Representing Sensory Culture, Enacting Community: “The Full English”

This chapter looks at the relationship between taste, culture, and identity articulated through a community arts project. Drawing on the work of a community arts initiative, it posits that community art and development work can find significant value in “thinking with the senses”. At the same time, in engaging with the minutiae of everyday life, such activities can provide useful resources for sensory scholarship, revealing the rhythms and textures, fears, and sources of joy, of what are often misrepresented areas of life. Community arts are not only well positioned to generate ethnographically rich representations of urban sociality. Rather, they can also often go beyond simple representation and toward enacting forms of sociality and community that they present.