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 LB-205 Ehsan Akbari (Faculty of Education, University of New Brunswick, Canada)Sensing the Environmental through Art EducationIn this presentation, I will explore ways educators can integrate art and sensory education to sensitize learners to environmental issues. Bertling (2023) argued for the urgency of incorporating eco-pedagogy in art education to inspire a generation of ecologically aware citizens. Such teaching aims to nourish l...

Room LB-322 Has the world become more triggering—or are people too sensitive these days? Over the past ten years, cultural controversy over trigger warnings has skyrocketed. Understandings of who trigger warnings are for, as well as what they may make possible, have become as ubiquitous as they are inconsistent in scholarly literature and popular discourses. Do trigger warnings help people to learn about that which is distressing, harmful, and injurious ...

See the Catalogue of Artworks in the Multisensory and Virtual Art Galleries for the abstract for this performance piece.

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...

In Pink Light is a ritual performance generated through vision, play, and sensory impulse. This multisensory ritual-performance is a choreography for two dancers that explores themes of transformation through a neurodivergent lens. Through movement, we articulate heightened fusion with (and as) nature. It follows earlier work centered around the Underworld; this phase of research shifts into a Middle Earth exploration—an imagined container of lush, shape-...

In "Learning(with)plants" interactive workshop we will invite one guest plant to participate in our practice-based research space of sensing and healing with plants. We will reflect on vegetal intelligence and will question what plants can teach us and how they can participate in our mutual learning to respond to the challenges of the fast-changing world. We will be sharing stories, memories, experiences, feelings, diverse knowledges and we will be writing(with)plants by shapeshifting into a ...

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...

Organizer: Vladimir Janković (Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK)The panel proposes to explore and invite conversation on the episodes of nineteenth-century phenomenology of light, air and odour as aspects of the environment (and envelopment) that are once perceived as atmospheric, optical and affective. In bringing to attention the practices associated with the realities and ideals of the European notions of the intimate, the m...

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...

Amandine Desille ∆ (Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning (IGOT), Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)Senses-to-film-to-theory? A Filmic Exploration with Ukrainian Women Practicing Heritage in PortugalWith this presentation, I attempt at bridging between sensory research, cultural heritage, migration and transnationalism. Since February 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war has brought to the fore the pressure on Ukraine to renounce its national cultural imaginary, including its c...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

Gili Hammer √ (Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)The Intersensory Nature of Inclusiveness: Crip Utopian Politics in Contested Times and PlacesThis presentation explores social inclusion through a sensory lens, focusing on the tensions and successes of utopian crip politics, particularly when intersensory experiences are negotiated. Drawing from a decade of anthropological f...

Hsuan Hsu √ (English, University of California, Davis, USA)Olfactory WorldmakingThis paper will argue that worldmaking—a concept that has been the focus of conversations in phenomenology, science fiction studies, critical ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and environmental humanities—offers a generative framework for understanding aesthetic experiments that center the sense of smell. The presentation will develop, through close analysis of literary texts and m...

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 ...

Tamás Solymosi √ & Daishi Wakizono (Heritage Studies, University of Tsukuba, Japan)Sensory Cartographies: Multisensory Mapping as a Tool for Understanding Urban SpacesThis paper introduces a methodological approach to interpreting urban distinctiveness through multi-sensory experiences, addressing the challenges in an era of increasing placelessness and global homogenisation. Our study investigates how distinct sensory experiences give rise to place-specific networks...

Mark Watson ∆ (Sociology & Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada)Voicing Difference, Dancing Objects: an Exploration of Indigenous Ainu Aesthetics as a Means of Effecting Decolonizing Action in North American MuseumsI use this paper to meditate on the value of thinking with ‘voice’ as somatic styling in the context of participatory research with Indigenous Ainu curators from Japan. Whereas ‘voice’ – or ‘voicing’ – is often employed in participatory research as an...

Organizer: Ayaka Yoshimizu ∆ (Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada)Reorienting ourselves to various multisensorial experiences, this panel brings together concepts, applications, and unintended consequences of sensory education from three different fields of intercultural learning: communication studies, language studies, and an international exchange program. To explore the ways of attuning to what is otherwise insensible or unintelligible, Sekimoto w...

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...

Organizer: Elisa Fiore ∆ (Human Geography and Spatial Planning, Utrecht University, Netherlands) Amrita Kumar-Ratta ∆ (Geography and Planning, University of Toronto, Canada)Sensing the Sexual & Reproductive Body, Sensing Place: Exploring Intergenerational Punjabi Women’s Sexual & Reproductive Place-Identities in Sub/Urban Ontario and British ColumbiaAmong the Punjabi diaspora in Canada, the topic of sexual & reproductive health is often shro...

Room EV 6.270Firat Erdim, Field Harp from 12h30-13h30

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...

Organizer: Firat Erdim ∆ (Architecture, Iowa State University, USA)The Field Harp is an ensemble of 16-25 single-string electric aeolian (wind-activated) harps. Aeolian harps are usually considered passive instruments, akin to wind-chimes. The Field Harp is instead designed to be held, oriented, and played in active collaboration with the wind. Each string is a point in the field. The wind blows differently across each point. The subtle differences across the field of sound enables us ...

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...

Organizer: Carsten Stabenow ∆This proposal is a data sensing and sonification approach focused on monitoring and comparing water qualities with a modular and lightweight field-kit. A sensor-data-input/CV-output module on Arduino base can monitor basic water quality parameters – pH-value, Total Dissolved Solids (TDS), Dissolved oxygen (DO), Oxidation-Reduction Potential (ORP) and temperature. The CV outputs can be patched to a VCLFO/VCO circuit and filter banks to generate an audio and ...

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...

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...

Organizer: Michele Granzotto ∆ (University of Naples "Federico II", Department of Social Science)I propose a workshop on ‘Performing Arts Oriented Social Research’. The focus will be on the capacity for self-perception in relation to the Other and the relevance of this Art-Based methodology. After a short theoretical introduction to theatre as a method of social research, we will explore some exercises taken from theatre training and creative writing to observe how a PAOSR workshop pro...

Organizer: Vitalija Povilaityte Petri √ (Brussels Health Gardens, Belgium)Join People Need People session, in which we will be tending together to art of sensing, noticing and care across multiple contexts (economy, education, art, technology, science, media, ecology, family and others). It is an invitation for tasting the vitality by immersing into our relationships and living stories. Our conversations will include participants across diverse (re)search fields to discuss what is pres...

Organizers: Joe Sussi √ and Megan Hayes √ (History of Art and Architecture (Sussi); Environmental Studies (Hayes), University of Oregon, USA)This panel explores sensing with, through, and across multispecies bodies and geographies as a framework for critiquing Western scientific knowledge production. By calibrating to the sensorium of oysters, poisonous plants, and other bodies, we analyze how attunement to the more-than-human reveals distributions of environmental violence, as well...

Organizer: Maxime MichaudThis 15-minutes original performance, titled [HYPER]aesthesilatio, engages with the concepts of Umwelt (von Uexküll, 1934), enaction (Varela, Thompson, Rosch, 1991) and habituation (Thompson & Spencer, 1966; Rankin et al., 2009). Also drawing on Schwab’s notion of “transposition” (2018), it aims to transpose and isolate “harmonic” sensory characteristics – both musical and spatial frequencies – captured through field recordings in environments with/without...

Organizer: Akihisa Iwaki ∆ (Kindai University, Japan)Scented Acrylic Colors (https://camp-fire.jp/projects/777431/view) is a scented acrylic paint released at the end of 2024.This innovative product is a collaboration between @aroma’s "100% pure natural essential oils" and Holbein’s high-quality acrylic paints, Acrylic Color (Heavy Body). The project began with a meeting between Masaki Taniguchi (affectionately known as Maa-chan), a visually impaired painter, and scenting design...

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...

Organizer: Eduardo Abrantes ∆ (Communication and Arts, Roskilde University, Denmark)In the global north, our relationship with the climate crisis is marked by a paradox: despite an abundance of scientific data clearly indicating a state of concern, societal action remains diffuse and ineffective (Cologna et al., 2024; Rowland et al., 2022; Viet-Phuong et al., 2024). We are not acting on what we know. Is it because we cannot bridge a lived ethics with a knowledge-based worldview? Are we...

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: Leena Samin Naqvi with Danielle Wilde (Umeå University, Umeå Institute of Design)In this workshop, participants will be tasked with: painting yoghurt on food safe butter paper; pegging it to a line, to dry; addressing an envelope to someone with whom they wish (or imagine) co- creating culture; adding a note, poem or desire, and yoghurt-making instructions that poetically detail the microbial and environmental meeting and making, noting what elements can (seemingly) be con...

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 ...

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...

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...

Organizer: David Garneau ∆ (Visual Arts, University of Regina, Canada)  David Garneau ∆ (Visual Arts, University of Regina, Canada)The Extended Field of Indigenous Traditional and Contemporary ArtMétis Sensuality is a panel consisting of three artists struggling to make art that expresses the complexity of contemporary, urban, Indigenous lived experience inflected by Métis specificity. According to Plains Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and do...

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 ...

Organizer: Crystal Lee (Schwarzman College of Computing and Comparative Media Studies / Writing, MIT, USA)This panel discussion brings together scholars of STS, engineering, and Media Studies to explore how technologies have been reshaping embodied experience across different sensory domains. Panelists will examine developments in multisensory representation, from vibrotactile musical devices to screen reader-friendly data visualizations, to explore how haptic and audio technologies ca...

Innovobot Labs is an innovation Design House, dedicated to tackling real-world problems through the development and application of cutting-edge technologies. Innovobot’s mission is to foster innovation across industries for the benefit of society. This event is of particular relevance to those interested in the development of haptic technologies. Places are limited. Pre-registration is required.Here is the link to register fo...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

Karis Jade Petty √ (Anthropology, University of Sussex, Brighton)Landscapes made Visible: Seeing in the Mind’s Eye for the Non-congenitally Sight ImpairedEven when there is no vision through the anatomical eyes, people who are non-congenitally sight impaired often describe “visual” experiences of the landscape through “seeing in the mind’s eye”. This imaginative sight is a ‘way of seeing’ through eyes of another time and can be understood as a ‘phantom vision’. Intentiona...

Organizer: Jarkko Toikkanen √ (English, University of Oulu, Finland)Our joint panel of two 90-minute sessions with three papers each explores how technological designs both old and new enable sensory access in professional and artistic contexts. We represent a variety of backgrounds across language, literature, and media studies to demonstrate and argue for new ways of putting into practice theoretical and methodological solutions regarding critical disability studies on the senses

Organizer: Simon Hajdini ∆ (Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)The panel “Ecologies of Enjoyment: Psychoanalysis and the Environment” takes its cue from the concept of “extimacy” first proposed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan with the goal of sketching out its salience for psychoanalytic ecology. The structure implied in the notion of extimacy signals that the duality of system—environment eludes the polarity between interiority and exteriority, the inside and t...

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...

Brian Glenney ∆ (Philosophy, Norwich University, UK)Animal Senses in the AnthropoceneThe mass of human-made things now exceeds the mass of natural things, a sign of our new Anthropocene age. This has introduced an array of sensory changes in animals’ perception of their natural climes. Human made structures now disrupt numerous animals’ flying behaviors, adding to the already disruptive human made light sources. Underwater boat motor sounds and radar pings interfere with ...

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...

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...

Phoebe Myers (English, CUNY Graduate Center, CUNY, USA)Beyond Domination? Sensory Dissonances and Public Art’s Role in Restoring Nature’s VoiceTheodor Adorno advocated for art to be a mechanism to give voice back to nature in his book Aesthetics. This voice had been stripped from nature through the domination of industrial capitalism, and Adorno believed recovering this voice to be crucial in resolving humanity’s estrangement from nature. Adorno, however, did not think an...

Organizers: Nina Morris ∆ (School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Scotland) and Kate McLean-MacKenzie ∆ (University of Kent, UK)Plenary Participant Discussion: ‘Smell of Morning’What does the early morning smell like outdoors in the city? Is Montreal different from other locations around the world? Why does this time of day smell the way it does? How does it make us feel? In this plenary session, we will use a range of methods to interrogate and discuss ‘the smell o...

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: Rennie Tang ∆ (California State Polytechnic University Pomona, USA) • Eleni-Ira Panourgia ∆ (Gustave Eiffel University, France);• Lisa Sandlos ∆ (Brock University, Canada)• Jackie Martin ∆ (Biodiversity Coordinator, Office of Sustainability, Concordia University, Canada)• Rebecca Tittler ∆ (Loyola College for Diversity and Sustainability, Concordia University, Canada)• Maya Lach-Aidelbaum ∆ (Communication Studies, Concordia University, Canada)• Li...

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...

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...

Organizer: Melissa Park (School of Physical and Occupational Therapy / Culture Mental Health Research Unit, Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, Canada)This round table brings together emerging scholars and expert discussants in the fields of sensory ethnography and 1st person, experience-near critical phenomenological frameworks in anthropology to discuss the affordances and limitations of immersive technology/techniques for understanding “inter” experiences. Drawin...

Peter Sebastian Chesney (History of Art & Architecture, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, USA)Burning Rich, Burning Lean: Expertise and the Smell of Automobile ExhaustThis paper offers a comparative history of two 20th-Century global cities: Los Angeles and Berlin. L.A. acquired a reputation for its "smog" after World War Two. Rich with unburned carbon fumes from the exhaust pipes of automobiles, the region's air reacted with sunlight to form a thick, dark, eye-stingi...

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...

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...

Aurélie Roy-Bourbeau ∆ (Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Canada)Within and Beyond Sight: An Ethnography of People with Visual ImpairmentIn this presentation, I will share the findings of my research conducted over the past two years and a half with individuals who have visual disabilities. This research explores the lived experiences of people whose vision differs from what is expected. Each participant has developed unique strategies to navigate their d...

Kelly Keenan ∆ (Département de danse, UQAM, Canada)Fluid Confluence(s): Plural Ways of Knowing in DanceThis article recognises that the dance class, and the fields of practice that we relate to in dance, pull along values, ways of knowing, normalised beliefs and cultural histories. Practice is never isolated: it is always relational and distinct. Using the 2024 Montreal Movement Educators Forum: Fluid Confluence(s) as a case study, this article explores how to unsettle d...

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...

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...

Room EV 6.270Lindsey French and Alex Young

Organizer: Erin Hassard (Communication Studies, Concordia University, Canada)The struggle of discourse around abortion is the tension between the external patriarchal constructs and the epistemological nuances of having a uterus. In order to generously explore that discourse, space needs to be created that holds the weight of the issue but frees the participants from carrying it. Thus, I have created a game similar to "Cards Against Humanity". The game itself carries flippant connotati...

Organizer: Melissa Park (School of Physical and Occupational Therapy / Culture Mental Health Research Unit, Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, Canada)Speakers:• Emily Bain (Concordia University);• Martina Padovani (McGill University);• Meena Ramachandran (McGill University);• Tamara Stecyk and Vincent Laliberté (McGill University);• Havana Xeros (Douglas Mental Health University Institute, Montreal, Canada)Discussant:• Florian Grond ...

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...

Organizer: Agustine Zegers ∆ (Santiago, Chile)Atmo-poiesis will be an olfactory workshop inviting an embodied awareness of how atmospheres reveal our embeddedness in systems of ecological collapse and emergence. The workshop will underscore Stacy Alaimo’s conception of Transcorporeality: inviting participants into a felt sense of the porosity of our bodies, and how much we are trans-touched by ecological shifts, material macrocosms, and a consortium of beings and animacies. Atmo-poiesi...

Room LB-207Organizer: Stephanie Grey ∆ with Christine Gallagher ∆ (Stir Copenhagen, USA) Invigorate your body and mind and participate in an experiential and creative workshop. Your point ofview is found through your senses as you focus on taste, texture, smell, sight and sound as a means toconnect with your surroundings. A sensory-focused methodology will guide you. We aim to expand yourpersonal awareness, as well as to help broaden and strength...

Organizers: Tim Horvath ∆ with Matthew Kirtkpatrick ∆ (Warren Wilson MFA Program in Writing/Phillips Exeter English Department, Stratham, USA)In this creative writing workshop, the leaders–writers whose recent projects push the boundaries of how language can be used to describe and evoke the non–visual (sound, scent, and texture)--will share writing activities designed to guide participants into fresh linguistic and conceptual zones. After reading from their own work, workshop leaders ...

Organizer: Natan Diacon-Furtado ∆ (The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (Electronic Arts), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)Community Portal is an open-source decolonial collaborative technology for listening with your more-than-human community and local watershed. Engaging with practices of ancestral imagination (Petra Kuppers) and recuperation (Marlon Jiménez Oviedo) this workshop will explore the potential for urban computing and pervasive media to allow for a r...

Tin Cugelj ∆ (Independent scholar and IMS Study Group - Auditory History)‘Death was chasing us’: The Sea as a Sensory Agent of Early Modern Community FormationOn 13 October 1494, Pietro Casola experienced a storm during a pilgrimage. Driven by the intensity of the multisensorial experience, he wrote: “The following night the sea was so agitated that every hope of life was abandoned by all; I repeat by all ... Death was chasing us” (Casola 1494: 323). With the overwhelming...

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...

Organizers: Jennifer Biddle √ (Ethnographic Media Lab (emLAB), UNSW Art & Design, Australia) and Tess Lea √ (Macquarie University, Australia) Jennifer Loureide Biddle √Live wire and speculative ethnographyThis is a new work of creative non-fiction as an experiment in speculative writing, attention and attestation. My interest is in the heritage and circulation of affect as techno-electric current and currency in writing a certain history of the pres...

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...

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...

Sylvie Grosjean ∆ (University of Ottawa, Canada)Feeling Through Screens: Developing "Sensory Awareness" for Sensing at a Distance during Medical VideoconsultationsLupton & Maslen (2017) have highlighted the importance of examining the sensory aspects of clinical consultations using telemedicine devices. They have studied the entanglement of technology, bodies, affect, and sensory cues in clinical practice, emphasizing the role of these elements in supporting what they...

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...

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 ...

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...

Organisers: Dorit Kluge∆ & Isabelle Pichet∆The increasing opening of private collections and the establishment of public museums in the 18th century created a form of public sphere that had been unknown until then (Habermas, 1962). In the close interplay between architecture, exhibition and works of art, completely new individual and social mechanisms of perception were set in motion for the viewers. In this context, multisensory perception, in contrast to purely visual p...

Lena Ferriday (History, University of Bristol, UK)Meeting Points: Tactile Bodily Encounters in Rural Britain, 1840-1914In recent years, sensory historians have begun to re-emphasise the physicality of sensation: its ‘realness’. There is disagreement amongst sensory historians about how to engage with this somatic realm of the sensory past whilst maintaining a commitment to understanding the senses as historically contingent and distant from ourselves. In this paper, I pro...

Ana Maria Ulloa √ (Anthropology, Universidad de los Andes)Better Smelling Through ChemistryIn the talk I will focus on how olfactory training for chemistry students interested in studying the aroma of tropical fruits has occurred at different periods and across the classroom, the laboratory, and the industry in Colombia. I will highlight chemists' perceptions about the importance of this type of training for their research and work and how sensory training opportunities a...

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...

Organizers: Florian Grond, Caro VerbeekThis commemorative session celebrates the life and work of Piet Devos (1983–2024), a Belgian writer, literary scholar, and passionate advocate for disability arts. A postdoctoral fellow at Concordia University's Centre for Sensory Studies in 2016, Piet's work bridged literature, sensory studies, and disability studies in deeply original ways. Blind since childhood, his intellectual and artistic pursuits were grounded in his embodied underst...

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 ...

Organizer: Simon Hajdini ∆ (Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia) Amy McLachlan (Field Museum, Chicago)Substituting a Life in Common: Surrogation and Sense-Work with Uitoto Plant WorkersThis paper considers the ethical implications of a capacity that I provisionally call ‘surrogation’: the capacity to bear, or to carry, for another, or, a demand of another to bear or carry something in them that is not of them. This figure emerges as a double-e...

Sohail Kajal (Interdisciplinary Humanities, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC), Concordia University, Canada)Outlines of the Non-sensuous Perception of UntouchabilityRecent scholarship on caste in India has opened inquiries on the sensorial dimensions of the perception of untouchability and their effects on the production of a caste-based sociality. The inquiries however limit their understanding of perception as mediated via the senses and i...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

Swati Chatterjee √ (History, Katwa College, Burdwan University, India)Striking the Auditory Chord of Harmony: The Rise of the Attentive Listener in Nineteenth Century CalcuttaThe paper proposes to understand the accentuated attention of the aural sensibility that took place increasingly from the middle of the nineteenth century in colonial Calutta by focusing on the evolution of interaction between music and songs and the audience in the colonial metropolis. Historicising...

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...

Room EV 6.270Vicky Sabourin

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...

Organizer: Elee Kraljii Gardiner ∆ and Eduardo Abrantes ∆ (Roskilde University and Medical Museion Copenhagen; Poet Laureate of Vancouver)In this participatory workshop, we invite people to create a soundtrack to a video based on “Changed and Changing”, an ecopoem about decay through exposure to natural processes by Elee Kraljii Gardiner. Part of an ongoing collaboration begun in Berlin in 2024 between the author and sound artist Eduardo Abrantes, this investigation explores the potent...

Kevin Hunt and David Johnson (School of Art & Design, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham; School of Arts & Humanities, Royal College of Art, London, UK)‘Picture Yourself in a Boat on a River’: A Collaborative Exploration of the Mental Image through Blindness and AphantasiaThis collaborative presentation will explore the mental image from different perspectives on an expansive spectrum of vision, with particular interest in the experiences of seeing and not-se...

Organizer: Lilia Mestre∆Collaborators/performers: Diego Gil∆; Valentina Plata∆; Heather Anderson∆; VK Preston∆; Aaron Richmond∆; Esteban Donoso∆ 

Organizer: Warsame Isse ∆ (Communication Studies, Concordia University, Canada)Black technopoetics is a term coined by Louis Chude-Sokei that refers to the intersection between creative expression, technology and Blackness according to Louise Chude-Sokei. I am implementing this concept as I utilize guitar pedals and haptic transducers to hear, feel and distort the sonic media that is a part of my Somali intangible cultural heritage. Intangible cultural heritage (here after referred to ...

Organizer: Dona nham ∆ (Communication Studies, Concordia University, Canada)Just as the saying goes, "a picture is worth a thousand words," embodied practice reveals a thousand senses. How do we articulate the visceral experience of living under white supremacy, colonialism, and neoliberalism? These forces evoke profound sensations and emotions such as loss, grief, confusion and fragmentation—of being everywhere yet nowhere. For those in the diaspora, like myself, whose families were d...

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: Abou Farman ∆ (Anthropology, The New School for Social Research, NYC, USA)This workshop is designed to help us think-feel our way into such questions as the following: How do we sense absence? How may we sense in ways we didn’t know we could, beyond the normative, secular entrainment of ‘our’ sensory apparatus? How might such possibilities and capabilities orient us differently to death and the afterlife?Based on my academic research, work in performance and Butoh, as we...

Olya Zikrata ∆ (Center for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)In the Buzz of "Human Safari": Designing the Gamified War in Ukraine“Human Safari” is a terror campaign launched by the Russian military in Ukraine's frontline municipalities, turning these areas into hunting grounds where drones deliberately target human and nonhuman beings. Thinking from the standpoint of design of safari hunting – marked by its racialized dynamics and violence toward nonhuman othe...

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...

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...

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. ...

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...

Hayleigh Giesbrecht (Faculty of Information, University of Toronto)Palpable Pasts: Affect, Materiality, and ASMR in GLAMASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is a “sensory phenomenon in which individuals experience a tingling, static-like sensation across the scalp, back of the neck and at times further areas in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli” (Barratt & Davis, 2015, p. 1). First identified in 2010, ASMR has since evolved into a popu...

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...

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...