Beth contributed a chapter to The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography. In it, she considers how sensory ethnographic methods can enhance the place-based impacts of participatory arts and culture projects.  She discusses sensory methods used during a “creative placekeeping” project including what she calls “walking laments” and “stoop speakeasies,” as well as multimodal installations of photographs, youth-made videos and audio clips from oral history interviews. 

These sensory experiments in storytelling brought community legacies to the fore while contesting typical “outside” representations of the neighborhood. In particular, she considers how multisensory storytelling captured a polyvocal polemic that moved the project from documenting local assets to challenging the knowledge extraction often embedded in community development projects, offering methodological considerations for a more equitable and community-driven engagement process.

Find The Routledge International Handbook of Sensory Ethnography here.