Leah Nieboer
she/her
Leah Nieboer is a poet, Deep Listener, graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and current PhD candidate in English & Literary Arts at the University of Denver. Her debut book, SOFT APOCALYPSE, was selected by Andrew Zawacki for the 2021 Georgia Poetry Prize (UGA Press, 2023), nominated for a 2024 Elgin Award, and named a best debut collection of 2023 by Poets & Writers Magazine. She is the winner of the 2022 Mountain West Writers’ Contest in Poetry, and the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Denver, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts at Mt. San Angelo and the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in mercury firs, the Brooklyn Rail, Oversound, Poetry Daily, Interim: A Journal of Poetry & Poetics, HERE, and elsewhere. She lives in Denver, Colorado, USA, where she teaches, edits, co-hosts The Ritter, a new cultural podcast.
Sessions in which Leah Nieboer 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...
See the Catalogue of Artworks in the Multisensory and Virtual Art Galleries for the abstract for this performance piece.
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...
The sound, video, performative site-specific intervention Nous sommes au cinéma will be presented in Cinéma moderne’s projection room. In order to highlight the very sensorial sense of presence in this piece, the site-specific experience is necessary. The relationships between seeing, listening and touching are tightened by a confusing sense of what is real or not. In order to address the huge challenges that are linked to the environmental collapse, I strongly believe that it is not only o...
Thursday 8 May, 2025
Kristian North (INDI, Concordia University, Canada)The Haptic Sound Field: Spatial aspects of Haptic Aurality in Acoustic and Electroacoustic DiffusionThis article explores the haptic dimension of acoustic fields, considering its influence on the perception and construction of actual and virtual spaces. A ‘haptic aurality’ (introduced in a recent article for Organised Sound (North 2024, Cambridge Press)) is developed, including sometimes contradictory accounts of ‘haptics...
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...
Scott McMaster (Art, Design, and Media, Sunway University, Malaysia)Sensory Field Research in Art & DesignThis presentation explores how sensory field research enhances design thinking and perception of urban spaces, drawing from fieldwork conducted in Hong Kong's Mong Kok and Busan’s Seomyeon. Initially conceived as a pedagogical tool in a visual arts research methods course, a sensory scavenger hunt in Mong Kok prompted graduate students to engage with their environ...
Anna Harris ∆ (Department of Society Studies, Maastricht University, The Netherlands)The Sensory Potential of Hospital MatterIn this talk I will explore the sensory potential of materials in the context of the hospital. Hospitals are currently seen as sites of clinical waste, using excessive single-use plastics and disposables, generating mountains of rubbish. Inside hospitals however, people work with materials in many different ways. They might find new uses of objects ...
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...
Zoe Silverman ∆ (UC Berkeley School of Education, USA)"They Sing Songs": (Re)considering Touch as Sensory Pedagogy in MuseumsThis paper (re)considers touch as a pedagogical strategy and epistemic modality in contemporary museums. A close study of two objects at the Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) —an abalone shell as “handling object” and an encased Klamath River woman’s dance skirt as “artifact” — illuminates the tensions that arise when museums deploy multisensory d...
Organizers: Jennifer Biddle √ (Ethnographic Media Lab (emLAB), UNSW Art & Design, Australia) & Tess Lea √ (Macquarie University, Australia) Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu √ and Marc Peckham √Ngurra Kurlu (HOME): Creating an embodied understanding of desert culture through artProf Wanta Jampijinpa Pawu-Kurlpurlurnu and his 90 year old father Jerry Jangala Patrick are fully initiated First Nations Elders from the remote Warlpiri community ...
Friday 9 May, 2025
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 ...
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...
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 ...
Kristine Dizon (Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Concordia University, Canada)Listening as Resistance: Decolonizing Sonic Poetry and the Politics of SoundThis presentation explores how decolonizing listening methodologies can serve as tools of resistance in sonic poetry. By examining the role of sound in reclaiming marginalized voices, this study argues that sonic poetry subverts traditional frameworks that often other non-Western practices. Using case studies such as Rose Co...
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...
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...
Jo Michael Rezes (Theater & Performance, Tufts University / Emerson College (Affiliated Faculty), Somerville USA)Sharing the Sounds of Vanilla Sex (in Viral Loads): Transnational Afterlives of HIV/AIDS in the House of Air (2017)Brendan Maclean’s House of Air (2017) music video is a campy enfleshment of the structuralist aesthetics of Gay Semiotics (1977), Hal Fischer’s photography series of sex codes for gay men in San Francisco. In House of Air, queer sex is on f...