Sensory Studies

Polina Dimova (University of Denver)

This keynote address investigates the aesthetic, cultural, and scientific discourses of synaesthesia that inspired the flourishing exchanges among the modern arts. It offers twenty theses on synaesthesia to trace the controversies surrounding the phenomenon: from the cooperation of the nineteenth-century arts and sciences in attempting to define synaesthesia to the present rift between them. The presentation first reconstructs the intellectual history of synaesthesia by exploring conflicting views on it as a lost primordial perception (Baudelaire), symptom of degeneration (Nordau), or future utopian mingling of the senses (Wagner). It next discusses the synaesthetic art and thought of Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, Aleksandr Scriabin, and Rainer Maria Rilke to offer an alternative genealogy of abstract art and visual music. The presentation ultimately argues that the modernist fascination with multisensory experiences stimulated and shaped experiments across the modern arts and advocates for a sensuous reading practice that may repair the divide between the humanities and sciences.

The mystery of the senses is as much in the ‘objects’ of sensation as in their mechanism. A theory of the senses influences a theory of objects. The sense organs do not perceive the objects per se but only qualities. If this is the case, how can we understand the long held suspicion towards collective and social ontology? In this talk, I will explore some ideas on the ontology of the social and relate it to the metaphysics of the senses in order to make the argument that cultural practices are not only based on an implicit ontology of the social but also on the belief that the social is sensorially accessible. The senses not only access the social but perception itself is fundamentally social in character. I will use the example of touch and the idea of social touch to illustrate this possibility of sensing the social.

Appealing or Disgusting? Atmospheres: The Most Powerful Game Changers; Bea Dieker (Frankfurt, Germany)

What makes an apartment, a city, an employer, or a means of transportation appealing or unappealing? Are the factors aesthetic, or are they social? Material or immaterial? And isn’t all of this highly subjective? When people wait together for the bus in the rain, we see how weather, architecture, and personal interactions come together to create something entirely new: an atmosphere. However, when we examine these elements separately (weather = natural sciences, architecture = aesthetics, personal interactions = human sciences), we fail to grasp their interplay. I propose a new perspective. Atmospheres result from the resonance of environments and situations and we should explore what drives them. I have identified FIVE FORCES: space, actors, events, sensory qualities, and culture. These forces can be atmospherically felt and experienced, independent of their specific manifestations. Every atmosphere consists of all five forces. Focusing on these FIVE FORCES—and not on the disparate and multimodal elements within them—provides an entirely new approach to designing atmospheres. We have the power to consciously design atmospheres—in our cities, workplaces, and living spaces. What if public transportation systems made us feel lightness, buildings gave us protection, and workplaces fostered a sense of belonging? Let’s start making that happen.
Keywords: phenomenology, ambiance, atmospheres, aesthetics, sociology

What Lies Below: Senses, Technology, and Multi-species Communication; Devon Baur (Theatre and Performance Studies, UCLA, USA)

As humans, our world view is formed by the limits of our umwelt (or sensory bubble). Many (or perhaps most) of the multi-species communication systems on Earth slip outside of the realm of our sensorium. If we ever hope to learn to communicate with aliens from another galaxy, we must first learn to “listen” to the subtle whisperings on this planet. Our reliance on the audio-visual has become so entrenched that pulses of information often slither between us, unnoticed. Perhaps one of the greatest sources for cross-species communication is right under our noses. This paper considers smell as a rich and vibrant avenue for cross-species transmissions. Casting aside the Western hierarchy of the senses, it invites us to linger in the invisible pathways of buzzing matter and considers smell as an integral source of knowledge production. To illuminate these overlooked exchanges, the paper turns to artistic case studies. Most notably, “One Tree ID” by Agnes Meyer- Brandis, in which the artist recreates the volatile organic compounds of a specific tree and transforms it into a perfume. The spectator wears the perfume and sits with the tree, inviting an invisible exchange beyond the realm of the human sensorium. Through a post-human analysis the paper draws on Stacy Alaimo, Astrid Neimanis, Anna Tsing and Donna Harraway to consider how unseen olfactory pathways can make kin; and how the act of smelling is nuanced, complex and trans- corporeal. Lower level senses like olfaction are often cast aside, but if we take pause and wade through them we might open up possibilities for communication in languages that are more-than- human.
Keywords: Olfaction, non-human, technology, performance, STS

The Smell of Leather, From the Material to Fragrances, in the Light of History: The Example of Russia Leather; Audrey Colonel-Coquet (Université Grenoble Alpes/LARHRA, France)

Surrounded by myths and legends, Russia leather is at the heart of a whole collective imagination. It is said to have originated by chance, when a cavalryman in the Russian army rubbed his boots against the bark of birch trees, making them waterproof . One story has it that it resurfaced in the 1970s, following the discovery of the wreck of an 18th-century Russian ship carrying leather that was found intact 200 years later. From the story of its origins to its supposed rediscovery, via the myth of its lost recipe, Russia leather has given rise to a whole literature extolling its olfactory particularities since the 19th century. There is no doubt that it was the subject of considerable trade between Russia and the rest of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. In Europe, particularly in France and England, many tanners tried to reproduce it. A distinction must therefore be made between “authentic” Russia leather and so-called Russia leather. This presentation will look at the role of smell in its manufacture and the perception of its sensory qualities, particularly olfactory qualities, in nineteenth-century technical literature, in a context of industrialists’ desire to reproduce it as manufactured in Russia. She will then look at the use of leather scents in perfumery.
Keywords: Leather, Russia Leather, Perfume, smell, sens

Give Me a Pottery Factory and I Will Split the World; Ningxiang Sun √ (School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, UK)

Latour’s concept of “immutable mobiles” has shaped our understanding of scientific revolution in modern European society. This paper extends his insights from laboratories to everyday objects – pottery, clothes, and furniture – developing it from a theory of science into one of sensory experience transformation. I argue that by the late 18th century, a fundamental shift occurred: the separation of objects’ “surface” from their “body.” This separation, exemplified by pottery and furniture production, transformed both tactile and visual experiences of everyday objects. It enabled the large-scale attachment of distant cultural experiences to local objects, accelerating the circulation of heterogeneous sensory experiences and dissolving the coherence of living worlds. As this separation became widespread by the mid-19th century, everyday objects became isolated entities, leading to the disintegration of holistic domestic environments into fragmented spaces, contributing to a new mode of sensory experience, as documented by Simmel, Benjamin, and Kracauer. This paper provides fresh perspectives on how pottery factories, like Latour’s laboratories, became sites where the world was disintegrated and reassembled. It bridges technological progress and sensory experience transformation, illuminating how changes in production methods reshaped the experiential landscape of modern European society and our contemporary sensory world.
Keywords: Material Culture, Immutable Mobiles, Sensory Experience, Object Design, Everyday Life

Sensory Labor and Sensible Aesthetic Communities: Traditional Hindu Sculptors and Claims-making in Contemporary India; Sowparnika Balaswaminathan (Religions & Cultures, Concordia University, Canada)

South Indian bronzes are a well-recognized and aesthetically venerated art object and Hindu religious idols. The dying tradition was revived through governmental efforts after independence by installing a sculpture school in the Tamil town of Swamimalai which has produced an evergrowing community of sculptors, marked by diverse locations of caste, class, education, and occupational orientation. Yet, on account of the neoliberal demands of commodification, their differential labor potentials must reproduce an aesthetic sensibility that evokes an institutionally mandated qualia of authenticity. How do artisans respond to these incommensurable qualifications that require the predictability of traditional art, the ineffability of sacred idols, and the quirkiness of craft? In this paper, I examine how sculptors from non-artisan castes claim expertise and belonging through the sensory aspects of labor that binds them to their art and the historical tradition of bronzecasting. I utilize the notion of “distribution of the sensible” theorized by Jacques Rancière to argue that the focus on tactile knowledge allows these sculptors to create an artisan community rooted in shared aesthetic sensibility rather than caste identity.
Keywords: labor, religion, craft, community, aesthetics

The Whispering hand-plane: Unifying Senses in a Woodworking Workshop; Marko Zivkovic (Anthropology, University of Alberta, Canada)

Woodworker-philosopher James Krenov paid minute attention to senses in the workshop: a simple handmade wooden plane is the “cabinetmaker’s Stradivarius.” Tuned perfectly, it gives you a “soft whispering sound” as it makes fine, thin shavings that shimmer in the light. What “confederates the senses,” say Michel Serres, is body in balance and movement, its exquisite proprioceptivity. No “seated professor,” taught him any productive work, whereas his “gymnastics teachers and coaches inscribed its very conditions into his muscles and bones.” If our sciences and inventions all ultimately come from dance, craft training, or climbing mountains, as Serres claimed, are we losing something essentially human by offloading our bodily/sensorial skills to technologies we invented: memory lost to writing, hand writing skills to printing, face-to-face sociality to smartphone screens … I want to examine the last iteration of these old laments through woodworking as a part of what is hailed as a contemporary craft renaissance. I propose that examining this movement to reengage senses in the microcosm of the contemporary maker’s workshop could help us think through the current moment of anxiety about AI, driverless cars, sociality in the age of smartphones or the bullshit job economy. Keywords: proprioception, sound, touch, craft, technology

Material Sense: Exploring the Entanglement of Perception, Worldviews, and Material Choices Since Paleolithic Times; Bar Efrati (School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, UK)

Perception is often defined as the awareness of elements within the environment through physical sensations, as a physical experience interpreted in light of one’s past experiences, and as a quick, acute, and intuitive understanding and appreciation. Viewing perception as enactive highlights that it relies on a person’s sensorimotor knowledge, making it an intentional action involving all senses. This plays a crucial role in exploring the environment and forming categories based on sensory experiences.
In a parallel disciplinary universe, the ontological turn explores diverse viewpoints on personhood, being, and relationships between humans and non-humans in ethnography and archaeology. This framework suggests that the choice of materials for object-making stems from deeper connections beyond functionality or symbolism. Materials are seen as active agents that influence human relationships. This study investigates the role of human perception in object-making, focusing on the process from material selection to the finished object.
In this study, I will explore the integration of studies from the philosophy of mind and the ontological turn to understand how perception, experiences, and memory are linked to object and tool-making from the Paleolithic period to the present. Through daily, ethnographic, and archaeological examples, I will suggest that key aspects of human behavior have deep prehistoric origins, indicating that prehistoric people consciously perceived their environment from early Paleolithic times.
Keywords: Enactive perception, Sensory experience, Materiality, Memory, Traditional ecological knowledge

Bottling Beauty & Distilling Desire: Perfume and Plasticity in the Ancient Greek World; Niharika Russell (Art History, University of Toronto, Canada)

Though the perfumes that suffused numerous social and spatial realms of the ancient Greek world no longer remain, we are left with a number of the vessels which once held this precious liquid. The playful, mimicking shapes of perfumed oil vessels which are categorized as plastic in form are especially evocative of their absent contents, having once dispensed scent directly from ceramic human figures and body parts, animals (both real and otherworldly), shells (both aquatic and agricultural), and more. Despite growing interest in the interactive mechanics of ancient Greek ceramics, little scholarly attention has been paid to how these ceramic vessels provide a potent case study for considering the syn-aesthetics of ancient Greek aesthetics. This presentation will examine how the plastic perfume vessels produced from the Archaic period onward are constructed according to interrelated olfactory, haptic, and visual modes and repertoires of engagement with their forms and contents. In doing so, we may explore the manner in which these vessels and their sensory relationships index a perceptive slippage between animacy and inanimacy at play within the conceptual scope of kalos (beauty) in ancient Greek thought.
Keywords: Plasticity, synaesthesia, ‘kalos,’ ceramics, perfume

What methodologies can support the investigation and presentation of heritage scents? In this panel we will present some of the results of the the Odeuropa project (2021-2023): a European research project intended to help museums, archives, libraries and other heritage institutions to enhance their impact through working with smell. The project team has invested in developing mixed methodologies to analyse and represent heritage scents and historical smellscaped. In this panel we wil present a) a mixed-methods framework for analysing smellscapes, b) the Odeuropa Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit: a guide for working with smells in GLAMs, and c) reflect on how to publish heritage smells.

The Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit: A How-to Guide for Working with Smell in Heritage Institutes; Cecilia Bembibre (University College London, UK)

Scent in the museum! For a long time, this phrase would have raised red flags for conservators, curators, archivists and visitors of heritage spaces – and in many cases it still does. Scents? Where? Surely not in the galleries or in the depot?! Do they indicate undesirable moulds in books or other objects? Recognised as a hazard or simply lurking in the background, visitors and heritage professionals alike are often not accustomed to actively paying attention to smells in cultural heritage institutions. Scents are assumed to be incidental, unintentional, and unwanted. However, this situation is changing rapidly. Over the last decade, more and more museums and heritage sites are discovering the power of communicating with scents. The Odeuropa project (2021-2023), was a European research project intended to help GLAMs enhance their impact through working with smell. In this lecture we will present Odeuropa’s Olfactory Storytelling Toolkit: A ‘How-To’ Guide for Working with Smells in GLAMs and Heritage Institutions. This toolkit is specifically created for conservators, curators, educators, tour guides, museum directors, archivists, librarians, and all others who are interested to work with smells in a heritage context. The guide is a resource that provides a basis to use smell as a storytelling technique within curatorial practices. It provides methods – from beginning to end – to bring an olfactory narrative from the (physical) collection item towards visitor engagement.
Keywords: GLAMs, Smell in the museum, Olfactory heritage, Olfactory storytelling, Societal Impact

Exploring Smellscapes in Cultural Heritage: a Mixed-methods Approach to Congruence and Authenticity in Olfactory Research; Victoria-Anne Michel Zunitow (University of York, UK)

This presentation introduces a mixed-methods framework for analysing smellscapes within cultural and heritage contexts. Combining historical, contemporary, and experiential data, the study examines the layered and contextual nature of smellscapes. It employs three complementary approaches: archival research, centered on the “Smell Explorer” browser; user-generated content analysis, primarily through Tripadvisor data; and sensory fieldwork, including smellwalks, smell diaries, and interviews. Together, these methods offer a multidimensional perspective on smellscapes in galleries, libraries, archives, museums (GLAM), and heritage sites. The discussion focuses on two key concepts: congruence and authenticity. Congruence refers to the alignment between olfactory cues and the spatial, historical, and narrative contexts in which they are deployed, highlighting tensions between pre-existing and curated smells. Authenticity examines the perceived genuineness of olfactory experiences, exploring how sensory interventions can reinforce or challenge cultural narratives and visitor expectations. Through case studies, the presentation illustrates how congruence and authenticity shape visitor experiences and inform curatorial practices in olfactory storytelling. Concluding with implications for research and practice, it advocates for intentional, interdisciplinary approaches to curating and studying both pre-existing and curated smellscapes, enhancing their role in cultural and heritage narratives and engagement.
Keywords: Smellscapes, Mixed-Methods, Congruence, Authenticity, Olfactory Research, Cultural Heritage

What Does it Mean to Publish a Smell? Some Thoughts on the Future of Multisensory Publications in Sensory Studies; William Tullett (University of York, UK)

This presentation focuses on a question that was addressed in a collaboration between the Odeuropa project and the American Historical Review: what would it mean to publish a smell? The publication of a smell with its own scratch and sniff card, doi, and accompanying explanatory article after it had undergone a peer review process was a new innovation in scholarly publishing. It has subsequently been followed by at least one such further published smell put forward by Dr Sean Coughlin and the Alchemies of Scent project. But what are the implications of publishing a smell for how we practice sensory studies or sensory history? How might we innovate in the realm of peer-reviewing smells? How does one cite a smell? What are the implications of publishing a smell in an academic publishing environment dominated by the digital? What implications do genuinely multisensorial forms of academic publication have for the training of future academics? These are the questions that this paper seeks to begin to answer. The answers are important, for they will help us to begin to break down the gap in knowledge and olfactory training that currently exists between academic smell studies scholars and their collaborators beyond the university. Keywords: GLAMs, Smell in the museum, Olfactory heritage, Olfactory storytelling, Societal Impact

Disabled Norms, Disaffected Us: Disaffection and Unfeeling in Salt Fish Girl; Gail Kehan Liu (American Studies, University of Nottingham, UK)

This paper examines Chinese Canadian writer Larissa Lai’s 2002 speculative novel Salt Fish Girl through the lens of Xine Yao’s theorization of disaffection. This paper argues that the disaffection in Salt Fish Girl, which is marked as the characters’ stench, reconfigures notions of agency, challenges dominant affective norms and opens pathways for reimagining diasporic identities and future resistance. Situating the discussion within the history of Chinese Canadian diaspora, the paper critiques conventional frameworks of sympathy as the universal human emotion authorized by systems of science and law and explores how Lai’s characters navigate exclusion and marginalization. Taking “rupture” as the keyword, the study discusses how biotechnology and legal restrictions in the novel are subverted, thus underscores how emotional detachment serves as a mechanism of resistance against white, male, capitalist systems. The analysis further investigates Lai’s thematic disruptions, connecting emotional anomalies to broader critiques of affective labor and the history of assimilation violence.
Keywords: disaffection, rupture, Chinese Canadian diasporic writing, Salt Fish Girl, olfactory study

Interweaving the Sociology of Creativity and Sensory Studies: Insights from the Creative Writing Industry; Jekaterina Karelina (School of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Barcelona, Spain)

This work intends to explore the intersection of sociology of creativity and sensory studies within the context of the creative writing industry. By examining how sensory experiences shape narrative construction, this report offers a comprehensive analysis of the dynamic interplay between societal influences and embodied perception in the production and reception of creative writing.
The object is to articulate the connections between these fields, identifying how societal structures and sensory elements converge to shape creativity in literary expression.
The analysis will incorporate sociological theories of creativity including Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the cultural field and Howard Becker’s idea of art as collective action, and sensory studies like exploring the role of embodied perception and sensory metaphors in creative practices.
The proposed report highlights the relevance of integrating sociology and sensory studies to enrich our understanding of creativity, particularly in literary domains. It provides valuable insights for academics, writers, and educators by showcasing how societal and sensory dimensions influence narrative techniques, thematic choices, and reader engagement.
Keywords: sociology of creativity, creative writing, creativity theories

Multisensory Storytelling, Accessible Curation, and Disability Arts; Kathleen Sitter (Canada Research Chair in Multisensory Research and Knowledge Translation University of Calgary, Canada)

Fractured Time: Sensory Dimensions of the Pandemic is a multisensory, 4-dimensional art installation created by neurodivergent artists and scholars from the fields of social work, community health, and architecture. Utilizing the sensory modalities of touch, sound, smell, and sight, the installation conveys the artists’ lived experiences of the pandemic. This presentation examines the adaptation and curation of Fractured Time at three non-traditional venues—a hospital, a university, and a public library—each presenting unique accessibility challenges.
To address the balance between engaging sensory modalities and avoiding the dominance of visual- centric narratives, three phases for accessible curation are proposed: Isolate (falsely), Instruct, and Imagine. These phases are critically analyzed within the context of Fractured Time, providing practical insights into inclusive art practices.
The presentation also describes the participatory creative process, reflects on accessibility-related lessons learned from the three venues, and offers recommendations for enhancing sensory storytelling and accessible curation. By sharing these findings, this research seeks to advance best practices in accessible curation within contemporary Disability Arts, fostering opportunities for artists and audiences to engage with art in inclusive and meaningful ways. Keywords: multisensory design, critical disability, arts, installation, curating

Voicing Difference, Dancing Objects: an Exploration of Indigenous Ainu Aesthetics as a Means of Effecting Decolonizing Action in North American Museums; Mark Watson (Sociology & Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada)

I use this paper to meditate on the value of thinking with ‘voice’ as somatic styling in the context of participatory research with Indigenous Ainu curators from Japan. Whereas ‘voice’ – or ‘voicing’ – is often employed in participatory research as an uncontestable value derived from a simple characterization of it as a freely given activity, this project recognizes that ‘voice’ is not a given but rather a social achievement that reminds us of the need to think our words from our bodies again. Drawing on the work of Richard Shusterman, Stanley Cavell and others, I examine the intention of Ainu artists to reanimate and reconnect with displaced cultural objects in North American museums by “dancing them” as the meeting place of ethics and aesthetics. I ask where it leads if we consider the proposed form of dancing – an individually stylized and impressionistic form of expression inspired by traditional Ainu movements – as somatic self-stylization, an example of confronting the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in the individual performer. If this search for expression, for somatic style, is where the action is then it reminds us of the need to think our words from our bodies again.
Keywords: Ainu, voice, dancing, museums, decolonizing

Oniibawitaan: Speaking for Ourselves: Maureen Anne Matthews ∆ (Anthropology, University of Manitoba, Canada)

This paper looks at the role of Anishinaabe pipes, opwaaganag, in disrupting museum practices and decolonizing the Manitoba Museum during a period of gallery renewal (Matthews 2021). The twelve opwaaganag now participating in five Treaty exhibits are grammatically animate in Anishinaabemowin and in their ceremonial mode, they not only live, bemaadizid, but are what Anishinaabemowin speakers would call bemaaji’iwemagak, those who bring new life into something. When they first began to participate on behalf of First Nations people in the new Treaty exhibits, they initiated new relationships between the museum and its ceremonial partners, forcing the institution to acknowledge the relational obligations that Anishinaabe personhood implies, and to surrender interpretive authority to Indigenous ontologies. The pipes, as diplomats and teachers rebalanced the relationship between the Indigenous communities and the museum and are using their kin-making skills and cultural context to foreground Indigenous sensory experience and reflect Indigenous ways of being.
Keywords: Museums, decolonization, Anishinaabe museum relationships, animacy, community engagement

A Preliminary Reconnaissance of the Spiritual, Sensorial and Legal Personality of Indigenous Artifacts; David Howes (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)

This paper presents some of the preliminary findings of the “Sensitive Material” research project. It troubles the longstanding distinction between persons and things, persona and res, in the Western tradition. In many Indigenous cultures located on the land now known as Canada, artifacts such as drums, ceremonial pipes, masks and other ritual paraphernalia are hailed and treated as animate, sentient (and sensible) beings – in short, as other-than-human persons. If they are persons in their cultures of origin then what should be their status in their culture of destination, for example, the collection of a museum such as the Canadian Museum of History? How should they be accommodated and conserved or cared for? How can their will be determined, and respected? How might a case be built for the “rights of artifacts”? The findings to be recounted here have radical curatorial and legal implications.

Olfactory Worldmaking; Hsuan Hsu (English, University of California, Davis, USA)

This paper will argue that worldmaking—a concept that has been the focus of conversations in phenomenology, science fiction studies, critical ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and environmental humanities—offers a generative framework for understanding aesthetic experiments that center the sense of smell. The presentation will develop, through close analysis of literary texts and multimodal artworks, a set of theoretical concepts for understanding how smell can function as a capacity for making phenomenological and relational worlds, whether by reintegrating suppressed memories, sustaining “microclimates” supportive of precarious lives, or offering solicitations towards modes of intimacy and kinship that hold the promise of generating alternate futures. Among the questions explored will be: How might our methods for studying and making olfactory works shift if we started from the conviction that we don’t fully know what smelling is, what it can be, and what it might enable? what are the distinctive affordances of smell as a medium of worldmaking, especially for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) whose sensory experiences and values have been marginalized from modernity’s climate-controlled, deodorized, and artificially scented spaces? How do speculative narratives and artworks that unsettle or reorder sensorial experience hold space for nonvisual and “illiberal” (following Kandice Chuh) modes of relationality?
Keywords: smell, speculation, worldmaking, critical race studies, more-than-human

Haptic Worlding: Touching Art, Touching Lives – Forging Bridges Through Art; Jenni Lauwrens (School of the Arts, University of Pretoria, South Africa)

In this presentation I will describe and reflect on an educational project that is positioned in the intersecting fields of visual studies, disability studies and community engagement. I will present the findings of interviews, reflections and recordings of a guided touch tour of sculptures that was held at the University of Pretoria, South Africa in 2024. The tour was designed by sighted students in Visual Studies for individuals with visual impairment. The format of the tour was based on literature describing different ways in which audio and touch tours might be structured and the successes and shortcomings of various approaches. It was also designed with the assistance of University of Pretoria students and staff with sight impairments. Although the intention of the project was to make artworks accessible to people who cannot see them, the data revealed that remarkable interactions arose between the students without visual disabilities and the audience with visual disabilities. Thus, touching art facilitated profound exchanges not only about the artworks that were presented, but more importantly, it enriched understanding of the lived experiences of persons with sight impairment. Keywords: Touch tour, visual impairment, disability studies, community engagement

A Political Ecology of Ethics; Rob Shields ∆ (University of Alberta, Canada)

This paper considers the relation between sensory perception and experience that gives rise to aesthesis. It considers how, as sensory self-evidence, aesthesis is the basis for ethical judgements about situation and context. Such contexts may be environmental or political but in turn aesthesis relies on references to collective experience and the polis for a normalization of perception. Heraclitean and Protagorean aesthesis as fundamental relation has persisted and been recovered as e.g. experience in William James’s pragmatism. It is integral to perception in A.N. Whitehead’s work, and is the founding mutualism of Simone Weil’s philosophy of obligation. Contemporary thinkers as diverse as Berardi and Serres find aesthesis as a material contact that grounds reason and conjoins thought to reality. Aesthesis is thus the relation between the perceptible or real, and the collective, that is, the polis. On one hand, the polity involves an ethical relation, but for Weil in particular it entailed a political process that exceeded rights. The polis is also the organization of obligation, or of “what matters” as well as what and at what scales sense data are perceived as real, significant and relevant.
Keywords: aesthesis, ethics, politics, obligation, polis

Conducting Remote Research with Individuals Living with Deafblindness; Walter Wittich (School of Optometry, Université de Montréal, Canada)

The inclusion of individuals with deafblindness in research has made considerable progress with accessible remote methods that gained traction during the Covid-19 pandemic. Communication can be facilitated through automated or manual captioning and transcription as well as through multi- user screen displays for sign-language interpreters. Cloud-based videoconferencing (e.g., Zoom or Teams) eliminates the need for travel, which can be its own barrier to research participation for individuals with sensory difficulties. However, such methodological approaches for qualitative data collection (e.g., interviews or focus groups) remain relatively new, and little research has explored their logistics, challenges and benefits. The purpose of this study was to describe the formats, barriers and facilitators of expressive and receptive communication during videoconferencing with deafblind participants.
Keywords: deafblindness, qualitative research, remote data collection, communication, accommodation

Do Not Touch: Distantism in the Museum; John Lee Clark (Interdisciplinary Humanities, Concordia University, Canada)

In 2017, I introduced the concept of distantism to help us put a finger on what affects everyone but especially DeafBlind people: social expectations and attitudes that keep people physically apart. Derived from the Latin “distantia,” “a standing apart,” the term opened many areas of discourse but already had its opposing dynamic, thanks to the Protactile movement. DeafBlind people have been overthrowing sighted norms we had been trying to oblige, frequently without success, and been fumbling our way into new habits of touching everything, maintaining contact, and rearranging our environments to suit our practices. One of the clearest sites of conflict between the protactile and distantism is the museum, where patrons are traditionally and systematically asked not to and trained not to touch objects selected to represent various sets of values, especially colonialism and capitalism. This presentation uses a recent museum visit, the history of the museum, the history of DeafBlind ways of touch, and a recent Protactile living history do project to feel some contours of distantism and pay attention to suggestive alternatives to the ethos of “Do Not Touch,” both in the museum and in society at large. Keywords: Touch; distantism; museums; DeafBlind community; living history

Building a Shared Reference in Sensory Asymmetric Situations. A Video-Analysis of Visually Impaired Students in Classrooms; Brian Due (Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Understanding scientific concepts in school can be challenging, especially for visually impaired students (VIS) who do not rely on visual illustrations. In our video ethnographic project, we observed how VIS engage in Danish science classes, focusing on the innovative use of everyday objects and haptic guidance by their assistants. This support often translates complex ideas like the periodic table or the Pythagorean theorem into tactile experiences. By applying ethnomethodology and conversation analysis within a multimodal framework (following Mondada, 2019, Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: Embodiment and materiality, multimodality and multisensoriality in social interaction. Journal of Pragmatics, 145, 47–62), I analyse a single case where a student tries to learn the periodic table through metaphors and the problems this practice leads to. I show that – what Gurwitsch in The Field of Consciousness (1964) refers to as – ‘gestalt contextures’ can more effectively be achieved through direct haptic interactions rather than through imaginative or metaphorical representations. The findings enrich ethnomethodological studies of science education by illustrating how VIS co-construct understanding of abstract concepts through object-centered, haptic guidance. This approach not only fosters a deeper grasp of science but also empowers VIS in their learning journey. Keywords: Visual impairment, distributed perception, ethnography, video analysis, ethnomethodology

Organizer: Ayaka Yoshimizu ∆ (Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada)

Reorienting ourselves to various multisensorial experiences, this panel brings together concepts, applications, and unintended consequences of sensory education from three different fields of intercultural learning: communication studies, language studies, and an international exchange program. To explore the ways of attuning to what is otherwise insensible or unintelligible, Sekimoto will propose multisensory literacy as a pedagogical concept for cultivating an awareness of affective and aesthetic dimensions of intercultural difference. Using the example of an advanced Japanese language course, Hoshi will explore the pedagogical application of the aesthetic dimensions of learning through embodied experiences of language learners as multimodal, multisensory subjects. Yoshimizu will reflect on unsettling moments in discussing (settler) colonialisms with international students and explore generative possibilities of negative emotions and discomfort experienced in the classroom for cultivating decolonial learning practice. This panel represents new pedagogical directions towards informing unexplored areas of intercultural teaching and learning through interdisciplinary approaches to sensory education.

Multisensory Literacy for Intercultural Communication; Sachi Sekimoto (Communication and Media, Minnesota State University; USA)

I propose the concept of multisensory literacy as a pedagogical tool for cultivating intercultural awareness. Growing up in a culture, we internalize and embody its sensory order with its rules, nuances, and subtleties. The sensory order of a given culture shapes our communication by privileging certain modes of sensory engagement while minimizing others (Howes & Classen, 2014). Through repetitive practice, we come to inhabit a body that is attuned to the specific cultural sensorium (Böhme, 2017; Rancière, 2004; Stwart, 2007). Culture, in this case, is a felt and kinesthetic environment in which particular relations of sensing, moving, and being are cultivated, enacted, and reciprocated. Intercultural communication is a site where our differently habituated bodies encounter one another, bringing differing sensorio-material arrangements of reality. To facilitate a greater awareness in these affectively charged and uncertain interactions, I conceptualize multisensory literacy by exploring the ways of attuning to the affective and aesthetic dimensions that emerge when multiple cultural sensoria meet, collide, and merge. Keywords: Intercultural communication, multisensory literacy, attunement

Subjective Self beyond Words: Learners of Japanese as Sensory Ethnographers; Saori Hoshi (Languages and Applied Linguistics, University of California Santa Cruz; USA)

Through the example of a third-year, advanced Japanese language course, this paper explores the pedagogical application of the aesthetic dimension of learning (Kramsch, 2009), which regards language learners as multimodal subjects whose experience is not grounded primarily in the mastery of grammatical rules, but rather in subjective learning of the new language with “all their senses” (Kramsch & Gerhands, 2012, p. 76). While the second language acquisition (SLA) research primarily focuses on the development of learners’ communicative and informational value of utterances, it has not explicitly addressed the association of affect, emotions, and identity to language learners’ lived experiences with the new language. Inspired by the insights from the work of sensory ethnography (Elliott & Culhane, 2017) and which is “not easily or even possibly expressed in written or spoken words” (Pink, 2015, p. 164), this paper is an attempt to uncover how the learners of Japanese are becoming “sensory ethnographers” to narrate their subjective language learning experiences through the use of artistic mediums such as poem, photography, music, video, and other non-verbal forms. The learners of Japanese language rely on the embodied aspects of the cognitive and socialized self of emotions, feelings and memories with the new language to express who they were, are, and aspire to be.
Keywords: Pedagogy, subjectivity, sensory experience

Bad Feelings, “Wrong” Temperatures, and Decolonial Pedagogy; Ayaka Yoshimizu (Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada)

In this paper, I reflect on my embodied experience of feeling and sensing the classroom, both alongside students and separately as an instructor, in undergraduate courses aimed at unlearning colonial ways of knowing and relating to the Indigenous Lands in the place colonially known as Vancouver, Canada. I focus specifically on a course called Introduction to Canada, which is primarily (but not exclusively) designed for exchange students from Japan, based on my teaching experience since 2019. I discuss how I have facilitated student (un)learning when they come from different geo- politico-historical contexts and may not have a shared language—both English as a common classroom language and the decolonial, anti-racist, critical conceptual framework and vocabulary—to critically engage with settler colonialism, its ongoing legacies, and our complicity within them. Rather than highlighting a pedagogical success story, I focus on my/our multisensory experiences, which are often “negative” or anti-enlightening in nature, ranging from emotional dissonance, awkwardness, boredom, and chilliness. Instead of proposing a conceptual solution to suppress or resolve these bodily responses, I build on the works of Ngai (2005), Diabo (2019), Hong (2020), and Sekimoto and Brown (2020) to explore the generative possibilities of negative emotions and sensations that keep us unsettled, compelling me to continue my reckoning with decolonial pedagogy. Keywords: International education, colonialism, negative emotions

Discussant: William Tullett (History, York University, UK)

This multidisciplinary online panel proposes to focus on non-human olfaction in an interspecies perspective to foster critical and interdisciplinary collaborations across the humanities and especially amongst ECRs. The panel’s main objectives are to 1) put forward nose-first histories at the margins of the traditional anthropocentrism of smell studies and 2) to explore olfactory perception as a medium for complex interspecies interactions with diverse environmental, political, scientific and cultural consequences. In a presentation provisionally titled “Mughal Perfumes in Early Modern South Asia: Olfactory Geography and Aromatic Mobility”, Dr. Amrita Chattopadhyay uses a textual corpus of early- modern Mughal aromatics’ recipes to demonstrates how ancient productions practices interlink plant, animal and human lives all the while altering the environment on an extensive scale, notably through the trade and displacement vegetal and animal aromatics. Through her study of 21st-century Francophone dystopian fiction, Chanelle Dupuis analyzes experimental narratives characterized by their decentering of hegemonical anthropocentric olfactory perceptions to unveil the dire interspecies consequences of environmental warfare. In the most conceptual of our three presentations, Sofia Livi and Emanuele Capozziello develop the eponymous notion of “Ecological plasticity”. Using the human olfactory microbiome as a support for their argument, the authors explore the possibility of a dynamic eco-affective ontology, in which traditional conceptual categories, such as human and non-human, subject and object, blur.

Mughal Perfumes in Early Modern South Asia: Olfactory Geography and Aromatic Mobility; Amrita Chattopadhyay (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Timely Histories’ Project, Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin)

The presentation primarily focuses on the early modern Indo-Persianate olfactory regimes in Mughal South Asia (16th-18th centuries). It studies a corpus of textualized recipes and technological methods followed for the preparation of diverse forms of perfumes in this period. Highlighting the minute and meticulous listing of ingredients with specific quantities and qualities, I will show how this craft was dependent on agrarian and pastoral practices, and especially their non-human products. Embedded in the variant topographies and landscapes, the primary raw materials for perfume- making were sourced from plants and animals suitable to specific climatic regions. Catering to courtly ceremonial observations, religious practices and elite consumption patterns, the perfumes in varied material forms such as paste, powder, liquid, soap and incenses were employed as aesthetic-cultural artefacts with complex relationships to their non-human sources. Materialised into exquisite perfume- containers manufactured at the Mughal factories/karkhanas, the olfactory regime of the period signaled the heightened craftmanship preceded by an efficient method of acquiring aromatic raw materials from various regions of the subcontinent and beyond. This was supported by dynamic trade-networks for sourcing and distributing these nature-dependent aromatics in their raw and processed forms as high-valued perfumes. The presentation thus highlights this co-relation between non-human lives, scenstscape and aromatic mobility during the early modern period in forging a unique human-nature relationship permitted by the olfactory modality.
Keywords: early modern perfumery, natural aromatic raw material, interspecies early modern industries, material culture, smell studies

Flies and Eagles: Nonhuman Smells and Nonhumans Smelling in 21st Century French and Francophone Dystopias; Chanelle Dupuis (French and Francophone Studies, Brown University, USA)

What are the smells of the future? French and Francophone dystopic texts imagine ravaged landscapes and broken atmospheres as the future we can expect. From worlds shifted by human- caused alterations to the climate to civilizations destroyed by chemical warfare, dystopias stage new relationships to environments, and more importantly, new ways of viewing nonhuman lives. These nonhumans are described in great detail as beings that suffer from human actions and beings that must strive to escape the conditions they are in. Of interest to me is the relationship between nonhumans and smell. How are they described as smelling? What do they smell? What are their smells? And why do these descriptions matter? In Mireille Gagné’s Frappabord (2024), the fly challenges the idea of a human protagonist and becomes the central character of the book. The fly’s dependence on smell is shown as it uses its sense of smell to track humans and nourish itself. The fly’s voice is especially important as it speaks to the humans and blames them for the destruction of the environment. Similarly, Lutz Bassmann’s Les aigles puent (2010) considers the eagle as the bearer of a toxic war of chemicals, that can be traced through the sense of smell. The eagles are described as carriers of a great stench, but the characters of this novel come to find that the odors of the eagles aren’t natural, but the result of chemical warfare. These two dystopias stage interesting relationships between humans and nonhumans to question environmental change and bring to focus the olfactory lives of other beings. Smell cultures, and smellscapes, as we know them, are shifted away from the human and towards something more inclusive, more informative. It is in this focus on flies and eagles that my paper situates new relationships to smell, and new ways of smelling. Keywords: dystopias, Non-humans, Toxicity, French and Francophone Studies, smell studies

Ecological Plasticity; Sofia Livi & Emanuele Capozziello (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, Italy)

In this presentation, we introduce the concept of ecological plasticity and develop it through the case study of human olfaction and its reliance on its own microbiome for functionality. Extending the model of plasticity to the ecological discourse, we define ecological plasticity as a principle of systemic relationality according to which an agent takes on a form by interacting with a complex affective reality while, reciprocally, giving it a form. The concept of form is here conceived as a synthetic unity that encapsulates the possibilities of existence, sensibility and interaction of an agent immersed in a complex world of other agent-forms. An agent is always aesthetically and affectively immersed in a complex or ecological system: a body is that which is affected and assumes form within a complex affective reality, which is, in turn, co-formed in this process. This perspective, in contrast with static morphology, contributes to configuring a dynamic eco-affective ontology without a clear distinction between activity and passivity, subject and object. Those concepts are crafted with reference to olfactory perception, an embodied and reciprocal field of co-affection. The anthropocentric point of departure is here deconstrued by focusing on the role of the microbiome. The human ability to sense odorants in the environment depends on the richness and composition of the microbiome in the nose, illustrating how olfactory perception relies on a complex network of interactions that plastically morph and define surfaces, questioning the idea of biological enclosure. Via the perception of smells, bodies make sense of their environment, and this shaping cannot take place without the same bodies being touched, affected, and thus renegotiated.
Keywords: eco-affective ontology, plasticity, systemic relationality, anthropocentrism, smell studies

Of Men and Crabs: Connectedness to Nature, Others, and Self; Susana Alves (Social and Developmental Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy)

This work explores human connectedness to nature by engaging with Josué de Castro’s novel Of Men and Crabs. The novel is a tale of childhood, which follows young João Paulo, the surviving son of Zé Luis, who settles on the shoreline to escape the draught and hunger of the inlands. Drawing on an ecological view of perception, I examine the interconnectedness between humans, nature, others, and the self, with a focus on relationality and entanglement. From a critical perspective, catching crabs emerges not only as an act of survival but also as a form of environmental identity and a way of establishing relation with non-human actors. The Northeastern littoral, located between continental and oceanic spaces, provides a behavior setting for people to escape the sertão draught by moving to the coast, where an abundance of water offers the prospect of a better life. The mudflats and the people who live near them, are entangled in the ‘crab cycle’. Thus, landscape affordances are related not only to materialities but also to people’s relationships with human and non-human actors. In conclusion, I argue that the novel’s critique of the complex interaction between humans and the environment offers a deeper understanding of connectedness to nature in terms of more-than-human experiences.
Keywords: environmental psychology; affordances; ecological perception; human-nature connectedness; Of Men and Crabs, Josué de Castro; sertão

Synaesthesia and Sensory Scaling in Carol Watts’s Poem ‘Kelptown’; Helena Hunter (English, Linguistics & Philosophy, Nottingham Trent University in partnership with the University of Warwick, UK)

This paper investigates the multi-sensory poetics of ‘Kelptown’, a poem by Carol Watts (2020) exploring the challenges posed to both kelp (seaweed) and humans in the ongoing environmental crisis. Building on Skoulding’s (2009) assertion that Watts’s poetry enacts a ‘synaesthetic interchange’, the paper unpacks poetic methods that connect the reader to kelp’s umwelt (Uexküll 1934). The notion of ‘sensory scaling ’is proposed as a lens to examine scales of perception, attention, and relation that bring the distant world of kelp forests and their potential demise closer. This sensory scaling fosters sensitivity and self-reflexivity, creating opportunities to imagine from the perspective of kelp. The paper proposes that the perceptual experiments of the poem place and displace the reader in the world of kelp. This subjective leap is achieved through direct address, which calls upon the reader to envision what it would be like to be fully submerged in the ocean ‘without surface or air’ (Watts 2020). In conclusion, the paper examines the role of sound in the poem as a means of sensory connection to the voiceless, highlighting how poetry can listen to and with multi-species worlds.
Keywords: poetry, scale, sound, synaesthesia

Literary Cultures of Olfactory Dysfunction; Ally Louks (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, UK)

In this paper, I will examine how literary representations of smell disorders, such as anosmia, parosmia and hyposmia, respond to the personal reverberations of olfactory augmentation, to the disproportionate effects of olfactory disruption on marginalised groups, and to the current and projected global impairment of olfaction as a result of anthropogenic pollution. Posing new questions for disability studies about the relationships between cultural representations of smell disorders, lived experiences, and structural inequality, I will offer an account of the value of critically engaging with literary responses to olfactory disturbances and inequalities. I suggest that literary texts can renegotiate the importance of olfaction within the world of the text, a process that can productively subvert readers’ habitual relations to their own sense of smell. Further, I argue that literary texts can couch the loss, impairment or distortion of smell through metaphorical and allegorical techniques, which shed light on broader sociological themes, as well as the management and distribution of sensory disruption within the Anthropocene. Interdisciplinary in nature, this paper will draw on a portfolio of textual examples, but will also engage with critical disability studies, the medical humanities, anthropological and psychological studies, and neuroscientific findings relating to smell dysfunction.
Keywords: Smell disorders, Literature, Disability, Inequality, Sensory dysfunction

Organizer: David Garneau ∆ (Visual Arts, University of Regina, Canada)

The Sensory Potential of Hospital Matter; Anna Harris (Department of Society Studies, Maastricht University, The Netherlands)

In this talk I will explore the sensory potential of materials in the context of the hospital. Hospitals are currently seen as sites of clinical waste, using excessive single-use plastics and disposables, generating mountains of rubbish. Inside hospitals however, people work with materials in many different ways. They might find new uses of objects for example rather than throw them away. They might tinker and repair objects to keep them from discard. We don’t know much about these repurposing practices because they are often “off-protocol”. In this talk I will introduce an ethnographic approach to studying upcycled materials in hospitals and share preliminary observations. I will discuss this in the context of an international sensory ethnographic team project which looks at material practices in sites around the world. I will share some of our creative methods for doing research, including experimenting with open datasets of material improvisations. Our team consists of anthropologists and STS scholars and will expand to include data experts, designers and makers. One of the goals of our research will be to expand current theories of materiality through comparative collaborative ethnography, using practices such as upcycling as ways to interrogate the sensory potential of materials.
Keywords: sensory ethnography, materiality, hospital ethnography, upcycling, circularity

Gardening the Cybernetic Meadow: Fostering Ecosophic Care using Microbial Fuel Cells as a Temporal Aesthetic Medium; Matthew Halpenny (interdisciplinary artist and researcher, Montréal, Canada)

The presentation would detail my graduate research on interdisciplinary art, temporal & more- than-human timelines, and Guattari’s ecosophic framework. Primarily, it uses sustainable energy technologies drawing energy from bio-matter (soil microbes) to explore experiential installation works. MFCs are a regenerative energy technology that use soil as medium and uptake energy through collecting by-products of microbial metabolism. When growing plants, the ions left in the soil by this process accumulate and power e-ink poetry over months of exhibition. The garden generates enough energy to generate about a word a day. This creates an extremely “slow”, temporal experience of waiting for the output, fostering the experience of sensing more-than-human timescales and subsequently, the contrasting temporal sense of “deep time” energy consumption we rely on with extractive energy sources. Oil and coal are also tied to metabolic growth timelines, but represent millions of years of that same metabolism and growth. Keywords: Research-Creation, Interdisciplinary Design, Microbial Energy, Temporal Aesthetics, Experiential Learning

Lithium Bodies: (Non-)human Chemical Affinities; Alba Clevenger (Communication Studies, Concordia University, Canada)

Like vehicles, some psychiatrized bodies are ‘made better’ with lithium. Backed by the scientific belief that it is the optimal choice for the perpetual forward motion of these human and vehicular bodies, lithium consumption enables some embodied potentials while foreclosing others. This is an exploratory paper that investigates the material-affective affinities of what I’m calling ‘lithium bodies’: human, locomotive, and ecological. It maps how processes of extraction, consumption, digestion, and excretion transform these lithium bodies and their sensorial potentials. It traces how lithium acts on these bodies, simultaneously enabling forms of mobility and immobility, offering repair while administering harm. This paper moves through multiple field sites in Quebec, from open pit mining to microscopy, while remaining anchored in the researcher’s felt sense of her body, in her everyday practice of lithium consumption. Emerging from critical disability and feminist science and technology studies frameworks, this paper moves multiple ethnographic sites in Quebec, from open pit mining to microscopy. Drawing on Mel Y. Chen’s theories of intoxication and chemical intimacy and Jane Bennett’s concept of vibrant matter, this paper seeks out points of affinity, contradiction, and ambivalence while staying attentive to relations of power. Keywords: disability, ecology, green energy futures, non-human ethnography, embodiment

This panel discussion brings together scholars of STS, engineering, and Media Studies to explore how technologies have been reshaping embodied experience across different sensory domains. Panelists will examine developments in multisensory representation, from vibrotactile musical devices to screen reader-friendly data visualizations, to explore how haptic and audio technologies can facilitate new forms of sensory engagement. Panelists will discuss historical and contemporary developments in multimodal representation, including Paul Bach-Y-Rita’s pioneering work in tactile-visual sensory substitution, the IMAGE project’s multimodal AI-powered displays, and Jeff Blum’s MIMIC device. The conversation will address the fragmentation in haptic effects editing software and multisensory data representation, questioning why attempts at standardization have struggled, and what this means for the field. Additionally, insights from perceptual psychology and embodied cognition, such as attunement techniques from auditory and tactile perception (e.g., human echolocation, vibrational cueing in cane navigation), will provide a broader context for the implications of these technologies. By merging critical perspectives from history, sociology, and disability studies, this panel will synthesize insights about these novel technologies to understand the future of mediated social touch and perceptual sensory research.

Speakers:
• Kyle Keane (University of Bristol, UK),
• Mark Paterson (University of Pittsburgh, USA),
• David Parisi (NYU, USA)
• Crystal Lee (MIT, USA)

“They Sing Songs”: (Re)considering Touch as Sensory Pedagogy in Museums; Zoe Silverman (UC Berkeley School of Education, USA)

This paper (re)considers touch as a pedagogical strategy and epistemic modality in contemporary museums. A close study of two objects at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) —an abalone shell as “handling object” and an encased Klamath River woman’s dance skirt as “artifact” — illuminates the tensions that arise when museums deploy multisensory design to support visitors’ affective or empathetic engagement with the lifeworlds of others. Listening closely to early ethnographic accounts of Yurok, Kurok, and Hupa tribes’ lifeways and to contemporary cultural experts’ guidelines for interpreting regalia, I suggest that hearing rather than touch is the relevant sense through which the Klamath River skirt ought to be interpreted. I argue that, despite the progressive values guiding OMCA’s designers, the introduction of a handling object in this installation risks replicating colonizing dynamics of touch rather than clarifying the aural universe in which the skirt was made more than one hundred years ago and is valued today by living descendants. I conclude by analyzing video of an interaction between a young child, the two objects, and myself, in which one perceptive visitor probed the silence of the abalone shell and offered an embodied, nondiscursive, and eloquent critique of the museum’s choice of sensory pedagogy.
Keywords: museum education, sensory design, material culture, Native Californians, interaction analysis

Sensing Beyond a Range of Audibility: Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass; Sebastian De Line (Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada)

This lecture examines Diné sound artist and composure, Raven Chacon’s large ensemble piece, Voiceless Mass (2021) which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022. The score necessitates the use of a pipe organ which is meant to be played in the site of a church. “Sensing Beyond a Range of Audibility” investigates how the architectural site of the church and the enlivened stone materiality of the building perform the role of both agential witness to historical and on-ogoing colonial violences and as a co-composer of the score, informed by Sto:lo theorist Dylan Robinson’s song-life (2020) and suprasensorial sensiotics (Drewal 2024).
Keywords: perception beyond (in)audibility, Indigenous sound studies, music, sensiotics, affect

The Role of Olfaction in Cultural Identity: How Different Societies and Subcultures Use Smell to Construct Social Boundaries, Norms, and Rituals; Tatevik Karapetyan (Eurasia International University, Armenia)

Landscapes made Visible: Seeing in the Mind’s Eye for the Non-congenitally Sight Impaired; Karis Jade Petty √ (Anthropology, University of Sussex, Brighton)

Even when there is no vision through the anatomical eyes, people who are non-congenitally sight impaired often describe “visual” experiences of the landscape through “seeing in the mind’s eye”. This imaginative sight is a ‘way of seeing’ through eyes of another time and can be understood as a ‘phantom vision’. Intentionally imagined or unintentionally triggered, the qualities of “seeing in the mind’s eye” often change over time as visual memories fade and the nature of ‘the visual’ transfigures. These transfigurations warp normative sighted ontologies concerning the nature of visibilities, and the landscape is revealed differently. Drawing on sensory ethnography of the experience of the South Downs National Park in Sussex amongst walkers who have impaired vision, this paper explores these phenomena to address what this means for notions of landscape, the body, and the senses.
Keywords: Blindness, imagination, memory, landscape, senses

Mobility in Blind Everyday : Possibilities and Challenges of an Olfactory Urban Planning; Sayantan Ghosh (Sociology, Hiralal Mazumdar Memorial College for Women, India)

Mobility in urban every day is a sensory experience. We often use our senses of sight and hearing to move from one place to another. If a person is going to a place she would depend perhaps on her eyes more than other senses starting from numbers or routes written in bus, train – through sign boards to the number of building. The entire process is predominantly bisensual. Thanks to the monosensuality of urban planning. But what about those who are persons with visual impairment? Yes, sound and tactility do play significant roles but olfaction does have an important role in mobility of blind persons as well as in significant several other aspects of their everyday lives. This paper tries to sniff out blind every days and outline the role of smell in food, security, everyday purchase, identification, mobility and construction of identities. Secondly, 2.2 billion people in the world are visually impaired and 90% of them live in developing countries. Chances are high that a significant number of lives among those are unemployed / underemployed and /or they are not being able to rich to their full potential as well as they suffer from lack of freedom, inaccessibility and are unable to become self dependant.
In this context, I propose a multisensory urban planning in place of a monosensual or bisensual one. This paper is a humble introductory effort to explore challenges and possibilities of a fragrant city and /or of an olfactory urban planning which might have sheer significance for both persons with disability as well as for able bodied persons.
Keywords: Olfaction, Blind , Urban, Everyday, Mobility

Which Walkability for the Suburbs? Developing an Ambiance-based Approach to Walkability; Mathilde Carbonneau Loiselle (Faculté de l’Aménagement, Université de Montréal / Laboratoire CRESSON, AAU-Ambiances, ENSAG-Université de Grenoble-Alpes, France)

This presentation aims to share the main results of my PhD thesis. The thesis foregrounds the potential role of sensory related criteria to enhance the walkability of suburban areas and to promote agency towards a shift in mobility habits. Traditional approaches to walkability rely essentially on morpho-functional aspects of the walking experiences. Suburban areas do not qualify as positive environments for walking if only considered through those dimensions. By better understanding social and sensorial aspects of the walking experiences, we end up creating a much wider set of tools to intervene for a better walkability of those environments. The approach also implies a redefinition of the roles associated with urban intervention, giving much more active role to inhabitants. Enhancing the walkability of suburban environments is of interest for climate action and for ensuring their inclusivity by promoting social connection and communitarian support.
Keywords: Walkability, ambiances, climate action, agency, creative methods

Sensing to Translate: A Reading of Silvina Ocampo’s Short Story “La Calle Sarandi”; Silvina Katz (Open University, UK)

Literary translators need to be able to sense or ‘feel’ a text in order to generate an emotionally resonant target text in translation, however, the ineffable nature of atmospheres in short stories can make this task difficult. This study explores the complex process of identifying sensory cues in literary works, focusing on Silvina Ocampo’s unsettling short story “La calle Sarandi” (1937). Through a phenomenological approach combining close reading and computer-aided qualitative data analysis, the research examines how perceptual sensory cues are encoded as sensory imagery both in their original and in their translated forms.
The study tracks sensory markers to identify and foreground textual components that trigger emotional responses. Findings reveal a significant number of sensory markers interwoven with the narrative structure, contributing to the story’s atmospheric qualities. The discussion explores how these sensory markers aid in making sense of the story and how they can be effectively recreated in translation.
This research highlights the importance of sensory perception in literary translation, particularly for texts like Ocampo’s, and provides insights into the delicate relationship between sensory cues and narrative structure of the short story.
Keywords: Translation, atmosphere, phenomenology, perception, sensory markers

Olfactory Ethics in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Other Works; Lay Sion Ng √ (University of Tsukuba, Japan)

This presentation contextualizes the environmental significance of olfactory descriptions in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and other works. It analyzes how they intervene in the text to immerse readers in the physical, socio-cultural, and symbolic implications. By doing so, the study challenges the perception of nature as a separate entity, instead positing it through smell as inherently transcorporeal, making smell itself essential for comprehending embodied experiences. At the heart of the presentation’s argument lies the exploration of the relationships between olfaction and the concept of ‘home’ and ‘not-home.’ It illustrates how smells can recall memories of childhood innocence and intimate connections with nature while evoking associations with war and death, highlighting the transboundary nature of olfaction. This exploration encourages audiences to reconsider the dichotomies between life and death, humans and nonhumans, suggesting a form of olfactory ethics inherent in Hemingway’s narrative.
Keywords: Ernest Hemingway, olfactory ethics, transcorporeality, home, not-home

Literary and Medical Imaginations of Intestinal Sensations in Medieval China (7th–13th c.); Zihan Guo (East Asian Studies, Princeton University, USA)

Medieval Chinese poets contemplated and composed with their intestines. The literary trope of “broken intestines,” referring figuratively to unbearable misery and pain, was from early times dissociated from its literal referent. However, the actual corporeal sensations of intestines resurfaced in medieval Chinese poetics. This paper traces the transformation of the imagery of intestines from a metaphor of woe into a motif of rumination in medieval China. Literary discourses depicted intestines as a storehouse of books, echoing medical theories that envisioned them to be repositories of life energy. The spatial imagination of intestines draws on the synesthetic idea of taste that signifies at once aesthetic discrimination and gustatory sensation. The rumbling intestines, tortured by hunger, cannot but be satiated by books and knowledge. Attending to the ecology between the senses and the intellect, the body and the mind, medieval Chinese writers constructed an alternative vision of knowledge as nutrient and themselves as austere epicures.
Keywords: intestines, hunger, knowledge, anatomy, poetry

Animal Senses in the Anthropocene; Brian Glenney (Philosophy, Norwich University, Vermont, USA)

The mass of human-made things now exceeds the mass of natural things, a sign of our new Anthropocene age. This has introduced an array of sensory changes in animals’ perception of their natural climes. Human made structures now disrupt numerous animals’ flying behaviors, adding to the already disruptive human made light sources. Underwater boat motor sounds and radar pings interfere with not only underwater animal navigation and communication, and their associated turbulence destroys hard fought nesting and hiding sites. Increases in terrestrial and aquatic temperatures disrupt a range of behaviors as increases in salinity undermine prey-detection in fish. The focus of this talk is animal crossmodal perceptual abilities and their ability to mitigate natural and artificial changes. In “sensory switching” when one sense is blocked another can be used. However, in some animals crossmodal perception leads to distraction in all the senses when one sense is blocked. Hence, understanding crossmodal perception in animals may reveal mitigating strategies as well as novel kinds of harm from artificial changes through anthropogenic effects on the environment, having significance for animal survival, sustenance, and social adaptations to ecologies in our new Anthropocene age. Keywords: pollution, animal perception, crossmodal perception, sensory switching, Anthropocene

Tactile Stigmergy: Ant-Inspired Strategies for Adaptive and Collective Sensory Design; Mike Cassidy (INDI/Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University)

Ants navigate and collaborate through tactile communication and stigmergy—indirect and often asynchronous coordination between agents via environmental modifications such as vibrational signals and pheromonal substrate markings. These decentralized systems are highly adaptive, relying on impermanent, multimodal sensory inputs to support collective problem-solving in novel contexts. This paper details the researcher’s process of designing and building a modular formicarium for his personal ant caring practice, while exploring how stigmergic principles can inspire spatio-sensory design that prioritizes adaptability, participation, and accessibility. Ants’ reliance on multimodal and ephemeral cues suggests ways to design communicative, multisensory spaces that adapt dynamically to collective input. This paper will take a speculative approach, thinking about how the built environment–this time at a human scale–might facilitate collective practices of sensing and sense-based communication. In particular, I will focus on haptic technologies–technologies of touch–as fundamental and inclusive modes of interaction. This entails thinking about how tactile markers might be integrated into public space, to create decentralized, community-driven communications networks. By embracing tactile and vibrational communication, I situate ants’ stigmergic strategies as powerful models for sensory-diverse design. Keywords: Stigmergy, Multisensory Design, Adaptive Environments, Bioinspired Systems, Collaborative Interaction

A Stroll Through the Perceptual Worlds of Animals and Men: Sensing Climate Crisis; Mark Paterson ∆ (Sociology, University of Pittsburgh, USA)

The classic 1934 essay ‘A stroll through the worlds of animals and men’ by Jakob Von Uexküll remains fresh and is continually in print. What if we are able to stroll like this through more advanced digital technology, the better to glimpse the realities of more-than human sensation and perception when habitats are under threat? Uexküll’s essay remains popular. First, it opens out the consideration of the senses beyond our anthropocentric limitations. The perceptual world of other species, based on different arrangements of senses, is endlessly fascinating. Second, it reveals not just the perceptual differences, but what is _shared_ between humans and nonhumans, that is, ‘interanimality’. As Merleau-Ponty remarks: “We study the human through its body in order to see it emerge as different from the animal, not by the addition of reason, but rather, in the _ineinander_ (intertwining) with the animal …” (2003, 214). This is to considering a larger ecology of sensing beyond the individual human subject, what cultural geographers, anthropologists, and others consider a “more-than human world”, and what Donna Haraway (2007) conceives as “multispecies entanglements”. This paper explores such ideas through a series of case studies, intriguing artistic experiments that seek to escape the replication of human sensing through digital technologies, looking to nonhuman bodies and experiences for inspiration. Are such experiments a productive strategy for grasping the effects of climate change on nonhuman species?
Keywords: more-than human, ethology, climate change, digital sensation, animal perception

Organizer: Marcel Cobussen (Leiden University, Netherlands)

Urban atmospheres are of course experienced through more than one sense: we use our eyes, ears, skin, and nose. Besides elements that can be experienced through the senses, many other agents are active in creating a specific atmosphere: cultural perspectives, sociopolitical and economic influences, ecological or commercial interests, etc. In short, all these agents (and many more) play a role in the ways places are designed and experienced. Our view is that sound is an important agent in the creation of an urban atmosphere and that all these agents are connected to sound. A constantly changing constellation of traffic sounds, construction works, human activities, bells, music, as well as natural sounds determine the soundscape of cities and how these are perceived. However, when intervening in such a soundscape, several other parameters besides sound might change: social interaction, feelings of (un)safety, biodiversity., etc. Also, visual, haptic, and olfactory transformations might occur in combination with introduced sounds. In this panel we would like to focus specifically on the relation between the sonic environment, sound art, and ecology in cities. In particular we will investigate the following question: how can sound artists intervene in the ecological climate in cities?

“Those Poor Birds”: Sound Art, Public Space, and Vulnerable Listening Subjects; Linnea Semmerling (Leiden University, Netherlands)

Sounding artworks in public urban spaces have led to noise complaints across the world. Drawing on recent histories and theories of noise nuisance (Bijsterveld), annoying music (Trotta), and aesthetic moralism (Thompson), this paper traces how involuntary art audiences have voiced their disapproval of sound installations in public spaces since the 1990s. An analysis of the complaints of residents, businesspeople, and office workers on the sites of sonic interventions by artists reveals that decibel meters fail to capture the degree of unpleasantness and disturbance felt by the locals. A recurrent rhetorical element in these complaints is the evocation of a “vulnerable listening subject” – ranging from children to pets and local wildlife – as a means of strengthening their case against the sonic intervention in question. This paper thus explores the sensory, social, and moral implications of sound installations in shared spaces.
Keywords: sound art, public space, noise nuisance, vulnerable listening subjects

The Building Blocks of Urban Sound: Listening to Material Voices; Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn √ (Leiden University, Netherlands)

The history of cities revolves around the transformation of exurban matter and (bio)energy into the infrastructures necessary to sustain dwelling, consumption, and expansion. As materials like brick, sand, and clay have given way to concrete, steel, glass, and petroleum products (plastic, foam, rubber, etc.), their supply chains have grown increasingly global, extractive, and toxic. Although discourse around urban soundscapes has largely evolved beyond R. Murray Schafer’s infamous ‘lo- fi’ formulation (Schafer 1977/1994) to acknowledge more nuanced acoustic ecologies, the relationship between these urban soundscapes and the landscapes from which their constituent parts are carved merits closer attention. Drawing from recent literature on the practice of field recording and its complex relationship to settler-colonialism, displacement, and exploitation (e.g. Kanngieser 2023; Wright 2022; Ouzounian 2017), this paper explores how building materials in contemporary cities don’t merely record their extraction but actively voice it, and how attending to the materials that suffuse urban life enables us to sense the echoing traumas of their production. It proposes then that building materials filter urban acoustic ecologies through the displaced soundscapes whose extraction, displacement, and mutilation they reverberate.
Keywords: urban sound, field recording, listening, settler-colonialism

The Role of Sound Art in Designing Public Urban Spaces; Marcel Cobussen (Leiden University, Netherlands)

What can sound artists contribute to the sonic design of public urban environments? And why is it important to involve sound artists in this design process? Although slowly, it seems as if a transformation is taking place in the way (local) governments deal with the (re)design of public urban spaces: not only can we notice more attention for the sonic design of those spaces; emphasis also shifts gradually from noise measurements and noise reduction policies to a more nuanced approach in which sounds in public spaces are regarded as an opportunity: sounds can contribute in a positive sense to the experience of an environment. Enter sound artists. Not only are they experienced listeners which may help to not denounce certain sounds a priori (e.g., because they stem from unwanted sources); artists can also offer unexpected solutions to specific problems; they can work with the unexplored sonic opportunities of an urban site; they may be able to create new types of site-involving activities; and they might be able to suggest alternative negotiations regarding sonic aspects of everyday sites and/or situations. Keywords: sound art, sound design, public urban spaces

Organizer: Florian Grond (Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University, Canada)

This roundtable brings together artists Bouchard, Bucionis, Johnson, and Hunt, each working across different sensory modalities, to challenge conventional assumptions about perception and imagination. By exploring how imagination emerges through diverse sensory experiences—starting with but extending beyond the dominance of visual perception—this discussion offers new perspectives on communication, creativity, and sensory diversity.

Imagination is often framed as a primarily visual process, but what happens when vision is absent or reconfigured? Johnson and Hunt begin the conversation with imagination as a response to visuality, examining how mental imagery is constructed through language, memory, and sensory substitution. From there, Bucionis will direct the discussion to the auditory realm, where sound evokes presence, memory, and emotion, constructing imagined spaces in ways distinct from vision. Whether through music or field recordings, auditory experiences generate multisensory perceptions that challenge conventional understandings of imagination.

Finally, Bouchard explores imagination through performative practices that engage the body and multiple senses. Immersive performances designed for blind and visually impaired audiences use movement, touch, and sound to create deeply embodied imaginative experiences. These novel approaches to performance and theatre reshape how imagination operates beyond sight, expanding the possibilities of artistic expression and audience engagement.

Speakers:
• Kevin J. Hunt (Nottingham School of Art and Design, Nottingham Trent University, UK)
• David Johnson (Royal College of Art, London, UK)
• Vytautas Bucionis (Ornithologist / Music, Université de Montréal, Canada)
• Audrey-Anne Bouchard (Theatre artist and researcher, Montreal, Canada)

Interembodied Attentiveness: Vibrational Encounters between Clinical Herbalists and Medicinal Plants; Rosalin Benedict (Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada)

I intend to present a chapter on my ongoing thesis that explores how clinical herbalists cultivate, experience and express their felt, synergetic relationships with medicinal plants; and how the interconnectedness of humans and plants contributes to a more ecological and embodied approach to wellbeing. This chapter particularly delves into the profoundly felt yet inexplicably lived experiences that emerge from human-plant relationships, focusing specifically on the emotional and sensory dimensions of communication between herbalists and medicinal plants. Many herbalists describe their interactions with plants in terms that resist articulation, often speaking of a “silent” or “invisible” way of knowing—one that transcends verbal communication and relies on heightened sensory awareness, particularly through affective listening. Relationships herbalists cultivate with medicinal plants are revealed to be emotionally intense and profound, rooted in a kind of intimate understanding that is felt in the body. Throughout my fieldwork, some herbalists describe this knowledge transmission as being mediated by “antennas” to capture the reciprocal ways human and plant bodies tune into one another. These antennas, I propose, act like invisible waves, vibrating with the intention to communicate. Drawing from ethnography, this presentation will explore the complexity and nuances of this invisibility, interpreted as a sense of attentiveness, which I describe as an interembodied connection: a shared form of knowledge that resonates and vibrates between human and herbal bodies.
Keywords: knowledge, listening, sensorial communication, interembodiment, human-plant relationship

Sensing Poison and Herbs in Witchcraft: Ethnographic Study of Bodily Experience of Herbal Medicine in the Eastern Himalayas; Kei Nagaoka (University of California, Berkeley, USA)

This study explores the sensory experience of witchcraft among the Monpa people through ethnographic research in the Eastern Himalayas. They use wild plants for medicine, rituals, and food. Some herbs are significant medicines that save lives from witchcraft. The witch is assumed to place an invisible poison in the food of others and deprive them of their Buddhist merit (sonam) after they die. Scholars have reported the poisoning of witchcraft in different locations along the Himalayan borders between Tibet, India, Nepal, and Bhutan and discussed the local discourse of merit and the narrative of suffering. However, few mention the use of herbal medicines for its treatment. By analyzing their senses of herbal medicine in the local context, I argue that witchcraft is not merely a discourse or narrative but a multisensory experience of living in an environment with poison and herbs. This study contributes to the medical anthropology of the senses and sensory ecology ethnography by discussing how people experience herbs through their senses, how their experience interconnects with the feeling and memory of the poison and witches at the border, and how they make sense of the uncertain world based on their bodily sensibility toward non-human species. Keywords:Multisensory experience, Human-plant relationship, Tibetan Buddhist community, Bodily sensibility, Memory

Entering Into a Sonic Intra-Active Quantum Relation with Plant Life; Juliana España Keller (Studio Arts, Concordia University, Canada)

In the speculative research of plant bioacoustics, one enters into a sonic intra-active relation, by humans with non-human beings (plant life), activated through acoustic wave signals emitted by plants to createelectronic patterns of sounds composed by humans and emitted by machines. Plants emit sound waves at relatively low frequencies of 50–120 Hz. Experimenting with patching and modulation by tracking these sonic lines of data can indeed lead to unique sonic experiences that tap into the universe’s musicology. It is fascinating how we can interact with sounds on such a deep level to create acoustic energy. We are and have always been attached to the universe in a relational processual way. We are all interconnected with plant life vibrating at different internal frequencies. This article focuses on a symbiotic relation between humans and plant life as an acoustic shimmering ecology – to communicate a posthuman, symbiotic understanding of vegetal matter as a morphological force that(re)shapes, (re)affirms our sonic intra-relations to the natural world. This proposition is molecular and metaphysical, as sound matter is of a qualitative multiplicity in the quantum field of listening. By acknowledging ontologically that cosmopolitics brings into relation different practices, practitioners, and the non-human (they assemble in a field of forces and intensities), I argue that there is no sovereign power under which all modes of existence can be organized, and there is no meta-language through which one can master the diversity of all discursive or material practices; but there are intra-relations in which one can get lost in a quantum field of sonic matter by moving into the cracks of the sensorium and the plant biosphere, which includes Indigenous voices. The alterity of plant life is daunting froman eco-feministmaterialist position in that relationships are the default state of existence and sonic experiences uncover alternative or additional explanations in a (post)phenomenological world – which is embedded in the stuff of acoustics in the many ways humans hear the world. Thus, to communicate a posthuman, symbiotic understanding of vegetal matter necessitates understanding how sound matter intra- performs through a sonic language – where intra-relations with plant life have complex boundaries for humans. As a creative practitioner, how does one define the mutually beneficial engagement in plant communication with creative musical encounters? Entanglement is messy and a becoming with the universe as a philosophical sonic meditation and worlding. This entails expanding on sensing plants as cosmogonic beings, world builders, and we, perhaps, are the byproducts of the lives of our vegetal others.
Keywords: acoustic ecologies, plant bioacoustics, environmental humanities, symbiosis, the biosphere

Within and Beyond Sight: An Ethnography of People with Visual Impairment; Aurélie Roy-Bourbeau (Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada)

In this presentation, I will share the findings of my research conducted over the past two years and a half with individuals who have visual disabilities. This research explores the lived experiences of people whose vision differs from what is expected. Each participant has developed unique strategies to navigate their differences and has expressed, with great emotion, their experiences in a world where sight often feels like the only sensation that matters.
This project is also a form of research-creation, incorporating auditory elements where you will hear the voices of the collaborators. Through their voices, we not only hear their emotions and hesitations, but also experience the environments in which I conducted the interviews. The voices, along with the rawness of the auditory segments, allow us to understand the situation beyond just words.
Thus, my work challenges traditional ways of sharing and understanding knowledge. Sensory experiences are not always tangible or objective in the way we typically value knowledge, but my research aims to create space for these forms of experience within the academic world.
Keywords: Ethnography, Vision, Sensation, Experience, Audio

The Animism of the Wandering Eye; Brígida Cristina Maestres Useche (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain)

For those who remain concerned with the problem of knowledge and experience and with its political effects, this presentation shows the path followed by Brígida Maestres and Angela Bonadies in their attempt to positively describe (low) visual experience. How did we grasp my own visual experience overcoming the embodied narratives of visual impairment? It shows how an aesthetic experience contributed ecstatically and creatively in both, loosening, liberating, merging -densifying- the cognitive and poetic frameworks; generating aesthetic materials that can, at the same time, break epistemologically with the duality disability/normality; (re)introducing aesthetically the beauty of a peripheral world already detached from the referents of the lack. This is the animist world.
Keywords: low vision, phenomenology, biopolitics, critical disability, art and science

The Hidden World of Visuals, or Unpacking What We See to Understand the Multi-Sensory Connections Our Eyes Make; Mary Sherman ∆ (TransCultural Exchange, Boston, USA)

Seeing includes our brains making hundreds of calculations, comparisons and connections with our other senses (typically, unbeknownst to us) to supplement what our eyes tell us. This act is what causes the often-heard refrain from people when they see a picture they like, “I don’t know. I just like it.” But, if we slow the viewing process down, some of what caused our hypothetical art enthusiast’s reaction can be explained. For example, for a drawing class I teach in Boston, I ask the students to describe what three different educational institutions look like: Harvard College, Northeastern University and, their college Boston College. In doing so, the students discover that the look of these institutions’ campuses (their buildings, location, grounds, etc.) perfectly match each institution’s mission – something we might not notice when we step foot on them, but our subconscious does and, consequently, all three schools have a high retention rate. My paper, which can also be run as a workshop, will start with this same exercise followed by the examination of key art historical paintings to show, for instance, how Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night magnificently creates a sense of unease and Edward Hopper’s paintings convey a sense of hopeless.
Keywords: artworks, visuals, multi-sensory, education, seeing

Organizer: Melissa Park (School of Physical and Occupational Therapy / Culture Mental Health Research Unit, Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, Canada)

Uncommoning Senses of the Unsaid, Schizophrenia as Methodology; Vishnu Vardhani Rajan and Kolar Aparna (Dept of Cultures, University of Helsinki; Finland)

In this ongoing exploration between a dancer-geographer and body-philosopher, we offer a performative lecture to revisit the wheres and whens of life-death worlds en/dis-abled in common sense circulations of jugupsa (disgust), shringaram (erotics), and love. We explore such circulations as produced and lived through visual and performance cultures our bodies carry as diasporic artist- scholars writing from the Global South—not as a geopolitical entity but as a relation. We follow the realm of gaze and signalling, governed by codes and politics of “proper” and “respectable” conduct, passed down to us for sensing the unsaid in these circulations of jugupsa-shringaram-love, producing the “mad body,” which we connect as essential to necropolitical urban architectures of medicine, language, and psychiatry, related to genocide, slavery, and annihilation. We craft schizophrenia as methodology, as a practice of shared-listening-to-voices-between-our-bodies (also as children of parents diagnosed with schizophrenia and bi-polar), to work against such common sense en/disablings. This allows us to move the gaze and senses of the unsaid from paranoia to speculation, and from teleologies of linear progress to time as heard. We do so to expose the White/male/sane gaze and revoice jugupsa/shringara/love as a process of uncommoning senses of the unsaid, reframing questions of resources, proximity, untouchability, science, inaccessibility, and digestion, among others, for other modalities of being in relation. This work aligns with feminist technoscience by critically engaging with the intersection of embodied knowledge, mental health, and the oppressive systems of psychiatry, while challenging the hegemonic, linear narratives of science and progress. By reimagining schizophrenia as methodology, it integrates relational, speculative, and non-linear approaches to knowledge production that disrupt dominant epistemologies and embrace marginalized, embodied experiences.
Keywords: jugupsa, schizophrenia, erotics, feminist technoscience, embodied knowledges

Rupture, Estrangement, and Extensibility in the Works of Rebecca Horn; Leah Nieboer (University of Denver, USA)

Early in her career, German multimedia artist Rebecca Horn experienced the rupture of a life- threatening illness after handling toxic materials, an event that significantly shaped her work and her understanding of subjectivity. This rupture in her embodiment, followed by a protracted recovery, was, however catastrophic, also an opening for excessive and unprecedented sensory experience. She began to work with body prostheses, motorized sculpture, mechanical repetition, language, and installations to intensify the experience of the sensory limits of the body. Body prostheses such as Cockfeather Mask (1973) or Mechanical Body Fan (1973/74) both constrict and extend the performer, allowing for strange and intimate affinities across human and nonhuman subjects: “I turn my head looking with one eye like a bird.” Installations such as The Peacock Machine (1982) and Inferno (1993) depend on the absence of the body in mechanical networks to suggest new relationships of pain, longing, or estranged desire between bodies and technology. In this paper, I’ll attend to the ways contamination, rupture, and constriction can become generative modes of critical and artistic inquiry. I’ll consider the ways Horn’s work invites us to new senses, embodiments, and modes of relationship at the intersection of the human, mechanical, and environmental, even as it insists we reckon with the essential plurality of the self. Keywords: performance, poetics, embodiment, sound, environment

Bodies Of Language Are Bodies In Movement: The Gaga Dance Phenomenon; Lera Kolomietc (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)

“Bodies of language are bodies in movement” explores the many shapes of a term, language. It’s format, texture, cultural constraints, and bodily possibilities. I use poetry to analyse the practice of Gaga, a movement-language practice developed by Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. Practitioners are encouraged to move through the intricate connections between movement, sensation, and emotional expression being navigated by the teacher’s words. Words that produce bodies and bodies reproducing words. It is this interaction between modes of being/moving and speaking/moving that I aim to explore. Can poetry be the new normal for sensory ethnography?

Feeling Through Screens: Developing “Sensory Awareness” for Sensing at a Distance during Medical Videoconsultations; Sylvie Grosjean (University of Ottawa, Canada)

Lupton & Maslen (2017) have highlighted the importance of examining the sensory aspects of clinical consultations using telemedicine devices. They have studied the entanglement of technology, bodies, affect, and sensory cues in clinical practice, emphasizing the role of these elements in supporting what they call “sensory work.” During video consultations, physicians cannot use senses such as touch and smell and must learn new ways to perform the “sensory work” they need to examine patients: for example, by relying on what they can see and hear or by delegating some physical assessments to patients. The aim of this communication is to examine the way in which “sensory work” is performed during remote medical consultations. To this end, a multimodal interaction analysis of video recordings of clinical consultations will be conducted. This will be followed by allo-confrontation interviews with physicians to analyze how they adapt their clinical practices to perform remote physical examinations. This study’s findings illustrate how physicians cultivate a “sensory awareness.” This concept refers to their capacity to reflect on and adapt their practice in response to the range of possibilities and constraints that technology presents or imposes on sensory experiences during clinical interactions.
Keywords: sensory work, vidéoconsultation, sensory awareness, affordances, multumodal interaction analysis

A Digital Palate: Migration, Sensation, and Online Food Narratives; Nicholas Bascuñan-Wiley (Sociology, Stony Brook University, USA)

This study investigates how Chilean Palestinian chefs use Instagram to translate the proximate sensorial dimensions of their culinary practices into audiovisual formats for global audiences. Through vibrant photography, dynamic videos, and evocative textual narratives, these chefs attempt to digitally relay their dishes’ flavors, aromas, and textures. I explore how these online creators use visual cues such as vivid ingredient close-ups, rich textures of finished dishes, and rhythmic preparation sequences to simulate proximity and intimacy. Captions and storytelling further enrich the sensory experience, often blending culinary descriptions with personal and cultural narratives that anchor the cuisine in its Palestinian roots and Chilean influences. Central to this analysis is the chefs’ ability to render the embodied act of cooking and eating into digital sensory performances, creating an affective connection with viewers despite the physical distance and symbolic separation. Drawing on 60 interviews, content analysis, and 18 months of sensory ethnography within the Palestinian foodscape in Chile, this study argues that these practices not only serve as effective advertising but also function as a form of cultural storytelling, creating a digital sensory experience that transcends physical boundaries. This research contributes to broader discussions on digital gastronomy, sensory ethnography, and the role of online platforms in diasporic foodways.
Keywords: Food, Diaspora, Migration, Digital, Sensation

Sensitive Environmental Attunement Through Direct Engagement with Sensory Transitions Between Layered Screens; Rikke Munck Petersen and Hongxia Pu (Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

This paper explores sensory transitions linked to cinematic and analog afterimages in ‘Echoes’, a collaborative research exhibition intersecting the themes geography of the senses; architecture and the senses; multisensory design. The interplay between three digital screens and three double-layered silk prints creates a sensory environment encouraging viewers to engage with and re-read landscapes—transformation of riverine environments in Denmark and China —their complex cultural, geographical, and ecological water- and soil narratives—and the emergence of sensorial affects in the action of motion. In the cinematic montages, slowing down and fading from one footage into the next allows a trace from the first to blend with the next, creating afterimages that allows new imaginations of the landscapes to emerge. The silk prints, derived from film stills and afterimages, act as tactile and visual filters, freezing and merging specific time periods, regions, and water-soil materialities. Visitors have described these afterimages as moments where they could see the past, present, and future in unison, thus connecting viewers directly with time, material, and sensory transitions. This paper qualifies how the digital/analog multimedia format decelerates the sensory experience of landscapes, emphasizing normally hidden sensory and tactile transitions. Moreover, the combination of sensory filmic immersion with the tactile presence of the silk prints allows one’s body to coexist within the environment (landscapes and exhibition), ultimately extending touch beyond time, sight, and sound, fostering sensitive attunement to environmental transformations.
Keywords: Environmental Attunement, Experimental Filmmaking, Sensory Transitions, Cinematic Afterimages, Multimedia Analog.

From Pollution to Perception: VOCs, Smell Dysfunction, and Cognitive Health; Paule Joseph (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, USA)

Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) are pervasive environmental pollutants linked to adverse respiratory, neurological, and systemic health effects. While urinary metabolites of VOCs are established biomarkers for exposure, their role in chemosensory health remains underexplored. Olfactory dysfunction, increasingly recognized as an early indicator of cognitive impairment, is also prevalent in aging populations. Yet, the mechanisms connecting VOC exposure to olfactory and cognitive health are poorly understood. This study analyzed data from the NHANES 2013-2014 cohort, including laboratory measures of urinary VOC metabolites, olfactory function assessments, and cognitive performance questionnaires. Our findings reveal that two specific VOC metabolites— N-Acetyl-S-(3,4-dihydroxybutyl)-L-cysteine and 2-Aminothiazole-4-carboxylic acid—significantly increased the odds of olfactory dysfunction in participants without cognitive impairment (odds ratios 7.29 and 3.11, respectively). These results suggest distinct biochemical pathways through which VOC exposure may impair olfactory function, independent of cognitive status. Understanding the pathways these metabolites activate may shed light on mechanisms underlying olfactory dysfunction and its potential progression to neurodegenerative diseases. These insights pave the way for targeted interventions to mitigate VOC-related health impacts and enhance early detection of at-risk individuals.
Keywords: Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) Olfactory Dysfunction Cognitive Impairment Biomarkers Neurotoxicity

Affective Olfactory Memories and the Rehabilitation of Long-Lasting Olfactory Disorders: Re-thinking Clinical Approaches; Vanessa Castello Branco Pereira (Institute of Psychology, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil)

Persistent Olfactory Disorders following COVID-19 pose a major challenge in Post-COVID Syndrome, significantly impacting emotional interactions, social engagement, and quality of life. Current treatments, such as Olfactory Training, aim to stimulate neuroplasticity and promote functional recovery. However, conventional protocols often overlook the affective dimension of olfactory perception and social olfactory learning. The standard approach selects four predefined odorants for all individuals, disregarding personal relevance, social learning, cultural heritage and hedonic associations. This study proposed a personalized Olfactory Training approach, integrating affective olfactory memories from individual biographical experiences to enhance top-down sensory processing, which is well-established in neuroscience as engaging central areas that encode meaning and emotional significance to interpret sensory stimuli. By shifting from a standardized to a memory-based and emotionally significant stimulus selection, we hypothesized that affectively enriched odors can reinforce neural modulation and improve patient adherence. Through a 12-week longitudinal exploratory study, participants with long-lasting olfactory disorders were divided into conventional and personalized groups. Our findings suggest that incorporating hedonic and autobiographical odor associations optimizes sensory recovery, enhances treatment engagement, and accelerates the onset of therapeutic effects. This research supports a more humanized, patient- centered approach, bridging neuroscience, sensory studies, and integrative health to redefine olfactory rehabilitation. Keywords: Olfactory Training, Affective Olfactory Memories, Sensory Neuroplasticity, Olfactory Disorders, Post-COVID Syndrome

A Taste of Belonging: In Search of Matzo Balls & Memories; Meghan Kerr (Communication Studies, Concordia University, Canada)

This paper investigates the profound relationship between food, culture, and identity within diasporic populations, particularly from the Jew-‘ish’ perspective. Drawing on my experience of recovery from open-heart surgery through a bowl of my great-great aunt’s chicken soup with matzo balls, this project raises the question: have you ever eaten something that reminds you of home? By exploring that soup’s connection to a past I am both part of, and apart from— the only link I have left to a family decimated by the holocaust is food— I aim to explore how culinary traditions serve as vessels for cultural connection, especially in communities with fragmented ties to their heritage. I will seek to capture the sensory experiences associated with traditional cooking and eating, focusing on taste, atmosphere, and sense memory. I seek to reveal how food serves as a medium for memory, belonging, and cultural transmission, particularly in a context where Jewish identity feels increasingly complex due to current geopolitical issues. It will invite audiences to reflect on their own culinary connections and the role of food in shaping cultural narratives. Ultimately, it aims to highlight the significance of shared meals in fostering community and preserving heritage in a rapidly changing world.
Keywords: culinary heritage, memory, taste, food, cultural history

A Taste for the Scent of Sugar: Perfumery and Confectionery in 19th-Century France; Erika Wicky (Departments of History and Art History, Université de Grenoble, France)

While the role of synthetic materials such as coumarin, heliotropin, and vanillin in the development of the perfume industry at the end of the 19th century is often acknowledged, it is frequently overlooked that these substances were initially used to flavor candies and liquors—two highly sweetened products made accessible through colonial trade networks. This study aims to examine the historical relationship between perfumery and confectionery, highlighting how the interplay between these artisanal and industrial practices informed olfactory sensibilities in 19th- century France and shaped its relationship with taste.
Both perfumery and confectionery share common goals: preserving the freshness of seasonal ingredients, offering potential medicinal benefits, and providing sensory pleasure. To investigate this relationship, I will first examine the explicit analogies made in professional treatises and identify shared techniques between perfumers and confectioners. The primary focus, however, will be on the ambiguities found in recipes, the evolution of materials associated with sugar in perfume compositions, and advertisements for perfumes published in the feminine press, which often emphasized the sweet qualities of raw ingredients. This analysis will illustrate how certain associations between specific scents and the taste of sweetness emerged during this period. Keywords: perfumery, confectionery, sweet, sugar, vanillin

Yea, Verily!: Towards a New Precognitive-Cognitive Framework in Medieval-Themed Dinner Theater; Kimberly Webb (School of International Letters and Cultures, Arizona State University, USA)

This paper argues for a trifurcated theoretical framework of emotional analysis that marries constructivist, cognitive perspectivist, and precognitive theories of film viewing—or, perhaps more accurately, experiencing. The phenomenon of experiencing, through media or through simply living, I argue, is a synthesis of meaning-making and emotional elicitation. The process of meaning-making and emotional elicitation—which go hand in hand and are inextricably linked to each other—is concurrently subjective and objective. When encountering sensory stimuli, there is an immediate, objective, ubiquitous emotional response followed by a subjective cognitive response determined by the identity and experiences of the recipient. While these tenets have been argued as separate and, in some cases, mutually exclusive, their synthesis is necessary to create a nuanced and holistic understanding of the emotional responses to sensory stimuli—emotions are not felt in a vacuum. However, there is a degree of standardization of emotional elicitation in the experience of a particular atmosphere or ambiance. This study aims to create this synthesized framework and to make it flexible enough to apply to studies beyond film spectatorship– but to the medievalist dining experience of Medieval Times.
Keywords: atmospheric studies, constructivism, sensory medievalism, Medieval Times, dinner theater

Gardens (būstān) as Fragrant Abodes: An Olfactory Approach to Persianate Studies; Giorgia M. Maffioli Brigatti ∆ (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (FAMES), University of Cambridge, UK)

The Persian word būstān is loosely translated in English as “garden” and, for this reason, is often used interchangeably with golestān, which is also translated as “garden”. However, there is an essential difference. The first refers to the garden as a place of fragrance (bū), while the latter identifies it as the abode of flowers (gol). The two terms underline a different conception of gardens that are detectable only in the original language. Similarly, little attention has been given to the sensory understanding of the poetry and art of Iran in the Early Modern Period, and this paper aims to address this gap through an interdisciplinary approach.
My presentation will be divided into three parts: garden treatises aimed at increasing the fragrance of trees, flowers, and fruit; descriptions of gardens in literary texts; and visual representations of gardens. When approached through the olfactory understanding and philosophies of the time, this body of knowledge and art gives the scholar more insight into the rich cultural practices of Medieval and Early Modern Iran.
My paper reflects on the conference theme of the history of the sense, and it is situated in the broader context of ensuing sensory approaches to Middle Eastern Studies.
Keywords: smell studies, gardens, Iran, history of art, poetry

Fluvial Infrastructures, Embodied Evidence, and The Limits of Sensory Governance; Abi Smith (Geography, University of Cambridge, UK)

The majority of England’s rivers are widely evidenced as toxic and harmful to health. The most recent ‘State of our Rivers’ report by The Rivers Trust (2024) found that no river or stretch of water in England can be categorised as in ‘good’ status. Whilst reports of slushy-coloured water and green algal blooms pervade descriptions of these spaces, concern equally remains over what cannot be seen or sensed. Weaving together theoretical strands of sensori-legal studies and urban geography this paper aims to contribute to literature which has sought to disentangle the often- paradoxical relations between law and the senses (Hamilton et al, 2016). Drawing upon the analysis of community campaigns, citizen science projects, legal cases, alongside semi-structured, mobile and audio interviews with various stakeholders, this paper explores the interconnectedness of embodied evidence and the legal regulation of urban waterways across London. Exploring the challenges local communities and activists face with (i) experiencing, (ii) recording and (iii) translating multi-sensory knowledge of polluted rivers into forms of evidence deemed legible by the justice system, it begins to call attention to what remains absent from these cases. Ultimately, it hopes to continue to shed light on what attending to the multi-sensory reveals about the search for justice, clean water, and healthy waterways. In doing so, this paper offers a small insight into how sensuous assumptions enable certain forms of fluvial governance, and are embedded within the legal process, more broadly. Put simply, this research aims to centre the question of how law senses.
Keywords: Odour, rivers, urban, evidence, campaigns

How Is Immersive: Environmental Accountability for Public Performance in Canada; Natalie Doonan (Communication, Université de Montréal, Canada)

This paper asks how to ethically meet the increasing demand on artists within Canadian artistic and scholarly institutions to produce outcomes with national and international impact. It employs sensory immersion as a guiding theme for addressing the issue of ethical accountability toward the plants, animals, insects, and elements of our shared world through public art. Immersion in this sense implies both the idea of plunging into a world, and a more-than-only-human understanding of its social contours. The socio-ecological role of publicly-funded art is imposing itself with increasing urgency in the context of planetary crisis. This is an opportunity for artists to create and promote work that positions issues of biodiversity at the center of studies in Canadian art and visual culture. Focusing on VerdunReality: Riparian Play, a multimedia performance presented in Montreal in the summer of 2023, I show the importance of site-specific, participatory performance as one possible example of how to model practices of care for the environment and for others within current research-creation paradigms.
Keywords: Immersion, Participatory performance, Multimedia performance, Virtual Reality, Place- based art

FABRIQUER UN CORPS. Pour une nouvelle cosmologie chimérique et un atomisme des relations dans le paysage fluide du Bassin Parisien; Alessandro Livraghi (LéaV- ENSA Versailles + CY Cergy Paris Université EUR PSGS-HCH, France)

Better Smelling Through Chemistry; Ana Maria Ulloa (Anthropology, Universidad de los Andes)

In the talk I will focus on how olfactory training for chemistry students interested in studying the aroma of tropical fruits has occurred at different periods and across the classroom, the laboratory, and the industry in Colombia. I will highlight chemists’ perceptions about the importance of this type of training for their research and work and how sensory training opportunities are made available locally. Discussing the role of the senses and sensory knowledge in chemistry will lead me to highlight some of the effects of learning how to smell for science and technology education. Keywords: Olfaction, Aroma, Chemistry, Sensory Skills, Science education

Making Brazilian Cocoa’s Excellence: Taste as Embodied Expertise along the Cocoa Coast in Southern Bahia, Brazil; Nathan Pécout-Le Bras (School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, University of Ottawa, Canada)

How does one assess cocoa’s taste and its permanence once transformed into chocolate? In the wake of colonization and monoculture (Mintz, 1986; Glissant, 1990; Rosa, 2001; Sharpe, 2016), the renewed Brazilian cocoa sector gathers public and private entities to promote sustainability and become the world’s best producer. Based on sensorial training in a specialized laboratory in Southern Bahia, this presentation explores the taste expertise accompanying this development. The laboratory is ran by experts – mostly trained in biochemistry – whose practice consists in embodying knowledge (Csordas, 1990; Mol, 2008; Samudra, 2020) of cocoa’s fineness by refining their tasting abilities.
“[T]hat most fleeting and difficult to universalize sense” (Spang, 2001, 75), taste is in constant negotiation. Through sensorial engagement, experts acquire the authority to evaluate different cocoas. The qualities of each harvest are informed by various parameters: tree variety, soil composition, microbial flora, companion species, climate variations, harvesting method, fermentation, drying, etc. These parameters can be translated into biochemical formulas, but more importantly into a set of taste and aromatic qualities: acidity, bitterness, astringency, and various notes of fruits, flowers, nuts, and spices. Assessing these qualities in each cocoa lot, experts determine its fineness and influence retail prices on domestic and global markets.
Keywords: Brazil, taste, embodiment, cocoa, sensorial anthropology

Why jump in the Saint Lawrence? The Identity Making Possibilities of Watery Immersion; Sarah Yems (Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada)

Based on field work in Saint Lawrence River as it flows through Montreal, the paper explores how activities such as cold water swimming and river surfing rearticulate the senses to such an extent that a new riverine body, even a riverine persona, is created. That is, a new persona which perceives and responds to the environment differently is born through habitual exposure.
This exploratory paper will draw from Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics (2006), as well as the Anthropology of the Senses, to examine the identity-making possibilities of three immersive water activities – sea swimming, the related sub-discipline winter swimming, and surfing. Based on this analytical exploration it will then attend to the liberatory claims about such nature based practices and their limitations. Through deep attention to the embodied action of immersion, this work seeks to follow the ethnographic practices of Waquant (2004), Throsby (2013) and Crawley (2022), who show how taking an anthropological approach to sporting activities can unseat mainstream narratives about the athletic body in motion and avoid merely merely textualising the body. In the context of dominant narratives of water based sports that focus on the male experience, and ‘bro culture’, this work seeks to foreground the female experience. Keywords: identity, immersion, senses, somaesthetics, water

Listening as Resistance: Decolonizing Sonic Poetry and the Politics of Sound; Kristine Dizon (Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Concordia University, Canada)

This presentation explores how decolonizing listening methodologies can serve as tools of resistance in sonic poetry. By examining the role of sound in reclaiming marginalized voices, this study argues that sonic poetry subverts traditional frameworks that often other non-Western practices. Using case studies such as Rose Cochlan’s Victor Recordings, Edith Sitwell’s Façade, and Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time, the research investigates how these works challenge mainstream narratives by embedding cultural and political resistance into sound. This paper will introduce critical listening positionalities as a framework to engage audiences with the layers of race, identity, and cultural reclamation in poetic-musical works, aiming to foster a more inclusive auditory experience. Keywords: decolonizing, listening, resistance, sonic poetry, identity

The Senses in Resistance: Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain; Melanie Schnidrig (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)

Multidisciplinary Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s 2005 piece Fountain, combines the senses in a striking multisensorial film installation. In the installation, a single-channel video is projected onto a wall of water that cascades within the gallery. This paper explores how the added sensory dimensions offered by the inclusion of water appeal to the gallery visitor and their bodily senses.
Film theorist Laura U. Marks identifies how artists can include representations of the senses in postcolonial film to appeal to the senses as an act of resistance and facilitate a dialogue between the artwork and the audience (Marks, 2000). This paper draws from this argument to analyze how Belmore’s appeal to the tangible and corporeal senses of touch, smell, and hearing in Fountain acts to enhance the impact of the video installation to directly implicate the audience in the artwork’s critical message. Through this exploration, this paper considers the following questions: What advantages does stimulating the bodily senses hold for postcolonial artists? How can the senses communicate alternative ways of knowing? And finally, how can an artist appeal to the senses to enhance a visual medium like film?
Keywords: Multisensorial, Sensory Studies, Sensory Art, Indigenous Artists, Postcolonialism

Sensing Disability; Laurel Lawson and Alice Sheppard (Kinetic Light)

Disability does not alter or require accommodation of the senses. Rather, the senses of disability are their own complete expressions and powerful creative forces. Recognizing disability in this way changes how we approach access, sensory design, and performance.
Understanding performance as both stage and lens for encountering and examining relationship, Kinetic Light, a disability arts company, seeks equity of experience for its disabled audience members by centering their desires and experiences in the company’s creative practice. Conventional interpretation of dance prioritizes sight, with the result that disabled audiences using other senses have been offered either no access to performance or low-quality, aesthetically inequitable access.
Kinetic Light designs performance in movement, sound, light, image, language, music, and vibration to create multi-sensory performances that can be experienced visually, audibly, and through touch. The content of each form is not identical: each form artistically expresses the work. Audience members are invited to experience the work according to their primary mode of artistic encounter. Research and novel technologies enable this execution.
Kinetic Light’s work addresses societal injustices encountered in performance culture. The company advances the research and practice of sensory studies by insistence on the value of disabled senses, expertise, and interpretive practice.
Keywords: disability, access, equity, art, technology

Kitchens on fire: Sensory figurations between the routine and the ritual; Martha Radice and Francisco Cruces (Sociology & Social Anthropology, Dalhousie University, Canada; Social and Cultural Anthropology, UNED)

Kitchens are sites of creative imagination and powerful materiality. Cooking is never just about food: it entails a complex cycle of planning, shopping, storage, preparation, eating and cleaning. Moreover, kitchens are not only for cooking, but for doing tasks like studying or mending, and intimately relating to others in kinship, companionship, conflict, or isolation. Moments of tedious routine alternate with intensive celebration, between the loneliness and boredom of the cook, and the merry social gathering around a table. Our paper explores this twofold condition of kitchen experiences by comparing two different ethnographic research contexts. On the one hand, we analyze the meanings of fire as a root metaphor in the practices and routines of everyday Spanish and French kitchens. On the other, we excavate the messiness of kitchens during carnival season in New Orleans, when the centrality of cooking is displaced by a palette of other creative and collective endeavors. The comparison points to the sensory reasons why kitchens are still such central places in our homes. As powerful places where the sensed, material world coalesces with the normative, noetic, and existential dimensions of social life, they are simultaneously “good to think with” and “good to feel.” Keywords: ethnography; everyday; ritual; domestic space; sociality

What Happens in My Kitchen? A Collective Exploration Of Contemporary Reconfigurations of Intimacy From Montevideo Kitchens; Karina Boggio, María Cantabrana and Francisco Cruces (Institute of Health Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Udelar; Centre of Social Experimentation and Innovation (CEIS), Faculty of Psychology, Udelar; Social and Cultural Anthropology, UNED, Spain)

The paper is part of the research project “In Kitchens. A multisited and cross-disciplinary exploration on intimacy-making” (PI Francisco Cruces). It involves a collaborative, experimental, interdisciplinary, sensorial, and visual ethnography across six cities in America and Europe, focusing on how intimacy is produced in kitchen spaces. The project aims to document and analyze the contemporary reconfigurations of intimacy. This paper is based on fieldwork carried out in Montevideo. It focuses on the Collective exploration workshop “What happens in my kitchen?” held this year. The call invited to explore different moments in the kitchen: “First thing in the morning, the kitchen announces how the day will unfold. It may be clean from the previous dinner; it may receive the first rays of sunshine: it is ready to welcome our little rituals, like preparing mate or sitting quietly as the body fully awakens […]”. The workshop took place over two sessions at Casa de las Ciudadanas, an NGO, and involved five middle-aged women from working-class neighborhoods. This paper presents significant emerging narratives from the workshop, analyzing their sensory experiences and their environments, the processes of constructing themselves and making sense of their world.
Keywords: intimacy, senses, in kitchens, Montevideo

Sheryl Boyle ∆ (Architecture, Carleton University, Canada)

The Bodily Need for a Territory. Visibility and Amplification of Body Consciousness from the Andean Worldview; Zoila Schrojel (DICTA. Foundation for the Interdisciplinary Development of Science, Technology and the Arts, Chile)

Lately, social outbursts materialized in Southern Abya Yala, making visible the Decoloniality, Epistemicide and Epistemic Violence that affect the territory. This symbolic opening of the decolonial, executed by corporealities that narrate and act, opens the way to propose new conceptions about the corporal composition of the Self based on the cosmovisions of the ancestral communities, in this case of the Central Andes.
Therefore, it is worth asking from the perspective of Corporeal Studies and the Philosophy of Theatrical Praxis: Can an Andean corporeality be identified? The answer at first sight seems to be affirmative, however, it assumes that ‘corporeality’ is a concept of the established Corporeal Phenomenology, and that ‘Andean’ is limited to a geographical category.
This presentation proposes that: the notion of ‘corporeality’ requires an exercise of epistemic decolonization, since the Andean cosmovision identifies ‘invisibilized’ corporal categories that would contribute to the analysis and understanding of their festive-ritual expressions. And on the other hand, to deepen and provide a current and territorial view of Constance Classen’s doctoral thesis (1990) by means of social manifestations, where a process of cognitive justice and corporal concepts of the Runa Simi language can be appreciated. Keywords: Corporeity, Decolonization, Andean Cosmovision, Cognitive Justice, Epistemicide

“Zungun or Listening to the Mapu”. Indigenous Audibilities in Chile’s 2021 1st Constitutional Convention; Natalia Bieletto Bueno (Centro de Investigación en Artes y Humanidades, Universidad Mayor, Chile)

After the 2019 social uprise, Chile embarked in a Constitutional process to replace the 1980s Constitution written under Pinochet’s regime. The 2021 Constitutional Convention was constituted in the ballots, with nineteen seats reserved for representatives of the original nations. One of the first quarrels among the conservative right constituents and those representing indigenous groups, concerned the place that indigenous cosmogonies were to play in the new social contract. During this Convention, the indigenous representatives performed rituals, spoke their languages and sang traditional songs hoping for Chile to be declared a plurinational country. That in mind, the proposal considered “Nature as the holder of the rights recognized in this Constitution that are applicable to it” (Ch. II, 18th Article). Such proposition was based on ancestral listening practices and notions of sound (zungun), that confer birds, the wind, mountains or the rivers the same status as humans, and thus considers them legal subjects whose rights should be guaranteed. Dialoguing with the field of sensory legal studies, this paper presents how the mapuche people’s understanding of “listening to the mapu” (earth) has called for a consideration of native acoustemologies and indigenous audibilities (Feld 2015, Robinson 2021, Minks 2023) in the making of the juridical order. Keywords: Sensory Legal Studies, Listening, Indigenous Audibilities, Acoustemological Conflict, Interculturality and the senses

The Tactility of Textile-Making among Nahua Women of San José Cuacuila, Puebla, Mexico; Maria Fernanda Suarez Olvera (INDI, Concordia University, Canada)

As a Mestiza artist, this performance is a way of honouring my relationship with the Nahua women of San José Cuacuila, a community located in the Northern Mountain range of Puebla, Mexico. Through an autoethnographic creative writing approach, combining prose and images, the piece describes the process of decolonizing my senses that has occurred since 2021. By rewriting my fieldwork notes, I reflect on the formation of my touch sensibility in relation to the care of other women in my life. Drawing from my memories of touch, I acknowledge it as the primary sense to create an intimate relationship with the Sihuame Tlatsahuane, weavers of the community. In our relationship, the materiality of wool is a central element that brings us together; through it, we learn about its multiple transformations and our differences as women. In the contingent relation between touch, textile making, and sounds, I delve deeper into the loss of Nahuatl words and the possibilities of listening and naming. Through this, I explore the potentialities of touch and sound as mediums for sharing and passing down knowledge. The process of unlearning my colonized education accordingly acknowledges the live forces that circulate in the folds of the mountains.
Keywords: Indigenous and Mestizas Women, decolonization, touch and sounds

Organizer: Lida Zeitlin-Wu (Communication & Theatre Arts/ Institute for the Humanities, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, USA)

The five-part division of the senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—might seem self
evident. Yet this framework, along with the prioritization of sight (sometimes termed “ocularcentrism”), reflects imperialist hierarchies of perception rooted in Enlightenment thinking. In media studies and TS, emerging technologies frequently reinforce dominant sensory hierarchies, erasing the existence of sensory systems and experiences which vary across geopolitical contexts.
This roundtable highlights the importance of sensory plurality from the late 19th century to our digital pre sent. It brings together junior scholars in media studies, comparative literature, and East Asian studies e xploring intersections between sound, color, scent, and taste. Lida exploresthe theambivalence of color as a “sense” and its enmeshment with white supremacist ideals, while Chelsea historicizes the shifting relationship between vision and olfaction in interwar Japan. Next, Kaitlin and Júlia look at the attempted digitization and transmission of scent in 4DX cinema and problematization of smell capture through perfume, respectively, while Harry focuses on how digital sound formats make computation sensible. Can foregrounding “minor” senses act as a political intervention? Ultimately, how might disrupting traditional sensory hierarchies reshape interdisciplinary media scholarship and our engagement with
the technologies we use every day?

Speakers:
1. Lida Zeitlin-Wu, Assistant Professor, Old Dominion University

2. Chelsea Ward, Postdoctoral Fellow, Wellesley College ∆

3. Kaitlin Clifton Forcier, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago

4. Júlia Irion Martins, PhD Candidate, University of Michigan

5. Harry Burson, Lecturer, University of Illinois at Chicago

‘Picture Yourself in a Boat on a River’: A Collaborative Exploration of the Mental Image through Blindness and Aphantasia; Kevin Hunt and David Johnson (School of Art & Design, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham; School of Arts & Humanities, Royal College of Art, London, UK)

3-2-1 Contact!: Haptic Holograms and the Programming of Touch; Jason Archer & Thomas Conner (Michigan Technological University; University of Tulsa, USA)

Two technologies are converging — midair haptics and digital holograms — in service of a project not only to materialize touch but to program it. In this presentation, we examine the emergence of haptic holograms to interrogate the sociotechnical construction of liminal sensory experiences that defy easy categorization as either tactile or visual. These new systems of calculating and projecting sensory experience intersect with and challenge social constructions of the biological senses and sense-making. Bringing together theories of touch and haptics with the media philosophy of Vilém Flusser — namely, his concept of the “technical image” and his own thinking on embodiment and gesture — we posit the notion of the “technical material.” The projection of 3D objects into space not just visually but haptically mixes up ideas, representations, experiences, and ontologies about images and objects, offering a new way of thinking about the social construction of senses. Just as viewing a digital image means viewing a computed abstraction, so does touching what these systems calculate and produce as a surface. The resulting new experiences are of something other than a hologram or even an image — they are unique liminal spaces for the production and experience of new sensory experiences and ways of knowing. Keywords: holograms, haptics, computation, technical material, sociotechnical

Organizer: Florian Grond (Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University, Canada)

The climate crisis compels us to rethink how we perceive, understand, and respond to environmental change. This panel explores the interplay between sensory experience, affect, and scientific knowledge as a foundation for meaningful climate action. Beyond intellectual comprehension, the crisis calls for an attunement of our sensory capacities to detect shifts that foretell critical ecological trends. Yet such attunement is not innate – it is through scientific and cultural knowledge that we learn to refine our senses as a precondition for acting sensibly. This link between knowing and sensibility is essential for acting in a world of rapid and complex environmental changes. The speed and criticality of these changes are present to those with unique disciplinary insights but are, in many ways, still imperceptible to the general public. To extend the reach of human perception, to sense what lies ahead, and to complement scientific and cultural knowledge, understanding environmental changes also depends on monitoring with novel sensor technologies. Not only do we need to reach beyond the limit of our senses but also beyond anthropocentric perspectives to hone our ability to empathize with the whole life world and reimagine our place within an ecosystem upon which our life ultimately depends. This panel strives to contribute to addressing the unfolding climate emergency by integrating sensory perspectives, emotional engagement, scientific knowledge, and sensor technologies. It invites participants to consider how these are all critical components for the ecological attunement of our extended sensorium.

Speakers:
• Amy Romer (journalist and immersive storyteller, Vancouver, Canada)
• Nicola S. Smith (DECO Lab, Concordia University, Canada)
• John Neufeld (SOAN, Concordia University, Canada)
• Gregor Kos (Chemistry and Biochemistry, Concordia University, Canada)