Welcome to Uncommon Senses IV: Sensory Ecologies, Economies and Aesthetics! We are delighted you can join us. The conference will be hybrid – in-person and on-line – and promises to be sensational in both formats. There is a tremendous richness and diversity to the abstracts you submitted, for which we thank you.

This conference has a history which stretches back over two decades to the staging of the first Uncommon Senses conference in May of 2000. Various smaller conferences followed until things resumed with Uncommon Senses II in 2018 and Uncommon Senses III in 2021. The pace has picked up, and so have the numbers, dramatically.

Here are some program highlights:

There will be four Plenary Addresses, by Kathleen Sitter (Wednesday) and Constance Classen (Thursday), Charles Spence (Friday) and Hsuan Hsu (Saturday) – all leading exponents of the sensorial revolution in the arts and human sciences.

Some of the more prominent themes addressed in the Individual Papers include: eco-sensing, sensory ethnography, multimodal/intermedia art, fashioning the senses, capitalism and the senses, the bureaucratization of the senses, sensory and environmental justice, sensory and neuro-diversity, sensory design, sensory museology, sensory speculation, and the more-than-human sensorium. There will be 10 panels, including “Haptic Ecologies of Attention, Performance, and Action” organized by David Parisi (College of Charleston, Communication) and “Sensoria: The Art and Science of Our Senses” organized by Joel Ong (Sensorium Centre for Digital Art and Technology, York University).

The conference will also feature numerous Workshops, including “Clapping to the Beat of Piet” (Mondrian) with Caro Verbeek (Kuntsmuseum den Haag), “Walking with our Senses: Grounded Pedagogical Encounters at Loyola Campus” led by Elizabeth Miller (Concordia University, Communications) and her crew; and, “Deep Gazing” by the Sisters of the Celestial Order of Nephology (Nina Vroemen and Erin Hill).

The conference will have a strong and variegated aroma: the Odeuropa research team will be back; Jas Brooks (University of Chicago, Computer Science) will odorize you with a presentation entitled “To Believe, Breathe AromaRama: Cinema’s Aerosol Age”; and the Paris-based trio of Pamela Roberts, Christel Sadde, and Anne Flipo will scent the atmosphere with their installation artwork “Parfum mobile #1."  

There will be a Multisensory Art Gallery and a Virtual Art Gallery (the artists will be “in” to respond to questions about their work at set times throughout the conference), a physical Book Display and a Virtual Book Exhibition, where you can browse the latest sensory studies titles (if you have published a book within the past four years, please send details – title, link to webpage, conference discount order form (if any) – to senses@concordia.ca so we can see about including it). 

A tentative conference schedule can be seen here and the conference program –with a full list of titles, abstracts and bios – will be posted in early April.

Registration will open at 3:00 pm on Wednesday, May 3 and the conference will kick off with a keynote by Kathleen Sitter at 5:00 pm followed by a reception that same evening. There will be a second reception, entitled “A Feast for the Senses” following the keynote by Charles Spence on Friday, May 5. The conference will close at 5:30 pm on the Saturday, May 6.

Conference Organizing Committee: David Howes (Sociology and Anthropology), Jordan LeBel (Marketing), Geneviève Sicotte (Études françaises), and Miranda Smitheram (Design and Computation Arts)

Conference Coordinator: Pamela Tudge (Individualized PhD Program)

Communications Coordinator: Craig Farkash (Social and Cultural Analysis PhD Program)

Event Logistics Coordinator: Stephanie Croteau (Conference Services, Hospitality Concordia)

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to e-mail us at senses@concordia.ca

David Howes

Chair, Uncommon Senses III

Co-Director, Centre for Sensory Studies

Professor, Sociology and Anthropology

Concordia University, Montreal

Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Law

McGill University, Montreal