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...

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

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...

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

Organizer: David Howes ∆ Polina Dimova ∆; Jeremy Stolow ∆; John Lee Clark ∆; Lida Zeitlin-Wu ∆This “meet the author” roundtable has a unique format. Instead of presenting their own work, each author will offer an appreciation of the work of the author with whom they are paired. The first pair consists of Jeremy Stolow commenting on Polina Dimova’s At the Crossroads of the Senses: the Synaesthetic Metaphor Across the Arts in European Modernism, followed by ...

Ana Maria Ulloa √ (Anthropology, Universidad de los Andes)Better Smelling Through ChemistryIn 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 a...

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...

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...

Mark Peter Wright (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice, University of the Arts, London)Sensing, Sounding and Sense-making with WhalesongThis paper examines multisensory cultures of listening within the scientific study of whalesong. As all corners of terrestrial life are impacted by the ongoing effects of humans, so too are the aquatic worlds of marine mammals. For decades, whalesong has provided the sonic signature for scientific and social scrutiny, be it from nois...