Room LB-207 Aaron Richmond and Tamar Tembeck (Post doctorial researcher, Concordia University / Artistic Director, OBORO Gallery, Montreal, Canada)Navigation Without a Compass - Reflections on Curating the WAYFINDERS exhibition We wish to present some critical reflections on the exhibition WAYFINDERS, to be presented at the MAI in April 2026. WAYFINDERS explores how we orient ourselves in our bodies, within the universe, and among...

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...

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...

Marko Zivkovic ∆ (Anthropology, University of Alberta, Canada)The Whispering hand-plane: Unifying Senses in a Woodworking WorkshopWoodworker-philosopher James Krenov paid minute attention to senses in the workshop: a simple handmade wooden plane is the “cabinetmaker’s Stradivarius.” Tuned perfectly, it gives you a “soft whispering sound” as it makes fine, thin shavings that shimmer in the light. What “confederates the senses,” say Michel Serres, is body in balance and mov...

Organizer: Manon Raffard (Université de Bourgogne, France)Discussant: William Tullett (History, York University, UK)This multidisciplinary online panel proposes to focus on non-human olfaction in an interspecies perspective to foster critical and interdisciplinary collaborations across the humanities and especially amongst ECRs. The panel’s main objectives are to 1) put forward nose-fi...

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...

Organizers: Jennifer Biddle √ (Ethnographic Media Lab (emLAB), UNSW Art & Design, Australia) &Tess Lea √ (Macquarie University, Australia) Jennifer Biddle √ and Tess Lea √Introduction to Making not Taking CultureThis panel (9-papers, 2-days) is on new arts engaged platforms and cultural formations taking shape exploring radical practice and sensory methodologies. Bringing together key practitioners and community projects in the field, the panel ...

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...

Organizer: Jarkko Toikkanen (English, University of Oulu, Finland) Juha-Pekka Alarauhio (University of Oulu, Finland)The Blind Bard at Work: Senses, Human Technologies, and Paradise Lost in John Milton’s Artistic ProductionSince Homer, famously known as “the blind man who dwells in rugged Chios,” (Thucydides), the theme of visual impairment has been central to narratives about poets and their creative abilities. This image of the blind bard, reinforcing...

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...

Elizabeth Davis ∆ (Sociology and Anthropology / Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada; Department of Social Justice Education, OISE/University of Toronto, Canada) “I know it when I see it”: Liberalism Sensing the ObsceneContrary to US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous evaluation of pornography as something that the good judge knows when he sees, this paper traces how obscenity and pornography have never been quite so easily discerned. I...

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...

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...

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...

Clara Muller (Independent scholar)A Sense of Connection: Reclaiming Smell as a Medium for Multispecies Encounters in Contemporary ArtWithin “naturalist ontology” (Descola 2005), modern Westerners have lost touch with the knowledge and relationships that smell enables—not only with other humans but also with other- than-humans. Yet, given that smell constitutes a shared biological ground for almost all life on Earth, learning to make a conscious, informed and de-centered u...

Abi Smith (Geography, University of Cambridge, UK)Fluvial Infrastructures, Embodied Evidence, and The Limits of Sensory GovernanceThe majority of England’s rivers are widely evidenced as toxic and harmful to health. The most recent ‘State of our Rivers’ report by The Rivers Trust (2024) found that no river or stretch of water in England can be categorised as in ‘good’ status. Whilst reports of slushy-coloured water and green algal blooms pervade descriptions of these spac...

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 ...

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 ...

Alex Young and Lindsey French (Department of Art, University of Maine, USA)Olfactory Media Library: Atmospheres as Shared and Multispecies CommonsIn this presentation, we will give an overview of our project, the Olfactory Media Library (OML): a moveable expandable field research and creation station, equipped with modules containing DIY olfactory tools, technologies, and instructions for tuning our noses to our atmospheres. We will also introduce the project’s website (l...

Rumela Chatterjee (Sociology, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence (SNIoE), India)Smelling with the Experts: An Ethnography of a Fragrance Laboratory in KannaujThis paper explores laboratory as a critical node in the fragrance commodity chain where flowers and essential oils are transformed into attar and perfume. In my ethnography, the laboratory emerges as a space not only for the transformation of a natural product into a bottled commodity but also for the external valid...

Véronique Servais & Magali Ollagnier-Beldame (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Liege, Belgium)Sensory Conversation with a Forest. Experiencing the Forest as Umwelt.The paper will present the results of a research that aims to document how ordinary people engage in the process of sensory meaning making with a forest environment. The encounter with the forest from which the data were collected took place during a 2 hours’ workshop under the guidance of a drama te...

Mark Peter Wright (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice, University of the Arts, London)Sensing, Sounding and Sense-making with WhalesongThis paper examines multisensory cultures of listening within the scientific study of whalesong. As all corners of terrestrial life are impacted by the ongoing effects of humans, so too are the aquatic worlds of marine mammals. For decades, whalesong has provided the sonic signature for scientific and social scrutiny, be it from nois...