Michael Bull is Emeritus Professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex. He has published widely in the field of Sound Studies. His single authored books include Sounding Out the City, Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Berg 2000), Sound Moves, iPod Culture and Urban Experience (Routledge 2007). He has also published a four volume edited work on Sound Studies for Routledge (2013). Most recently he has co-edited the second edition of The Auditory Culture Reader with Professor Les Back (Bloomsbury 2016). He is the editor and joint founder of the Journal Senses and Society and the co-founder and editor (with Prof Veit Erlmann) of the Sound Studies Journal (Routledge).He is currently writing a book on sirens which will be one of the first publications in his new book series The Study of Sound (Bloomsbury).

Caroline A Jones studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception. Trained in visual studies and art history at Harvard, she did graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York before completing her PhD at Stanford University in 1992.

Previous to completing her art history degree, she worked in museum administration and exhibition curation, holding positions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1977-83) and the Harvard University Art Museums (1983-85) while she completed two documentary films. In addition to these institutions, her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC, the Hara Museum Tokyo, the Boston University Art Gallery, and MIT's List Visual Art Center, among other venues.

She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (among others), and has been honored by fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies (2013-14), the Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College (2009-10), Institute national d'histoire de l'art in Paris (2006-07), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Max Planck Institüt (2001-02), the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton (1994-95), and the Stanford Humanities Center (1986-87).

Her books include Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (2005), Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (1996/98, winner of the Charles Eldredge Prize from the Smithsonian Institution); Bay Area Figurative Art, 1950-1965 (1990, awarded the silver medal from San Francisco's Commonwealth Club); and Modern Art at Harvard (1985). She edited Sensorium: Embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art (2006) and co-edited Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998) and Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense (2016). She has published on subjects ranging from Francis Picabia to John Cage to new media art to biennial culture, in journals such as Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Res, Science in Context, caareviews online, Texte zur Kunst, and Cahiers du Musée national d'art moderne. Jones's ongoing research interests include globalism, the agency of the artist, and new media art, the focus of her latest book The Global Work of Art (2016).

Richard G. Newhauser is Professor of English and Medieval Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe. His research is focused on the moral tradition in Western thought, the history of the senses, and Middle English literature. He is the co-editor of Pleasure and Danger in Perception, special issue of The Senses & Society 5.1 (2010), and editor of A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages (Bloomsbury, 2014). He has contributed articles on the sensory study of Middle English literature and medieval theology to numerous collections of essays and journals, including The Review of English Studies (2013), Handbook of Medieval Culture (2015), and The Five Senses in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: Literature and Language (2016).

Nayrouz Abu Hatoum is an assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Concordia University. She was the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University for 2018/2019 and the recipient of the 2018 Leonhard-Woltjer postdoctoral award in the History and Art History Department at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from York University, Toronto, where she also worked on theories in visual anthropology, urban politics, landscape, borders, bureaucracy, and state violence. Her ethnographic manuscript The Art of Unsettling Visual Politics (work in progress) explores visual politics in Palestine and interrogates how Palestinian artists in West Bank are using art as a liberatory tool in crafting an insurgent political imaginary that challenges hegemonic projects of statehood. She also explores the politics of place-making at the frontier of Israeli military borders, in specific, the case of Palestinian spaces behind the Wall in Jerusalem. Her current writing project looks at Palestinian resistance films to examine the role Palestinian epistemologies play in contesting military violence.

Sowparnika Balaswaminathan is an Assistant Professor in Religions and Cultures at Concordia University, Montreal. She received a PhD in anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, and was a Peter Buck postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC.

Her work examines the politics of heritage, the ethics and aesthetics of artisanal labor, and religious art traditions in India. Her ethnographic project, currently being written as a manuscript, examines the formulation of artisanal personhood in contemporary India at the nexus of politicized and neoliberalized Hindu art, and evolving politics of caste, specifically amongst the Tamil Vishwakarma community in Swamimalai, Tamilnadu. Her postdoctoral project examines the affective labor of museum collecting during the Cold war era, and the limits of ethnonational representation in museum exhibits through the Asian ethnographic collections at the Smithsonian NMNH.

jessie beier is a teacher, artist, researcher, and conjurer of weird pedagogies for unthought futures. She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Education at Concordia University, where she works with folks to make concepts, experiment with collectivities, and craft pedagogies through all kinds of material encounters. She has published writing in the areas of (art) education, media and sound studies, feminist STS, critical animal studies, speculative philosophy, and (post)Anthropocene thought, with recent and forthcoming work on mixtaping, underground atmospheres, fungal horror, black box pedagogy, and methodological frustration. She is the author of Pedagogy at the End of the World: Weird Pedagogies for Unthought Educational Futures (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023), co-author and designer of the Energy Emergency Repair Kit (Fordham University Press, 2024), and co-editor of Ahuman Pedagogy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022) and Sound Research in Troubling Times: Hope in Crisis (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024). As an artist, beier has exhibited work in galleries, universities, and community spaces where she often works collectively to create multi-sensory environments and speculative scenarios that invite pedagogical fabulation. 

Dr. Carolina Cambre, Associate Professor, Concordia University, Montreal CA. Her work explores vernacular visual expression asking: How do people produce and direct the visual space. How is the image a doing? What are the social and cultural work/ings of images? She has ongoing projects on visual processes of legitimation, representation of online sharing, the visual politics of identity, and polymedia literacies. She is the author of: The Semiotics of Che Guevara: Affective gateways (2015) and co-author of The Filtered Face: Toward a Sociology of Selfies (Routledge, forthcoming) with Christine Lavrence. Cambre is also co-editor of the forthcoming collections, Representation/Presentation/Embodiment (Bloomsbury, UK in press) and Visual Pedagogies: Concepts, Cases & Practices (Brill | Sense Publishers, NL under review) Cambre’s artistic work in the mediums of encaustic, photography and multi-media collage has been featured as cover art for a number of magazines and books as well as juried competitions.

May Chew is an Assistant Professor at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and Department of Art History at Concordia University. She received her PhD in Cultural Studies from Queen’s University, and held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at York University’s Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts & Technology. Her current research focuses on interactive and immersive technologies in diverse museum and exhibit spaces across Canada, and how these facilitate the material practice of nation and cultural citizenship. This project approaches immersion not just in terms of its aesthetic and affective elements but through a critical genealogy that embeds immersion within longstanding trajectories of liberalism, settler colonial imaginaries, and decolonial interventions. Her other interests include haunting, diasporic media, and archives. Her work includes a chapter in the anthology Material Cultures in Canada (WLU Press, 2015); articles in Imaginations, the International Journal of Heritage Studies, the Journal of Canadian Art History; and Public 57: Archives/Counter-Archives, which she co-edited with Susan Lord and Janine Marchessault. She also collaborates on Archive/Counter-Archive, Ethnocultural Art Histories Research in Media, and Worlding Public Cultures.

Martin French is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Queen’s University (2009). Prior to joining Concordia, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto (in Health Policy, Management & Evaluation) and New York University (in Media, Culture & Communication). Martin’s research examines the social dimensions of technology with an empirical focus on communications & information technology (CIT). It emphasizes the broader social and political contexts of CIT, concentrating especially on questions related to risk, surveillance, privacy, and social justice. His work has been published in, among other places, Social Science & Medicine, Sociology of Health & Illness, Surveillance & Society, Critical Public Health and Social & Legal Studies. Working through the prism of data, and focusing especially on the field of practices organized by the concept of ‘big data,’ Martin’s current research bridges sensory studies and surveillance studies in order to interrogate facets of the emerging ‘sensor society’. While the notion of the sensor society evokes a world saturated by sensing devices, where intelligent environments produce a massive amount of actionable data about the everyday lives of the actors and actants that transit through them, Martin’s current research documents the work of sensing assemblages at the level of practice. The goal is to produce an account not only of what is sensed, but also of what escapes sensation.

Bianca Grohmann is Associate Professor of Marketing, Concordia University Research Chair in Marketing (Tier 2), and principal investigator at the Laboratory for Sensory Research at the John Molson School of Business. Bianca’s research on the sensory aspects of marketing encompasses the influence of music, ambient and product scent, visual cues (e.g., colours, fonts), and touch on consumers’ responses to retail environments and products. As an experimental consumer researcher, Bianca conducts laboratory and field studies that focus on single sensory modalities (such as touch, vision, or olfaction) as well as joint effects of the senses on consumer perceptions and behaviors. Bianca’s work on sensory aspects of marketing has been published in the Journal of Business Research and the Journal of Retailing, and presented at conferences of the Society of Consumer Psychology (SCP), Administrative Sciences Association of Canada (ASAC), and European Marketing Association (EMAC). Bianca collaborates with David Howes and Constance Classen on a research program on multi-sensory marketing that was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Florian Grond, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor for Design, Interaction Design, and Computation Arts in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. His research interests are participatory design in the context of disability, the arts, immersive media, and assistive technology. He has published in the fields of sound studies, auditory display, assistive technology design, immersive sound recording, sonic ethnographies and art and disability. He has been an independent media artist for many years, exhibiting his works at several venues (Europe, North America, and Japan). When connecting design and disability, he draws from his creative practice as an artist and technologist. Over the last years, he has started collaborations with colleagues with disabilities from academia and the arts, resulting in research output, artistic creations, and exhibition curating. He held a post-doctoral appointment at Concordia and was part of the Critical Disability Studies Working Group. He received a post-doctoral research creation scholarship B5 from FRQSC, which he held at CIRMMT, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology, McGill. Grond has supervised various engineering capstone projects and taught a course on sonic boundary objects, a method using immersive sound recording techniques for blind ethnographies, developed with blind literary scholar Dr. Piet Devos, a post-doctoral fellow at Concordia University at that time. Grond was a research associate in the Shared Reality Lab at McGill after spending two years in the Sound Recording Department of the Schulich School of Music. He was the first to record with a 6-degrees-of-freedom sound recording system in several projects at McGill University and later in independent productions. Grond has several years of experience and published in 3D sound recording (microphone arrays) and immersive sound reproduction. He has been a creative sound engineer for ZYLIA, a company that produces microphone arrays for sound recording in AR and VR applications. In 2022, he and Melissa Park received an SSHRC Insight Development Grant for a research-creation project in which they will apply immersive sound recording and narrative phenomenology to study neurodiverse multisensory experiences. In 2023, he received an Insight Development Grant as PI to study atmospheres with David Howes, Matthew Unger, and Melissa Park through a research-creation approach using immersive audio technology, including a neurodiversity angle.

David Howes is a Canadian anthropologist and legal scholar. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Co-Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies, at Concordia University, Montreal. Since 2012, he has also held an appointment as an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University. Howes is best known as a pioneer of the anthropology of the senses and leading theorist of the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies. He has otherwise published

numerous articles on material culture, the museum and cross-cultural aesthetics as well as Canadian legal history and constitutional studies, legal pluralism and cross-cultural jurisprudence.

Life

David Howes was born in Montreal, the unceded traditional territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation. He trained in social anthropology at the University of Toronto (1976-1979) and Oxford University (1979-1981) before pursuing two degrees in law at McGill University (1981-1985) and then switched back to anthropology and obtained a PhD from the Université de Montréal (1992) and a DLitt from Oxford (2024). In July 2025, he received a sixth advanced degree, the Doctor of Letters (DLitt) from Oxford University. 

Howes is a past holder of the Chaire Jacques Leclercq at the Université Catholique Louvain (2018). He received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research in 2020, and the University Research Award in 2021. That same year he was named Distinguished Research Professor. In 2023, he was granted the Concordia University Award for Graduate Student Mentorship. In 2024, Howes was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 2025 he was inducted into the Provost’s Circle of Distinction.

Research

In 2006, together with Michael Bull (University of Sussex), Howes co-founded The Senses and Society journal. In 2010, he launched the Sensory Studies website. In 2012, together with Bianca Grohmann (Marketing, Concordia), he co-founded the Centre for Sensory Studies. The Centre has 18 faculty members, ± 40 graduate student members, and regularly receives visiting scholars from around the world. It hosts the biennial, international “Uncommon Senses” conference series. Howes is a past holder of the Chaire Jacques Leclercq at the Université Catholique Louvain (2018) and was awarded the title of Distinguished Research Professor by Concordia University in 2021. In 2024, he was granted leave to supplicate for the Higher Doctorate (DLitt) by Oxford University (the degree will be conferred at a ceremony in July 2025) and also inducted as a Fellow into the Royal Society of Canada (class of 2024).

Howes is the author, co-author or editor of 16 books, the editor or co-editor of 11 thematic issues of scholarly journals, and has published over 200 book chapters, journal articles and review essays. He was inspired to train his sights on the study of the sensorium by a talk that Marshall McLuhan gave at his college in 1979, and went on to carry out field research on the social and cultural life of the senses in Papua New Guinea and Northwestern Argentina as well as the sensory life of things in the ethnographic museum, and the sensualization of the commodity form, or “hyperaesthesia” in late consumer capitalism.

Howes’ first book, The Varieties of Sensory Experience (1991) was at the origin of the sensory turn in anthropology and cognate disciplines. Sensory anthropology examines “how the patterning of sense experience varies from one culture to the next in accordance with the meaning and emphasis attached to each of the modalities of perception. It is also concerned with tracing the influence such variations have on forms of social organization, conceptions of self and cosmos, the regulation of the emotions, and other domains of cultural expression” (p. 3).

Aroma (1994), co-authored with the cultural historian Constance Classen and sociologist Anthony Synnott, was the first book-length study to adopt a multidisciplinary (historical, anthropological and sociological) approach to the investigation of olfaction. It challenged many of the assumptions (and conclusions) of research in the psychology and neurobiology of smell. Aroma was awarded the 1994 Richard B. Salomon prize by the Olfactory Research Fund.

Sensual Relations (2003) was inspired both by McLuhan’s notion of the “sense-ratio” and the German sociologist Georg Simmel’s observation in “Sociology of the Senses” (“That we become involved in interactions at all depends on the fact that we have a sensory effect upon one another”). This book traces the emergence of the anthropology of the senses in the early 1990s, and then presents a comparative study of the sensory orders of two Papua New Guinea societies. It concludes with a pair of chapters – called “sensory biographies” – of Freud and Marx, with particular emphasis on the sensual dimensions of their respective theories of the psyche and the social.

Ways of Sensing (2013), co-authored with Constance Classen, introduced a domain-based approach to the study of the sensorium. Its six chapters focus on: the senses in art, the senses in medicine, the senses at law and in politics, the senses in the marketplace and the entwinement of the senses (synaesthesia) respectively. This approach also informs A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 1920-2000 (2014), the sixth volume in the Cultural History of the Senses set from Bloomsbury Academic.

The Sensory Studies Manifesto (2022) presents a cultural and intellectual history of the “sensorial revolution” in the human sciences (with a particular focus on history, anthropology, geography and sociology) as well as contemporary art and design, and the new museology. It also tracks the emergence of such interdisciplinary formations as visual culture, auditory culture (or sound studies), taste cultures, skin cultures (or culture of touch), and so forth, the main argument of the book is that the senses are made, not given, and that each culture or historical period must be approached on its own sensory terms.

Howes’ Sensorial Investigations (2023) delves into the history of anthropological approaches to the study of the senses and sense experience, which first took the form of an obsession with measurement, then patterning, and most recently, sharing in the sensible. The book goes on to examine and critique the construction of the sensorium in modern (western) psychology and neuroscience and the role of the senses as mediators in diverse contact situations.

Sensorium (2024), subtitled ‘Contextualizing the Senses and Cognition in History and Across Cultures’, is a volume in the Elements Histories of Emotions and the Senses series from Cambridge University Press. It contains chapters on the enumeration of the senses, ways of hearing, ways of smelling and techniques of seeing feelingly, followed by two études sensorielles. The first examines the sensuous epistemology of the prolific 17th century natural philosopher, playwright and essayist Margaret Cavendish; the second presents a sensory biography of the works and life of the late nineteenth century American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler.

Howes’ latest book is co-authored with two former students: Sheryl Boyle (a professor of architecture at Carleton University) and Genevieve Collins (who is pursuing a PhD at the University of Manchester). It is called Sense-Making: New Sensory Methods for Exploring the Past and Imagining Possible Futures. Howes wrote the chapters of Part1: “Sensing the Past: Archaeologies of Perception” and “Sensing Ahead: Anthropologies of the Future”; Boyle wrote the chapters of Part 2: entitled “Sensory (Re)Construction as a Way of Knowing: The Case of Thornbury Castle, 1508–1521”; and Collins wrote the chapters of Part 3, which centred on applying the methodology of sensory extrapolation to imagine the life of the senses in outer space and creating a “performative sensory environment” for visitors to try out.

Research-Creation

Around 2010, Howes became interested in employing more creative means of generating and communicating research results, alongside the traditional scholarly media of print publications and conference presentations. He embarked on a series of “research-creation” projects together with Chris Salter (Design and ComputationArts, Concordia; now of Zurich University of the Arts). Research-creation involves “uniting artistic expression, scholarly investigation and material experimentation to generate new ways of being and knowing” (Salter) The resulting performance/installation works occupy a space “between art and science.” The team of Salter and Howes, together with diverse collaborators, have designed, staged, and analyzed visitor responses to a wide range of “performative sensory environments” or PSEs.

One of the first PSEs, called Displace v. 1.0, was shown at the 2011 meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal. It was billed as “a flight simulator for anthropologists,” and aimed to awaken the senses of participants to alternative modes of sensing by presenting novel (from a mainstream Western perspective) configurations of savours, scents, sounds, movement, and light. Other PSEs include Haptic Field(2017) at the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin and Totem (2019), a dynamic light sculpture, at the “AI: More than Human” exhibition at the Barbican.

Socio-legal Studies

Howes’s socio-legal research focusses on the interplay of legal and cultural orders. In such essays as “From Polyjurality to Monojurality” and “Faultless Reasoning”, he explored the history of exchanges between the civil law and common law in Canadian legal reasoning, with a particular focus on the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada from its inception in 1875 down to the present. He has also forged a connection between constitutional studies and cultural studies in a series of articles showing how certain core constitutional principles have found expression in a range of iconic cultural productions, from painting to pop songs, in Canada and the United States.

Within law, Howes is best known for his advocacy of “cross-cultural jurisprudence” which posits that law is a cultural system, and that judges ought to take cognizance of the cultural background of the parties to a litigation, as well as their own personal culture, before rendering judgment. Finally, arriving full circle, Howes is the chief architect of the nascent field of “sensori-legal studies” (a cross between sensory studies and socio-legal studies). The sensory underpinnings of law are manifest in everything from the rules of evidence to the sensescape of the prison, and from the trademarking of sensations in Intellectual Property Law to the iconography of Justice itself.

Howes’s research and that of his numerous collaborators has been funded by inter alia the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture, the Australian Research Council, the Olfactory Research Fund of The Fragrance Foundation, the Fonds du Barreau du Québec, the Canadian Bar Association, and Concordia University to the amount of $3, 235,000 (as of 2022). The leitmotif of his research is given in the idea of “crossing” (confronting but also harmonizing or blending): crossing disciplines, crossing cultural and linguistic borders, and crossing the senses.

Aaron Johnson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Concordia University. He is one of the co-principal investigators of the Concordia Vision Laboratory in the Psychology Department, and is a member of the Center for Studies in Learning and Performance. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Glasgow in 2002, and then worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Ophthalmology at McGill University until 2006, when he came to Concordia. Aaron’s research investigates aspects of human vision. His basic research program involves human perception of natural scenes, and how humans rapidly encode the most relevant information. He uses a number of techniques including computational neuroscience, psychophysics and recording eye movements. His clinical research program studies patients with low vision, and designing research driven rehabilitation methods. This work is done in collaboration with the Montreal Association for the Blind – Mackay Rehabilitation Centre near the Loyola Campus of Concordia University. Aaron’s work has been published in the Journal of Vision, Vision Research, Visual Neuroscience, and the Journal of the Optical Society of America. He regularly presents at conferences of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS), the European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), Association for Research in Vision and Opthalmology (ARVO), and the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science. His work is funded by the Natural Sciences, and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Angela Kross is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University, where she leads the Earth Observation (EOL) Lab. Her research interests lie at the intersection of geospatial technologies (remote sensing and geographic information systems), ecology, and environmental science. In her research, she integrates field measurements, models, and multi-sensor remote sensing data (from optical, thermal, and radar sensors, and more recently, acoustic sensors) with geospatial methods to answer questions related to ecosystem processes, vegetation development, biodiversity, and land use change in response to anthropogenic and natural drivers, such as agriculture practices, mining activities, and climate change. Her work spans the full spectrum from fundamental remote sensing research (advancing methods to link spectral signals with ecosystem characteristics) to applied research addressing current challenges in agriculture, forest, peatland, and urban environments. Her research, including work within her lab, has been published in leading remote sensing and applied journals, including Remote Sensing of the Environment, Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing, International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, Urban Ecosystems, Environmental Impact Assessment Review, Ecological Informatics, Agricultural Water Management, Journal of Forestry Research, and Urban Forestry & Urban Greening.

By translating spectral signals into ecological information, her work positions remote sensing as a form of environmental sensing that extends human perception, contributing to interdisciplinary dialogues on how environments are sensed, measured, interpreted, and experienced.

Marc Lafrance is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University. He holds a Ph.D. in French Cultural Studies from the University of Oxford. His two main areas of enquiry include: popular media culture and contemporary cultural theory. With respect to the former, Marc explores issues of self, body and society and how they are bound up with the forces of sex, gender and sexuality. Looking at advertising, magazines, popular music and cable television, he considers the cultural politics of the body as they relate to both men and women. Marc’ work in the area of contemporary cultural theory focuses on questions of subjectivity and embodiment and how each, in its own way, informs human identity. He has published widely on the philosopher Michel Foucault and on the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, best known for his concept of the “skin ego”. Marc’s research has appeared in journals such as Body and Societyand Medical Humanities, in edited collections such as Bodies, Boundaries and Health Work, Canadian Perspectives on Men and Masculinity and Revealing Bodies,Unveiling Representations as well as in the biggest online men’s lifestyle magazine AskMen.com.

Jordan LeBel is Professor (Marketing) at the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University, where he teaches “The Marketing of Food” and MBA courses. He has received numerous awards for his teaching and leadership in higher education, including the 3M National Teaching Fellowship. Jordan specializes in consumer psychology as it relates to decisions and behaviors motivated by the pursuit of pleasure, particularly in the domains of food choices, eating behavior, and healthy lifestyles. His research focuses on comfort foods (and the unique case of chocolate) as a window into the dynamics of eating decisions and the many factors that shape them, including the important role of ambiance and the environment. Jordan’s work is inspired by his background in the food and foodservice industries and his expertise in marketing communications strategies. He started working in professional kitchens at the age of 12 and has been a chef and a restaurant reviewer. He has taught restaurant management and experience design at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University and at the École Hôtelière de Lausanne in Switzerland. He currently sits on the standing scientific committee for the prevention of obesity at the Institut national de santé publique du Québec. As a certified corporate administrator, Jordan strives to approach and appreciate marketing decisions and their impacts from a broad perspective, including socio-cultural considerations. With Anya Zilberstein (History), Jordan co-leads the Concordia Food Studies Working Group. He regularly consults for large and small organizations in the food, foodservice, and retail industries. He has given keynote addresses to a variety of organizations such as C2MTL, the World Congress of Food Scientists, the Ordre professionnel des diététistes du Québec, and the Canadian Foodservice Professionals Association. Jordan loves to engage with academics and professionals from different domains and disciplines and thrives on making deep, meaning connections. He loves learning more about the history of food and cooking; his vintage cookbook collection goes back to 1742.

Dr John Potvin is Professor of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, where he teaches on the intersections of art, design and fashion. The author of over 40 essays, his work has been published in such leading journals as The Journal of Design History, Journal of Interior Design, Senses and Society,Genders, Home Cultures, Visual Culture in Britainand Fashion Theory. He is the author of Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding (2008), Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (2013) and, more recently, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (2014), winner of the Historians of British Art Book Prize. In addition, he is also editor of The Places and Spaces of Fashion (2009) and Oriental Interiors: Design, Identity, Space (2015). His current book project, Deco Dandy: Designing Masculinity in 1920s Paris (forthcoming with Manchester UP) explores the fashion, painting, performance and design cultures of the much-neglected interwar dandy and in 2016 he was awarded a four-year SSHRC Grant to explore ‘Sexuality, Masculinity and Shame in Interior Design: From Professionalization to Queer Theory, 1869-2015’.

VK Preston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Concordia University and member of the University of the Arts’ internationally situated MFA research community in dance. VK’s work appears at intersections of history and performance studies, taking up kinesthetics and sensation in scholarship that traverses embodied relations to difficult histories and the work of contemporary artists. VK is currently working on their first monograph. Their research has appeared in TDR / The Drama Review, Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theatre, The Oxford Handbook of Danced Reenactment, Performance Research, and History, Memory, Performance. VK also works as a dramaturg and interlocutor with artists in contemporary dance and socially engaged practice.

Geneviève Sicotte est professeure au Département d’études françaises de l’Université Concordia. Ses recherches portent sur les représentations de la nourriture dans la culture et la littérature. Elle s’est d’abord spécialisée dans le domaine de la littérature française du 19e siècle. Dans les dernières années, elle s’est aussi intéressée au contexte québécois. Son approche, d’inspiration sociocritique et ethnocritique, tente de comprendre comment et pourquoi s’élaborent les imaginaires contemporains liés à la nourriture.

Outre de nombreux articles et chapitres de livres, Geneviève a notamment publié Le festin lu. Le repas chez Flaubert, Zola et Huysmans (Liber, réédité en 2008), le recueil Gastronomie québécoise et patrimoine (avec M.-N. Aubertin, 2013), ainsi qu’un dossier dans la revue Captures, « Raconter l’aliment » (avec M.-C. Lambert-Perreault, 2016). Sur son site web personnel Le goût des mots, elle publie un blogue sur le thème alimentaire dans la littérature.

Geneviève a aussi développé des projets en recherche-création dont le plus récent, Signes de vie/Vital Signs (2020), est une œuvre de littérature numérique qui explore la signification intime et la sensorialité des nourritures.

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Geneviève Sicotte is professor of literature in the Department of Études françaises at Concordia University. Her research focuses on the representation of food in culture and literature. She first specialized in the field of 19th century French literature. In recent years, she has also been interested in the Quebec context. Using a sociocritical and ethnocritical approach, she attempts to understand how and why the contemporary imaginaries related to food are elaborated.

In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, Geneviève has notably published Le festin lu. Le repas chez Flaubert, Zola et Huysmans (Liber, reprinted in 2008), the collection Gastronomie québécoise et patrimoine (with M.-N. Aubertin, 2013), as well as a dossier in the journal Captures, “Raconter l’aliment” (with M.-C. Lambert-Perreault, 2016). On her personal website Le goût des mots, she publishes a blog about food in literature.

Geneviève has also developed research-creation projects, the most recent of which, Signes de vie/Vital Signs (2020), is a work of digital literature that explores the intimate meaning and sensoriality of food.

Luis C. Sotelo Castro is Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre at Concordia University, Montreal (Quebec, Canada). He is also the second co-director of Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling. In 2018 he founded at Concordia the Acts of Listening Lab, a hub for research-creation on the transformative power of listening to painful narratives, with particular reference to testimonies by exiles from sites of conflict. His latest publications explore listening in the context of post-conflict performances of memory. For instance, see ‘Facilitating voicing and listening in the context of post-conflict performances of memory. The Colombian scenario.’ In: De Nardi, S., Orange, H., et al. Routledge Handbook of Memoryscapes. Routledge: London. (2019), and his article ‘Not being able to speak is torture: performing listening to painful narratives’. International Journal of Transitional Justice, Special Issue Creative Approaches to Transitional Justice: Contributions of Arts and Culture. (March, 2020).

Jeremy Stolow is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University. He is also a member of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Religion and Media (New York University), and of the Centre de recherche sur l’intermedialité (Université de Montréal). Among Jeremy’s recent publications are his books, Orthodox By Design: Judaism, Print Politics and the ArtScroll Revolution (University of California Press, 2010) and Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between (Fordham University Press, 2012). Originally trained as a social theorist, Jeremy works in the nascent, inter- disciplinary field of “religion and media,” to which he has contributed several projects, based on textual, archival, and ethnographic research. These have included studies of Orthodox Jewish publishing and print culture, and of nineteenth-century Spiritualist uses of electrically-mediated communications technologies, as well as contributions to the theoretical mapping of the field. Increasingly, Jeremy’s research interests have turned to questions about how religious experiences and forms of knowledge and practice are materialized — such as in objects used for ritual practice, study, or veneration — and in the ways different religious traditions “tune” the senses for the purposes of gaining knowledge, achieving piety, or in pursuit of other goals. A second area of research interest deals with the “supernatural” or “magical” dimensions of modern techno-scientific practice, and with the ways scientific knowledge and practice resemble “religious” or “magical” modes of knowing, doing, and perceiving things. These interests converge in Jeremy’s current research project, “Picturing Aura.” Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, this project aims to reconstruct the history and examine the contemporary contexts of optical instruments and visual media technologies developed and used by paranormal scientists, alternative health practitioners, and spiritual service providers, all of whom share an interest in trying to detect, visualize, pictorially represent, and interpret the meaning of mysterious spiritual forces: specifically, the “vital energy” that some claim radiates from our human bodies and is referred to as our “aura.”

Matthew P. Unger is Assistant Professor in Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal. His work questions how conditions of aesthetic and juridical judgment have changed in a post-critical age.

His work broadly encompasses sound studies, ethnography/participant observation within the extreme metal community, phenomenology and hermeneutics of criminal accusation, and colonial legal imaginaries. He examines how predominant metaphors and symbols structure aesthetic, sonic, and legal imaginaries. His continuing projects focus on the relationship of accusation to governance. The other lines of investigation on symbols and sound focus on cultural and musical competence, formal and informal pedagogies, and genre.

He is the author of Sound, Symbol, Sociality: The Aesthetics of Extreme Metal Music (2016 with Palgrave MacMillan) which draws on the social theory of Paul Ricoeur to understand the intersection of the social, juridical, religious, and political within aesthetic judgment. He is co-editor (with George Pavlich) of Accusation: Creating Criminals (UBC Press, 2016) and Entryways to Criminal Justice: Accusation and Criminalization in Canada (Forthcoming with University of Alberta Press 2019).

https://www.concordia.ca/faculty/mark-watson.html

Chris Salter is Professor for Immersive Arts and Director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He is also Professor Emeritus, Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and former Co-Director of the Hexagram network for research-creation in arts, cultures and technology and Co-Founder of the Milieux Institute at Concordia. He studied philosophy and economics at Emory University and completed his PhD in theatre studies with research in computer music Stanford University. His artistic work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbican Centre, Berliner Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, Grand Palais Immersif, MEET Center, ZKM, Kunstfest Weimar, Musée d’art Contemporain, Muffathalle, EXIT Festival and Vitra Design Museum, among many others. He is the author of three monographs, all published by the MIT Press: Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance ( 2010), Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (2015) and Sensing Machines (2022). Salter has given over 100 talks and keynotes at academic and cultural institutions worldwide.

https://www.zhdk.ch/person/prof-dr-christopher-salter-190661

Nuria Alvarez Coll holds a Phd in Architecture at Cresson Laboratory – Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble (ENSAG). She is interested in studying how in the field of architecture, the use of raw materials – that is, those that keep the state least distant from its state of origin as earth, straw, stone and wood, for example – could help us to take root in our world.

Nuria specialised in Earth Architecture at the CRAterre laboratory at the Ecole Nationale d’Architecture de Grenoble. From 2013 to 2017, she integrated amàco’s project, where she developed the contents and teaching methods to enhance the use of raw materials in higher education through a transdisciplinary approach. At the same time she studied architecture in Barcelona, she took theater classes based on Lecoq Methodology. In 2012, she founded the theater company Colectivo Terron where she is artistic director and actress.

Her distinguished publications include the article in the journal Le Philotope « Matière, source d’émotions » (2016), her communication in the XII Congress on Earth Architecture « Le langage de la matière » (2016) and more recently in the 4th International Congress of Ambiances « Raw Materials and Emphasis on Tactile Perceptions to Create Atmospheres. A Tactile Experiment to Explore Bodily Sensations ».

Cristóbal F. Barria Bignotti (Santiago de Chile, 1984) holds a PhD in Art History from Sapienza Università di Roma (2019). He is interested in studying the modes by which images participate in the organization of our sensorial experiences. His research covers a wide range of subjects, including the political connotations with which Gustave Courbet’s painting imbues our tactile experiences, and the anti-colonialist role conferred on the sense of touch within Latin American art and criticism. From 2017 to 2018, he was head of a study group in Latin American art at the Istituto Italo-Latinoamericano in Rome (IILA). He edits the journal Quaderni Culturali IILA (2019) for the same institution. Other distinguished publications include the articles “Clement Greenberg’s Media Differentiation and Gustave Courbet’s Tactile Appeal” (2019), and “Due Momenti Della Critica d’Arte Latinoamericana del Novecento” (2017). Cristóbal has written the exhibition catalogues “Carsten Holler a Global Artist; Carsten Holler a Local Artist” (2015) and “Two Architectures for Researching” (2016), as well as the chapters “From the Laboratory Image to the Habitat-Image” for the book “Laboratorio Eigengrau” (2016)  by the artist J. Toro and “No tocar” for the book “Echoes” (2020) by the artist Marion Tampon.

Victoria Bates is Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Bristol. She specialises in the social history of medicine and the medical humanities. Most recently, her research has focused on ‘humanistic’ healthcare environments and sensory ‘design for health’ in theory/practice since 1948. She focuses on English hospitals under the National Health Service, but is also interested in the relationship between national and international trends in healthcare architecture, design and sensescapes. In 2017/18 the University of Bristol Strategic Research Fund funded the development of her research in sensory history, with a project entitled ‘Better by Design: Towards a Sensory History of the Modern Hospital’. Her visit to Montreal as a visiting scholar in 2019 is supported by the University of Bristol International Strategic Fund, with the goal of exploring opportunities for international and interdisciplinary collaboration in studies of the senses, health and healthcare environments.

This project links to her collaborative and public-facing work on the senses and health, including:

• The AHRC/REACT project InTouch.

• A soundscape of hospital arts/health for the University of Bristol Feel It festival.

• The GW4 Crucible Project ‘Rethinking Healthy Spaces: Evidence, Evaluation and Design’.

• The AHRC/EPSRC ‘Immersive Experiences’ project ‘A Sense of Place: Exploring nature & wellbeing through the non-visual senses’.

A list of Dr Bates’ publications is available HERE.

Fiona Carlston is a Scent Design Director based in Paris with IFF/International Flavors and Fragrances. Her role is essentially to work closely with perfumers to design fragrances for global clients and consumers, primarily for consumer products, such as haircare. She studied history, politics, and art history at the University of Nottingham. She began her career in South Africa with Quest International, a global fragrance and flavors company, in 1993, where she began her specialisation in fragrance development.

In 1996 Fiona moved to the Global Headquarters of Quest International in Ashford, UK to focus on haircare fragrance development, where she concentrated on global fragrance development and consumer understanding. After four years in the USA, she moved to IFF in Paris at the global centre of excellence for haircare. Her primary focus has been on helping to create scents that are creative, unique, and meaningful across all categories servicing the needs/wants of consumers and clients.This requires a deep understanding of consumers from different cultures, and the creative process.

Fiona is also a passionate amateur oil painter, specifically figure painting, with a focus on the different lights, shades, and colors that skin and the figure exude, as well as the texture created by paint.
http://www.iff.com/

https://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/expertise/profile.cfm?stref=953150

Charlotte is approaching the end of her two year Research Master’s degree at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, specialising in cultural and sensory early modern history. She is currently working on her thesis which will explore representations of women in eighteenth-century London’s Exchange Alley, utilising a sensory studies approach.

During her time at the Centre for Sensory Studies, in early 2018, she helped organise upcoming “Uncommon Senses II” conference alongside attending lectures given by David Howes and conducting independent research. She benefitted greatly from discussing her research themes with the centre’s experts and utilised the resources available in Montreal, at both Concordia and McGill, to further her thesis study.

Stephanie Grey is a designer, educator and creative leader with a wide range of expertise in graphic design, accessibility, user experience, and communication strategy. She is a skilled practitioner and works with clients from diverse industries to craft brands and create impact for the screen, print and physical environments.

Stephanie teaches all levels of studio courses—from typography to experience design to advanced degree projects—in order to help students advance their understanding of the value of design. Her primary area of research investigates design for the senses as a means to create memorable and meaningful experiences for all users and participants. She is the founder of Stir Copenhagen: design, culture + your senses, a travel experience in Copenhagen, Denmark that offers insight on the elements needed to create sensory-based design.

A recent recipient of the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation grant, Stephanie will travel to Australia to study indigenous art and design in 2023. She has won international and national design awards and holds an undergraduate degree in Graphic Design from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA (her hometown), and an MFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. She currently teaches full-time in the design program at Framingham State University and lives in Somerville Massachusetts with her family.

Harald Heinrichs is a sociologist and Professor of Sustainability and Politics at the Leuphana University in Germany. In research, teaching and transfer he works on social and political aspects of sustainable development. He is particularly interested in employing insights from sensory studies and arts-based research in sustainability science and sustainability policy. Recent publications in this context include: “Sustainability Science with Ozzy Osbourne, Julia Roberts and Ai Weiwei: the potential of arts-based research for sustainable development” (2018); “Sensory sustainability science – theoretical and methodological foundations” (2019); “Artful Sustainability Governance  – foundational considerations on sensory-informed policymaking for sustainable development” (2020) and “Aesthetic expertise for sustainable development” (2021). Harald has been involved in numerous inter- and transdisciplinary research and development projects, serves in advisory committees from local to international level and enjoys to collaborate with artists and practitioners from different societal spheres in co-creative processes.

Kirsty Jones has recently completed her MPhil in Old Testament at the University of Cambridge, with a research interest in Disability in the Old Testament and Biblical Ethics of Disability. Her thesis, ‘Inclusion in the Prophetic Utopian Visions’, investigates the role of inclusion of individuals with disabilities within Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the implication of healing/non-healing tropes within the wider biblical text. More broadly, she studies how the senses are evaluated and used in Scripture, the implications of this for understanding sensory disabilities and upon presentations of emotive and cognitive revelation and response.

During her time at the Centre for Sensory Studies, in the Fall of 2016, she attended classes given by David Howes and Constance Classen, assisted with and attended a conference of the International Visual Literacy Association and undertook independent research. She benefitted from the input of the centre’s experts and material resources, which enabled her to gain insight into the existing field of sensory studies and inspired her to continue working at the intersection between biblical, disability and sensory studies.

Daniela Sanchez is completing her Master’s Degree in Gender Studies at El Colegio de México. She holds a BA in Sociology and a BA in Communication and Digital Media. Her dissertation “The Social Construction of Sexual Deviancy: Bondage, Discipline and Sadomasoquism in Mexico City” explored the social and historical construction of deviant sexuality and how different practices have been categorized as such. She conducted research on a BDSM community, with regards to the socio-demographic profile of participants and the corporeal and social ways through which they acquire the necessary knowledge to participate in the BDSM scene. Throughout her research she argued that sexual practices considered deviant can be better understood from a sociological, not pathologizing perspective.

Her current research focuses on analyzing how the experience of pain is deeply gendered. Outside of academia, Daniela directed a short documentary film about Saint Death, a stigmatized religious cult popular in the marginalized areas of Mexico City.

As an intern for the Centre for Sensory Studies she participated in and helped with the organization of the Uncommon Senses II conference, conducted independent research, and discussed drafts of her writing with Dr. David Howes for future publication.

https://profiles.ucalgary.ca/kathy-sitter

Anette Stenslund is a cultural sociologist specializing in space and atmosphere. She is currently (Spring 2020) working on a book about the ethnography of urban design which considers the architectural production of atmosphere in the city. In earlier projects Stenslund has examined the experience of art and atmosphere in hospitals; smell and atmosphere in medical culture – including the museum, and she has curated an exhibition about metabolic scent – Metascent. She has an ongoing interest in research-based exhibition making. She has also published a book on lust and the aesthetics of seduction.

Stenslund works as a post.doc. at Roskilde University, Denmark, affiliated the project “Living with Nordic Lighting” funded by the Velux Foundation. She holds her PhD from Medical Museion, Copenhagen University and a MSc and BA from Department of Sociology, Copenhagen University. She was a visiting Ph.D. student at the Centre for Sensory Studies in 2012.

Sharon Todd is Professor of Education at Maynooth University, Ireland. A former graduate of the PhD in Humanities Programme at Concordia, she has been Professor of Education at Stockholm University (2004-2014) and Associate Professor at York University in Toronto (1997-2004). She is currently engaged in the areas of aesthetics, sensibility and contemporary art practices and their connection to educational and political transformation. She is currently working on a book, tentatively titled, The Touch of the Present: Education, Encounter and the Politics of the Senses (forthcoming from SUNY Press). Previous publications include  Learning from the Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis and Ethical Possibilities in Education (SUNY, 2003) and Toward an Imperfect Education: Facing Humanity, Rethinking Cosmopolitanism (Paradigm, 2009), the co-edited volumes Re-imagining Educational Relationships: Ethics, Politics, Practices with M. Griffiths, M. Honerod and C. Winter (Wiley, 2014) and Philosophy East/West: Exploring the Intersections between Educational and Contemplative Practices with O. Ergas (Wiley, 2015). She is currently President of the International Network of Philosophers of Education.

Brígida Cristina Maestres Useche – PhD Social Psychology – BA Sociology
Assistant Professor – Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences
Part Time Researcher – CareNet Group – IN3 Institute
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Throughout my career as a researcher, I’ve been interested in how reality is constructed and produced, both within/by political systems (policies, legislative actions) as well as within/by persons, subjects/subjectivities that have been defined as ‘the other’ (the victimized, the sickened, the disabled). I have tied this epistemic interest to the diverse ‘ways of seeing’, which has finally driven me to the embodied matter of blind vision and its phenomenological research.

I am particularly interested in blind vision because of the nature of blind reality. This interest has been nurtured by the production of fictional narrative, such as chronicles, poetics of objects, sketches, drawings, and photographs, and music interpretation – percussion, above all, as a way of constructing a sensitive and tactile reality.

In this sense, my path can be understood as a process that began as a projective interest in the vision of political systems and resulted in my own vision experience, that is to say, in a project drawn from my own existence as a person diagnosed with low vision, a project reluctant to words and other captures of biopolitics related to disability/impairment. Thus, I am driven by a vital political interest gradually born in the narrative, photographic and musical arts, a potent methodology for dismantling dominant discourses nested in our own experiences. This path has enabled me to produce a discourse and an experience in which blind vision is not understood as a lack of something, but as an episteme that builds reality and puts forward a particular aesthetics of the world. For instance, I speak in terms of “animismo del ojo inquieto” to refer to such a way of vision and its phenomenology, emphasizing the role of the body as a sensorium, and the social and individual experience of constructing reality.

In the end, it has been a transformative process that has influenced both my use of scholarly language and my pedagogical practice as a professor.

bmaestres@uoc.edu
https://carenet.in3.uoc.edu/project/brigida-maestres/
instagram: @the_wandering_eye_project
https://www.instagram.com/the_wandering_eye_project/

https://www.unb.ca/faculty-staff/directory/education/akbari-ehsan.html

https://anderwald-grond.at

https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/victoria-bates/

https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/jennifer-biddle

Marie-Josée Blanchard is assistant professor in Religious Studies at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada. She holds a Ph.D. in Humanities (Concordia University), an M.A. in Religious Studies (University of Ottawa), and holds a B.A. in Psychology (Université de Moncton). Her research interests focus on the intersection between Hinduism, devotion, classical Indian dance, Indian aesthetics, culture, emotions and the senses, and more recently on extrasensory experiences and new religions and alternative spiritualities. Her most recent publication explored the role of participant sensation (as an alternative to participant observation) as a key method in ethnographic work, anthropology and the performing arts.

Marie-Josée’s M.A. dissertation examined the rich sensory textures and flavours of Hindu pujas (devotional rituals), both in India and in a small Hindu temple in Ottawa. She argued that the embodied nature of Hindu devotion called for a “sacred sensorium,” a form of perception that was particularly rich and symbolic within the ritual puja. It is during her M.A. research that Marie-Josée came upon the concept of “rasa”–which means “flavour” and “essence,” but also “aesthetic pleasure.” Focusing on this notion, her PhD project explored the sensory and emotional nature of rasa within Bharatanatyam, a classical Indian dance-drama form (among many) that has been through a cultural renewal in the past century.

Marie-Josée defended her thesis, entitled “Tasting Physical Expression: A Sensorial and Cultural Analysis of the Notion of Rasa in Classical Indian Dance” in December 2020, and graduated at Spring 2021 Convocation.

Sheryl Boyle is Associate Professor at the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University in Ottawa and is Director of the Carleton Sensory Architecture and Liminal Technologies lab which explores materiality through hands-on research and projects that work with historical artifacts and industry partners. Sheryl and her lab collaborators work with a variety of craftspeople including cooks, masons, carpenters and 3D printing experts, embracing the knowledge of craft in works that aims to expand to sensory dimensions of construction and architecture.  Her artistic work uses discarded and collected materials from her surroundings to reformulate sensory narratives which participate in daily life. Sheryl completed her professional architecture degree at Carleton University, her post-professional Master of Architecture at McGill University in the History and Theory program studying under Alberto Perez-Gomez, and her PhD at Concordia University in the Humanities under supervisor David Howes, and minor supervisors Rod Phillips and Cynthia Imogen-Hammond.

Sheryl defended her thesis, entitled “Fragrant Walls and the Table of Delight: Sensory (re)construction as a way of knowing, the case of Thornbury Castle 1508-21” in November 2020.

Michael Bull is Emeritus Professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex. He has published widely in the field of Sound Studies. His single authored books include Sounding Out the City, Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Berg 2000), Sound Moves, iPod Culture and Urban Experience (Routledge 2007). He has also published a four volume edited work on Sound Studies for Routledge (2013). Most recently he has co-edited the second edition of The Auditory Culture Reader with Professor Les Back (Bloomsbury 2016). He is the editor and joint founder of the Journal Senses and Society and the co-founder and editor (with Prof Veit Erlmann) of the Sound Studies Journal (Routledge).He is currently writing a book on sirens which will be one of the first publications in his new book series The Study of Sound (Bloomsbury).

https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/view/profile/members/424

https://colinclark.org

https://com.umontreal.ca/english/department-directory/professors/professor/in/in31111/sg/Natalie%20Doonan/

https://profiles.ucalgary.ca/charlene-elliott

https://anderwald-grond.at

https://www.ff.uni-lj.si/en/staff/simon-hajdini

https://annaroseharris.wordpress.com

Hsuan L. Hsu is a Professor in the Department of English at UC Davis, specializing in American literature, race studies, literary geography, and the environmental humanities. His research focuses on olfaction as a mode of aesthetic practice that is both spatially extensive and capable of biochemically transforming bodies, minds, and moods. His forthcoming book, The Smell of Risk: Olfactory Aesthetics and Atmospheric Disparities (NYU Press), explores how writers, artists, and activists have experimented with smell as a medium for staging modernity’s unevenly distributed atmospheres. Other recent publications include articles on the olfactory artworks of Boris Raux, Sean Raspet, Anicka Yi, and Peter De Cupere; an edited article cluster on “Literary Atmospherics” (Literary Geographies); a Broadview edition of Edith Maude Eaton’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance; and an article on “Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice” (American Literature). Broadly, Hsu is interested in how sensory aesthetics inflects perceptions and experiences of race, disability, place, and atmosphere.

In 2020, Hsuan left Concordia to take up a position in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis. He remains an Affiliate Member.

https://management.ok.ubc.ca/about/contact/annamma-joy/

https://www.mcgill.ca/anthropology/people/hillary-kaell

https://www.hec.ca/en/profs/jean-sebastien-marcoux

Ali Motamedi is an Associate Professor at École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS). He received his Ph.D. from an interdisciplinary Individualized program in 2013 at Concordia University. From 2014 to 2016, he conducted research in a world-renowned laboratory at Osaka University, Japan, where he explored the use of crowd simulation, natural processes modeling and immersive visualizations to create design feedback systems for architects and facility managers. He also collaborated in cutting-edge research on Diminished Reality for urban design applications.

His research investigates the application of sensor networks, ambient and artificial intelligence, and visual analytics for the design, construction and management of built facilities. His interests also reside in the cyber-physical interactions provided by “digital twins” of facilities through an integration of digital models and the Internet of Things (IoT). He is currently exploring the potential of the visual analytics of digital twins for engineers and architects to enable heuristics-based problem-solving and decision-making. By enabling cyber-physical interactions, enabled by Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR), human reasoning can be used more effectively for various purposes, such as on-site problem-solving or personnel training.

Ali is the holder of several national and international scholarships, fellowships and awards including JSPS, FQRNT, NSERC, and the Merit Award. His research results have been published in several journals, such as Visualization in Engineering, Advanced Engineering Informatics, Building and Environment, Computational Design and Engineering, and Automation in Construction, presented in various conferences, and won multiple best-paper awards. He has also many years of consulting/design experience in the area of information technology and has participated in several large-scale IT projects.

Ali started collaborating with the Center for Sensory Studies in 2011, investigating the topic of how to extend human senses by using intelligent sensors.

Kasra Padyab is an architect and architectural anthropologist working at the intersection of sensory studies, architectural theory, and the anthropology of the built environment. His research asks how architecture is known through the body before it is understood as form and space — through the senses, movement, gender, behavior, perception, and everyday practice — and brings embodied ethnography, environmental psychology, and phenomenology to bear on architectural education and urban life.

He completed his doctorate in architecture in 2023 with a dissertation entitled Anthropology of Architectural Design Education, examining design-thinking education through the relationship between embodied experience and imagination, conducted through a mixed-methods, multi-layered research design across Iran, Türkiye, and Cyprus. The work produced an anthropological model for design pedagogy grounded in a body–mind approach, together with an assessment instrument for evaluating perceptual and representational difference among architecture students. He subsequently held a research fellowship at Iran University of Science and Technology, funded by the competitive research grant of Iran's National Elites Foundation, for an ethnographic study of multisensory perception in architectural education. In recognition of his research record, the Foundation also granted him the national elite distinction reserved for exceptional scholars.

An ongoing strand of his work examines the relationship between architectural spatial perception and sexual satisfaction, approached through gender differences in couples' perception of domestic space and pursued through registered clinical-trial protocols. To his knowledge, this is the first sustained ethnographic treatment of the subject in Iranian and wider Middle Eastern Islamic contexts, where it has remained largely unexamined.

His current work concerns the sensory ordering of cities in the Arabian Gulf. Drawing on six months of embodied ethnographic fieldwork in Muscat, Oman, his book manuscript Living in the White City: An Embodied Experience of the Anthropology of Architecture and Behaviour in Muscat traces how climate, materiality, food, ritual, sound, and everyday movement shape the perception of urban space, using the researcher's own migrant body as the primary instrument of inquiry. The manuscript is under consideration with Routledge's Sensory Studies series.

Drawing is central to his method rather than illustrative of it. His ethnographic archive includes over three thousand croquis and sketches of historic buildings, alongside a study of fifteen hundred children's drawings and interview and survey research with some three thousand participants. He has held several exhibitions of his sensory croquis of environment, in which drawing functions as a research practice: a way of slowing the body in place and recording what a trained hand registers of climate, material, and atmosphere.

An award-winning architect and a nominee for the 2A Architecture Awards, he practises as a registered architect in Iran, Oman, and elsewhere in the Gulf. Recognized as a distinguished teacher in Iranian universities, he has taught some eight thousand students across several countries, including Iran, Türkiye, and Oman, and has delivered numerous invited lectures and keynote talks in Iran, Türkiye, Cyprus, and Oman. Kasra Padyab (2025), a documentary on his life and work, was produced in Iran. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Art and Design, on the scientific committees of the International Psychological Applications Conference and Trends (InPACT), and as a reviewer for journals including Family Relations and Heliyon. He juries international architecture competitions and is a permanent juror of the INSPIRELI International Award for Architecture. He works in Persian, English, Arabic, and Turkish, and reads Braille and sign language.

Research interests: sensory anthropology of architecture; embodied and autoethnographic methods; drawing as research practice; the relationship between architectural spatial perception and sexual satisfaction; gendered perception; architectural education; environmental psychology; Gulf urbanism; vernacular architecture.

https://www.mcgill.ca/spot/melissa-park

https://www.uu.se/en/contact-and-organisation/staff?query=N13-1021

https://americanstudies.yale.edu/people/sally-promey

https://chromotope.eu/team-members/charlotte-ribeyrol/

Siegfried Saerberg currently works as an independent scholar in the fields of Sensory Studies, the ethnography of blindness, Disability Studies, and Disability Arts. In recent years, questions concerning digitality and disability have increasingly moved to the centre of his research.  

He was a Senior Fellow at the Research College Access to Cultural Goods in the Digital Transformation at the University of Münster.

He held the Professorship of Disability Studies at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences for Social Work and Diaconia, Rauhes Haus, in Hamburg. There, he directed the project Schattenbericht Hamburg (“Hamburg Shadow Report”), an evaluation of the City of Hamburg’s State Action Plan for the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD).

He studied sociology, philosophy, and political science in Cologne. His master thesis was published by Böhlau Verlag in 1991 under the title “Blinde auf Reisen” (“Blind People Travelling”). He taught at the University of Konstanz with Thomas Luckmann, at Dortmund University with Ronald Hitzler, and at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences Bochum with Theresia Degener. He received his PHD from Dortmund University for a lifeworld-oriented ethnography of spatial orientation among blind people. The study was published by Universitätsverlag Konstanz in 2006 under the title “Geradeaus ist einfach immer geradeaus” (“Straight Ahead Is Simply Always Straight Ahead”).

Since 2017, he has served on the board of the association of Disability Studies in Germany.

As an artist, he has collaborated with Terry Fox at sonambiente Berlin 2006. He was also a long-standing member of the jury for the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden (War Blinded Audio Drama Prize).

As part of the Sommerblut Cultural Festival, he curated the exhibitions “Blinde Flecken” (Blind Spots) and Art Blind for the association “Blinde und Kunst” (“Blind People and Art”).

At the Ruhr Museum in Essen, Saerberg was responsible for the auditory design of the exhibition “Unten und Oben – Die NaturKultur des Ruhrgebietes“ (“Below and Above: The Nature-Culture of the Ruhr Region”). He also advised the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn on modular educational approaches to inclusive cultural mediation.

https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/people/charles-spence

https://www.vidmina.net

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thesensesarchitect/

https://eavm.uqam.ca/corps-enseignant/professeurs-reguliers/professeur/trudel.gisele/