing village in North-East Iceland. In the process, a sense will be developed of what such encounters can tell us—human sensitive, active and acted-upon beings—about the way in which we have to make sense of what we face. The ultimate aim is to think beyond tourism towards a wide-ranging notion of the coming-and-going of beings, through a situated, embodied common sense, that makes sense in the current global crisis.