Susana Alves
Her
Susana Alves is an environmental psychologist working at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She holds a BA and MA in Psychology and a PhD in Architecture (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee). Dr. Alves' research examines how natural landscapes can promote health and psychological well-being, with a focus on diverse groups of people, including older people, migrants, and urban residents under stress. Her past research addresses quality-of-life issues in outdoor neighbourhood outdoor spaces as well as in institutional settings for older individuals. Strong components of her work include the use of multi-method approach to research, the emphasis on policy-related social problems, and the aim to promote culturally meaningful social and environmental interventions for diverse groups of people. Dr. Alves has engaged in research and teaching activities in environmental psychology, landscape architecture, and architecture in Brazil, US, UK, Turkey and Italy.
Sessions in which Susana Alves attends
Wednesday 7 May, 2025
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...
Thursday 8 May, 2025
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...
Elisabeth Tangerner √ (History (Medieval History), University of Salzburg, Austria)Sensing the Divine: Sensory Experience and Space in the Late Medieval Benedictine Abbey of Lambach (Austria)In the cloistered worlds of late medieval monastic life, sensory perception had a decisive inpact on the spiritual experience and communal identity of conventuals. This paper explores how sensory worlds were created, experienced and discussed in the Benedictine Abbey of Lambach (Upper...
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 ...
Emily Collins (Cinema and Media Studies, School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, York University)Sounding a Clearing: Intimate Encounters in Otherwise ListeningRecognizing processes of sonic marginalization, contemporary sound scholars increasingly orient their work towards historical contexts and theoretical frameworks that emphasize diversity, intercultural understandings, and th...
Elena Giulia Abbiatici √ (POLI.Design, Milan / Albertina Academy of Fine Arts, Turin, Italy)The Sensory Experience of Menstruation: Transforming Stigma into Posthuman Powerful PossibilitiesMenstruation has long been subject to religious, cultural, social taboos, associated with impurity and shame. During World War II, Nazi doctors in concentration camps, like Auschwitz, administered synthetic steroids to female prisoners to suppress menstrual cycles, permanently compromis...
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...
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...
Anwesha Sengupta (MESAAS, Columbia University, USA)Sensing Cities Word by Word: Examining the Motif of “description of cities” across Avadhi Sufi Romance Narratives in IndiaIn this paper, I close-read descriptions of cities in Avadhi Sufi romance narratives in premodern India. Through this reading I show inter-textual relations in the image of the city portrayed by different poets. The corpus I discuss here comprises the four main texts of the Avadhi romance narrative gen...
Friday 9 May, 2025
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: Florian Grond (Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University, Canada)This roundtable brings together artists Bouchard, Bucionis, Johnson, and Hunt, each working across different sensory modalities, to challenge conventional assumptions about perception and imagination. By exploring how imagination emerges through diverse sensory experiences—starting with but extending beyond the dominance of visual perception—this discussion offers new perspectives on communication, crea...
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 ...
Rosalin Benedict ∆ (Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada)Interembodied Attentiveness: Vibrational Encounters between Clinical Herbalists and Medicinal PlantsI intend to present a chapter on my ongoing thesis that explores how clinical herbalists cultivate, experience and express their felt, synergetic relationships with medicinal plants; and how the interconnectedness of humans and plants contributes to a more ecological and embodied approach to wellbe...
Aaron Benavidez (Sociology, Harvard University, USA)From Organ to Receptor? The Future of the Western Scientific SensoriumIt is not uncommon to fasten the “Western” sensorial system to Aristotle who imagined the human senses as a quintet comprising sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch (Aristotle [c. 350 BCE] 1957b:219; Classen 1993). By the first half of the 19th Century—at the time Auguste Comte attempted to organize the sciences—the five-part conceptualization would re...
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...
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 ...
Erika Wicky ∆ (Departments of History and Art History, Université de Grenoble, France)A Taste for the Scent of Sugar: Perfumery and Confectionery in 19th-Century FranceWhile the role of synthetic materials such as coumarin, heliotropin, and vanillin in the development of the perfume industry at the end of the 19th century is often acknowledged, it is frequently overlooked that these substances were initially used to flavor candies and liquors—two highly sweetened product...
Saturday 10 May, 2025
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 ...
Malcolm Troon ∆ (University of Sussex, UK)Crystalised Sonic Views through Direct Proxy Observation: Reinterpreting the Sounds of Sectarianism in Belfast.The presentation takes one case study drawn from a sonic ethnography involving a diverse range of people spanning the globe that unveils sounds as dependable permanent fixtures of their sensory trajectories, which I refer to as ‘Sound Tenses.’ The specific example explores the urban environment of Belfast through a sonic ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
Organizer: Sheliza Ladhani √ (Department of Chemistry Faculty of Science, University of Calgary) • Stephanie Tyler √ (Faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary, Canada)• Sophia Marlow √ (Faculty of Science, University of Calgary, Canada)• Mairi McDermott √ (Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, Canada)• Jennifer D. Adams √ (Canada Research Chair, University of Calgary, Canada)• Kathleen C. Sitter ∆ (Canada Research Chair, Faculty of Social Work, Un...
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: Florian Grond ∆ (Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University, Canada)The climate crisis compels us to rethink how we perceive, understand, and respond to environmental change. This panel explores the interplay between sensory experience, affect, and scientific knowledge as a foundation for meaningful climate action. Beyond intellectual comprehension, the crisis calls for an attunement of our sensory capacities to detect shifts that foretell critical ecological trends. ...
Eline van Leeuwen √ (Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands)Employing Phenomenology of Psychopathology to Inform Architectural Design of Psychiatric HospitalsWe explore how embodied and phenomenological accounts of depression, mania and psychosis can inform architectural design to address disturbances of embodiment commonly experienced in these psychopathologies, fostering the restoration of patients' sensorimotor engagement with their surroundings. By bridging d...