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...

Audrey Colonel-Coquet (Université Grenoble Alpes/LARHRA, France)The Smell of Leather, From the Material to Fragrances, in the Light of History: The Example of Russia LeatherSurrounded by myths and legends, Russia leather is at the heart of a whole collective imagination. It is said to have originated by chance, when a cavalryman in the Russian army rubbed his boots against the bark of birch trees, making them waterproof . One story has it that it resurfaced in the 1970s,...

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...

Sofia Livi ∆ (Scuola Normale Superiore, Italy)Affective Perception and the Sense of the SelfIn my presentation, I explore how the sense of the self is shaped by olfactory experiences. The methods that I use are the ones of phenomenology and empirically informed philosophy of mind. First of all, I try to define what to mean with the term ‘self’, and the notion of personal identity that is at stake there. The problem that I want to tackle is the one usually labelled as bein...

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...

Anna Young ∆ (Communication & Culture, York University, UK)The Pain Scarf: A Tactile AutopathographyThe presentation will fall within the medicine and the senses theme. Part of my dissertation will include an autoethnographic exploration of my tonsillectomy operation scheduled for November 2024. I am inspired by such ‘autopathographies’ (accounts of one’s own illness) as Lochlann Jain’s "Malignant" to document the process of the operation and recovery, while supplemen...

Cassandra Jones ∆ (Department of Integrated Studies in Education, McGill University, Canada)Sensing Care: Poetic and Multisensory Approaches to Healthcare EnvironmentsThis paper explores the role of the sensory environment for people who are seriously ill or at end of life, using poetic inquiry as a rich, arts-based approach to sensory ethnography. Poetry offers a unique way to capture the essence of embodied experiences within healthcare environments.Poetry can he...

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...

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 ...

Karla Berrens √ (Sociology, University of Barcelona, Spain)Being a Devil with a Brain InjuryI am a devil. I have a TBI. I will not quit.I have been researching the body in space and the making of place during Barcelona’s ‘correfocs’ for the last five years. ‘Correfocs’ are street performances where a group of people, called devils, dance to the sound of drummers whilst doing a very loud performance with different types of fire artifacts. This is intrinsically part of ...

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...

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 ...

Karolina Nikielska-Sekuła ∆ (Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw, Poland)Feeling The Home/Feeling At Home: a Translocal Multisensoriality Of HomeThe metaphor of "home" is often used by migrants in reference to their sense of belonging— both from a long-term perspective as a process of settling in a new location, and in the context of temporary experiences of familiarity that evoke a sense of home in the here and now. This presentation, employing a multisens...

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...