Annabel Castro ∆ (Cinema and Communication, Universidad de Monterrey, Mexico)Sensing the Borderland in the Work of Female Writers from Northern Mexico and South AsiaThe objective of this paper is to analyze the role of multisensorial representation in producing the reader’s borderland experience. It focuses on literary work by female authors from Northern Mexico and South Asia. Particularly on specific texts by Juana Adcock, Orfa Alarcón, Patricia Laurent, Ila Arab Mehta...

Amandine Desille ∆ (Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT), Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)Senses-to-film-to-theory? A Filmic Exploration with Ukrainian Women Practicing Heritage in PortugalWith this presentation, I attempt at bridging between sensory research, cultural heritage, migration and transnationalism. Since February 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war has brought to the fore the pressure on Ukraine to renounce its national cultural imaginary, including its c...

Hsuan Hsu √ (English, University of California, Davis, USA)Olfactory WorldmakingThis 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 m...

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...

Organizer: Akihisa Iwaki ∆ (Kindai University, Japan)Scented Acrylic Colors (https://camp-fire.jp/projects/777431/view) is a scented acrylic paint released at the end of 2024.This innovative product is a collaboration between @aroma’s "100% pure natural essential oils" and Holbein’s high-quality acrylic paints, Acrylic Color (Heavy Body). The project began with a meeting between Masaki Taniguchi (affectionately known as Maa-chan), a visually impaired painter, and scenting design...

Organizer: Vitalija Povilaityte Petri √ (Brussels Health Gardens, Belgium)Join People Need People session, in which we will be tending together to art of sensing, noticing and care across multiple contexts (economy, education, art, technology, science, media, ecology, family and others). It is an invitation for tasting the vitality by immersing into our relationships and living stories. Our conversations will include participants across diverse (re)search fields to discuss what is pres...

KS Brewer (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)Fly Affinities: Sensing Ecstasy in Decay through Interspecies RelationsThis past spring, I cared for hundreds of flesh flies (sacrophaga bullata) in my apartment, and fed them my blood throughout their lives. I did so out of an interest in exploring the possibility of ecstatic decay—conceived as a vibrant material entanglement, post-death, that locates the transcendence of ecstasy in the body, rather than out of it (Bennett...

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

Organizers: Nina Morris ∆ (School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Scotland) and Kate McLean-MacKenzie ∆ (University of Kent, UK)Plenary Participant Discussion: ‘Smell of Morning’What does the early morning smell like outdoors in the city? Is Montreal different from other locations around the world? Why does this time of day smell the way it does? How does it make us feel? In this plenary session, we will use a range of methods to interrogate and discuss ‘the smell o...

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...

ONLINE ONLYOrganizer: Jieling Xiao ∆ (School of Architecture and Design, Birmingham City University, UK)Design whose research explores place-based learning and design through sounds and smells. Her doctoral research explored smellscape pleasantness in transit spaces from a cross-cultural perspective. She is the lead editor for the Frontiers research topic 'Smell, wellbeing and the built environment'. She is currently working on two projects: Multi-modal Hong Kong project documen...

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

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

Sylvie Grosjean ∆ (University of Ottawa, Canada)Feeling Through Screens: Developing "Sensory Awareness" for Sensing at a Distance during Medical VideoconsultationsLupton & 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...

Jessica Chapman ∆ (Communication, Carleton University, Canada)Seeing Space: Astronomical Imaging and the Production of Cosmic VisionsThe relationship between photography and space is a longstanding one. Louis Daguerre, for example, invented the Daguerreotype in 1837, and by 1839 Daguerre himself is thought to have produced the first photograph of the moon (TIME, 2024). Today, space organizations like NASA mobilize all manner of imaging technology to generate visual repres...

Clare Walker ∆ (Sociology & Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada)Feminine Value.s: Locating the Senses in Wellness’s Gendered CapitalismBuilding from my ethnographic fieldwork, I place the sensory elements of the female- dominated wellness community in Paris, France at the forefront of a broader analysis of wellness capitalism and (post)feminist aesthetics.Beginning with a discussion of two competing diet trends, I argue that the deployment of the senses in ...

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...

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

Sohail Kajal (Interdisciplinary Humanities, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC), Concordia University, Canada)Outlines of the Non-sensuous Perception of UntouchabilityRecent scholarship on caste in India has opened inquiries on the sensorial dimensions of the perception of untouchability and their effects on the production of a caste-based sociality. The inquiries however limit their understanding of perception as mediated via the senses and i...

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

Hayleigh Giesbrecht (Faculty of Information, University of Toronto)Palpable Pasts: Affect, Materiality, and ASMR in GLAMASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is a “sensory phenomenon in which individuals experience a tingling, static-like sensation across the scalp, back of the neck and at times further areas in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli” (Barratt & Davis, 2015, p. 1). First identified in 2010, ASMR has since evolved into a popu...

Olya Zikrata ∆ (Center for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)In the Buzz of "Human Safari": Designing the Gamified War in Ukraine“Human Safari” is a terror campaign launched by the Russian military in Ukraine's frontline municipalities, turning these areas into hunting grounds where drones deliberately target human and nonhuman beings. Thinking from the standpoint of design of safari hunting – marked by its racialized dynamics and violence toward nonhuman othe...