Multisensory Art Gallery (ROOM EV-6.720).The Gallery opens at 13h00 and will close at 15h00 on Wednesday

Room EV-11.705, Milieux Resource Room Bea Dieker (Frankfurt, Germany)Appealing or Disgusting? Atmospheres: The Most Powerful Game ChangersWhat 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 interact...

2026 will mark the 20th anniversary of the launch of The Senses and Society and coining of the term ‘sensory studies.’ Senses and Society was founded by Michael Bull and David Howes (who have alternated in the role of Managing Editor every 3-4 years) and Doug Kahn and Paul Gilroy. The term sensory studies was selected (over e.g. ‘sensography’) and used in the title of the inaugural article, ‘Introducing Sensory Studies,’ in order to serve as an umbrella term for the multiple sub...

The sound, video, performative site-specific intervention Nous sommes au cinéma will be presented in Cinéma moderne’s projection room. In order to highlight the very sensorial sense of presence in this piece, the site-specific experience is necessary. The relationships between seeing, listening and touching are tightened by a confusing sense of what is real or not. In order to address the huge challenges that are linked to the environmental collapse, I strongly believe that it is not only o...

The Gallery opens at 10h30 and will close at 13h30There will be two artist’s talk/happenings in EV-6.270 on Thursday.Thursday’s featured artists are: • Emilie O’Brien, What the Body Knows: A Code for Living Well Together from 11h30 to 12h30; and• Firat Erdim, Field Harp from 12h30-13h30

Tamás Solymosi √ & Daishi Wakizono (Heritage Studies, University of Tsukuba, Japan)Sensory Cartographies: Multisensory Mapping as a Tool for Understanding Urban SpacesThis paper introduces a methodological approach to interpreting urban distinctiveness through multi-sensory experiences, addressing the challenges in an era of increasing placelessness and global homogenisation. Our study investigates how distinct sensory experiences give rise to place-specific networks...

Emma Bruce ∆ (Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada)"Mother palate (palette)" - Tasting Cultural IdentitiesI wish to propose my academic agenda as a burgeoning undergraduate student of culinary cultural studies. In establishing the multifaceted applications of sensory studies of food and eating as it is a prevalent area of research across all disciplines of the Arts and Sciences, I hope to contract attention to the insight individual sensory food percep...

Polina Dimova (Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, USA) ∆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 th...

Organizers: Jennifer Biddle √ (Ethnographic Media Lab (emLAB), UNSW Art & Design, Australia) &Tess Lea √ (Macquarie University, Australia) Jennifer Biddle √ and Tess Lea √Introduction to Making not Taking CultureThis panel (9-papers, 2-days) is on new arts engaged platforms and cultural formations taking shape exploring radical practice and sensory methodologies. Bringing together key practitioners and community projects in the field, the panel ...

Zoe Silverman ∆ (UC Berkeley School of Education, USA)"They Sing Songs": (Re)considering Touch as Sensory Pedagogy in MuseumsThis 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 d...

Phoebe Myers (English, CUNY Graduate Center, CUNY, USA)Beyond Domination? Sensory Dissonances and Public Art’s Role in Restoring Nature’s VoiceTheodor Adorno advocated for art to be a mechanism to give voice back to nature in his book Aesthetics. This voice had been stripped from nature through the domination of industrial capitalism, and Adorno believed recovering this voice to be crucial in resolving humanity’s estrangement from nature. Adorno, however, did not think an...

The Gallery opens at 10h30 and will close at 13h30. There will be an artist’s talk/happening in EV-6.720 at 12h30-13h20.Friday’s featured artists are Lindsey French∆ & Alex Young∆See further 4.2.6 

Organizer: Melissa Park (School of Physical and Occupational Therapy / Culture Mental Health Research Unit, Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, Canada)Speakers:• Emily Bain (Concordia University);• Martina Padovani (McGill University);• Meena Ramachandran (McGill University);• Tamara Stecyk and Vincent Laliberté (McGill University);• Havana Xeros (Douglas Mental Health University Institute, Montreal, Canada)Discussant:• Florian Grond ...

Room LB-207Organizer: Stephanie Grey ∆ with Christine Gallagher ∆ (Stir Copenhagen, USA) Invigorate your body and mind and participate in an experiential and creative workshop. Your point ofview is found through your senses as you focus on taste, texture, smell, sight and sound as a means toconnect with your surroundings. A sensory-focused methodology will guide you. We aim to expand yourpersonal awareness, as well as to help broaden and strength...

Tin Cugelj ∆ (Independent scholar and IMS Study Group - Auditory History)‘Death was chasing us’: The Sea as a Sensory Agent of Early Modern Community FormationOn 13 October 1494, Pietro Casola experienced a storm during a pilgrimage. Driven by the intensity of the multisensorial experience, he wrote: “The following night the sea was so agitated that every hope of life was abandoned by all; I repeat by all ... Death was chasing us” (Casola 1494: 323). With the overwhelming...

Organisers: Dorit Kluge∆ & Isabelle Pichet∆The increasing opening of private collections and the establishment of public museums in the 18th century created a form of public sphere that had been unknown until then (Habermas, 1962). In the close interplay between architecture, exhibition and works of art, completely new individual and social mechanisms of perception were set in motion for the viewers. In this context, multisensory perception, in contrast to purely visual p...

Karolina Nikielska-Sekuła (Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw, Poland)Feeling the Field: An Exploration of Multisensory Positionality in Visual Research on MigrationResearchers and participants enter the field with their feeling bodies, which both react to what they encounter and are, in turn, reacted to by those in the field. The meanings of these encounters are shaped cognitively and through knowledge acquired via sensory experiences. In mobility and mig...

Kevin Hunt and David Johnson (School of Art & Design, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham; School of Arts & Humanities, Royal College of Art, London, UK)‘Picture Yourself in a Boat on a River’: A Collaborative Exploration of the Mental Image through Blindness and AphantasiaThis collaborative presentation will explore the mental image from different perspectives on an expansive spectrum of vision, with particular interest in the experiences of seeing and not-se...