Funding body: AHRC Cultural Engagement (2016)
Principal Investigator: Prof. Marialena Nikolopoulou
Post-doc researcher: Dr Carolina Vasilikou
Partners: Canterbury Cathedral
Summary
The project is building on the University’s recent partnership with Canterbury Cathedral and the Canterbury Journey, a programme of community engagement and knowledge exchange that aims to provide new interpretation and visitor trails through the Cathedral and its environs to improve access to the Cathedral’s collections, heritage, community and culture and engage new, diverse and hard to reach people.
A series of sensory walks propose to introduce a novel way of experiencing the Cathedral precincts and its connection to the city, through the senses and the visual, thermal, acoustic, haptic and olfactory environment. The proposal re-invents our experience of walking, wayfinding, discovery of the historical, cultural and natural evolution of walking paths that link Canterbury Cathedral with the city and its people. It addresses how urban environments can be explored to facilitate individual and collective interpretation of the senses in understanding of place. It will investigate how different senses can be represented for interpretation, how technologies may be used in the investigation and depiction of sensescapes, and how and where creative responses to the sensory realm by the community might be deployed to facilitate both collective and individual interpretation.