Helmi Järviluoma is a Finnish sound, music and cultural scholar and writer. She is Professor Emerita of Cultural Studies at the University of Eastern Finland. As sensory and soundscape ethnographer, Järviluoma has developed the mobile method of sensobiographic walking. Her research and art span the fields of sensory remembering, qualitative methodology (especially regarding gender), environmental cultural studies, sound art and fiction writing. In 2016, she received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council ERC, in order to study Sensory Transformations and Transgenerational Environmental Relationships, 1950–2020 SENSOTRA in the three European cities. Among her 180 publications, co-authored Gender and Qualitative Methods (2003/2010) continues to draw attention. She has written and directed six radio features for the Finnish Broadcasting Company. The Finnish Union of University Professors selected Helmi Järviluoma as professor of the year 2019; 2018 Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, invited her as a member. Lesley Murray is Professor of Spatial Sociology at the University of Brighton, UK, where her research centres around the social and cultural aspects of transport and mobilities. She has written extensively on gendered and generational mobilities as well as mobile methodologies. Her publications include Children’s Mobilities: Interdependent, Imagined, Relational (co-author, 2019); Mobile methodologies (co-editor, 2010); Researching mobilities: transdisciplinary encounters (co-editor, 2014); Intergenerational Mobilities: Relationality, age and lifecourse (co-editor, Routledge 2017); and Families in Motion: Space, Time, Materials and Emotion (co-editor, 2019). Her most recent research was as principal investigator on a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project (AH/V013122/1) on the immobilities of gender-based violence in the COVID-19 pandemic.
'At a time when our relationship with urban environments is increasingly shaped by digital technologies, this book draws on comparative research in three European cities to bring fresh perspectives on people’s multi-sensory experiences of such environments and how these experiences have changed over time. Chapters by established scholars and new voices develop common themes deserving of a broad, interdisciplinary readership. Particularly welcome is the examination of intersections not just between the senses and different types of media, but also between mobility and memory, ageing and generation, natural and built environments. Combining a shared, innovative research methodology with rich theoretical insights, the book offers new ways of understanding the complexities of urban living.' Sara Cohen, James and Constance Alsop Chair in Music, University of Liverpool, UK