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

Room LB-205 Ehsan Akbari (Faculty of Education, University of New Brunswick, Canada)Sensing the Environmental through Art EducationIn this presentation, I will explore ways educators can integrate art and sensory education to sensitize learners to environmental issues. Bertling (2023) argued for the urgency of incorporating eco-pedagogy in art education to inspire a generation of ecologically aware citizens. Such teaching aims to nourish l...

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...

Organizer: Inger Leemans √ (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences (KNAW), Netherlands)What methodologies can support the investigation and presentation of heritage scents? In this panel we will present some of the results of the the Odeuropa project (2021-2023): a European research project intended to help museums, archives, libraries and other heritage institutions to enhance their impact through working with smell. The project team has i...

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...

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...

Peter Sebastian Chesney (History of Art & Architecture, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA)Burning Rich, Burning Lean: Expertise and the Smell of Automobile ExhaustThis paper offers a comparative history of two 20th-Century global cities: Los Angeles and Berlin. L.A. acquired a reputation for its "smog" after World War Two. Rich with unburned carbon fumes from the exhaust pipes of automobiles, the region's air reacted with sunlight to form a thick, dark, eye-stingi...

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 ...

Constance Classen ∆ (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)Green Museums: Narratives of Nature in English MuseumsIn recent years, growing attention has been paid to the interconnections between environmental issues and museums in England. Initially, much of this attention came from groups protesting the links between certain museums and the fossil fuel industry, most notably, the British Museum’s sponsorship by British Petroleum. The ‘Green Museums’ mov...

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...

Organisers: Dorit Kluge ∆ and Isabelle Pichet ∆ (VICTORIA, International University, Berlin, Germany; UQTR, Canada) Dorit Kluge ∆ (VICTORIA | International University, Berlin, Germany)The Sound of Art Experience: Between Longing for Silence and the Need for Communicative Exchange in MuseumsMuseums and society have entered a close symbiosis from the very beginning (Habermas, 1962). This arises from the interaction of artwork, exhibition design, architect...

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...

Organizer: Ayaka Yoshimizu ∆ (Asian Studies, UBC, Canada)In this interdisciplinary panel, we put three studies on the transnational movement of different research objects in conversation with each other. By disorienting or refashioning sensorial experiences across borders, these papers explore how the cultural consumption of different texts and materials reveal new understandings of racialized or persecuted bodies, identities and cultures. Building on his experiences of consuming il...