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...

Room EV 6.270Vicky Sabourin

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...

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...