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This study aims to explore how people bodily narrate and use collective memory to clarify their embodied experiences regarding a city which they memorise.

Drawing on 1,359 short stories collected by the online travel portal Visit Turku about ‘How the city feels’, the fine-grained embodied experiences of people are represented through descriptions of their feelings towards the city of Turku.

Based on the analysis, two aspects through which the respondents narrated their embodied experiences of cities have been identified: (1) the sociomaterial entanglements with the city and (2) the humane relationship with the city.

This study is limited to short stories acquired online, raising questions of anonymity and representativeness. Thus, these narrations are constructions which have to be interpreted as told by specific people in a certain time and place.

Tourist agencies should pay attention to the value of looking at written stories as bodily materialisations of people’s experiences of city destinations. Understanding this would strengthen the cities’ competitiveness.

By empirically highlighting how people memorise a city through narrations, the study offers novel viewpoints on the embodied experiences in cities as well as the cultural constructs these narrations are based on, thus broadening our understanding of how cities become bodily entangled with us.

How do we write from the sensory body in ways that can convey the lived experience of the researcher and the researched, which can allow other researchers to make sense of their lived experience as well? What alternative writings could transform disembodied academia through dialogue and relational reflection? The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the value of the researcher’s embodied reflexivity in academic writing. More specifically, this chapter explores the ways in which we can write differently about organisational phenomena by experiencing aesthetic moments in the field. To accomplish this, I share examples of the aesthetic moments that I, as a researcher, experienced while undertaking three ethnographic projects: a study on professional dance, a study on academic motherhood and a study on female-canine companionship. This chapter identifies three aspects that allow the researcher to experience aesthetic moments – namely, appreciating sensory cues, writing ‘in and from the flesh’ and allowing vulnerability to flourish. Paying attention to the social micro-dynamics that exist between researchers and research phenomena and addressing the analytically marginalised experiences of researchers, therefore, allows for developing academic writing practices in more reflexive and sensory-appreciative directions.