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...