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...

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

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...

Sundar Sarukkai∆ (Public Intellectual, Founder of Barefoot Philosophers, India)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 ...

Saadia Mirza∆ (Social Sciences Fellow, University of Chicago, USA)The Liminality of Sensing Environmental perception entails techniques of hearing, seeing and sensing unresolved natural processes in infinite variations of time and space. These techniques also reveal aesthetic and political imperatives that shape the discovery, imagination, and exploration of the natural world. How does someone listen to an 11,000-year old glacier? Or visualize the morphology of a...