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...

Walter Wittich ∆ (School of Optometry, Université de Montréal, Canada)Conducting Remote Research with Individuals Living with DeafblindnessThe inclusion of individuals with deafblindness in research has made considerable progress with accessible remote methods that gained traction during the Covid-19 pandemic. Communication can be facilitated through automated or manual captioning and transcription as well as through multi- user screen displays for sign-language interpr...

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...

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...

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...

Organizer: Marcel Cobussen √ (Leiden University, Netherlands) Urban atmospheres are of course experienced through more than one sense: we use our eyes, ears, skin, and nose. Besides elements that can be experienced through the senses, many other agents are active in creating a specific atmosphere: cultural perspectives, sociopolitical and economic influences, ecological or commercial interests, etc. In short, all these agents (and many more) play a role in the ways place...

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 ...

Organizer: Jayanthan Sriram ∆ (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)How do you experience light and sound in accordance to smell? If you think this question is asked backwards, with smell having to follow your sense of sound and light, you are in for a treat. Born out of a collaboration with the ITHQ (Institut de tourisme et d'hôtellerie du Québec) and ExperiSens, Modal Olfactory Atmosphere finds its second iteration as an interactive and collaborative workshop. W...

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...