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This article serves as an introduction to the special section on Sensorial Politics, which includes articles by Nicholas Caverly, Elsa Davidson, Susan Falls and Ali Kenner. The introduction outlines the arguments of the articles before proceeding to a discussion of the common themes they illuminate as a whole. In particular, they address four key issues: the relationship between the sensorial and the political; the role of sensorial disruption and its political effects; the issue of labor; and the issue of knowledge. We conclude that while these pieces advance our understanding of the relationships between the sensorium and politics, they also open up avenues for ongoing research and theorization, particularly in our contemporary situation, in which the Covid-19 pandemic has recast sensorial politics in new ways.

In this article we argue that menthol-containing products, like chewing gums, vapour rubs and mouthwashes, are used as moral things within everyday practices. They take on moral functions because of how their material qualities contribute to sensory experiences. Specifically, we focus on scenarios in which menthol products become associated with the moral work of care and highlight the temporal dimension of what people do with moral things. We review the literature on morality as a practical, everyday accomplishment and stress the embodied nature of caring practices to outline how care is bound up with sensory experience. We draw on rich qualitative data generated through creative methods, including film, photography and sketching, as part of object-elicitation interviews, focus groups, home tours and ‘pop-up stalls’. We develop three concepts regarding the function of moral things: manifesting, anchoring and conserving moral relations to describe how time, morality and the sensory are entwined.

The article examines the primacy of vision and the work of the sensorium: the permanently under-construction seat of the senses, that absorbs and interprets information endlessly to make associations that influence food and eating. It discusses how the internet’s social media photo sharing platform Instagram plays a pivotal role in food choices as part of our taste apparatus. The article’s focus, situated in middle to high-income countries, concludes that Instagram – as a particularly visual example of social media’s attention economy is potentially part of the transformation to more sustainable and ecological eating.

The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the ‘passivation’ of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage’s heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.

When religious institutions engage the secular emotively and publicly, they can foster an affective atmosphere of religiosity, which potentially has motivational power, even for non-believers, because it shapes the sensorium of those who circulate in public space. When individuals appeal to “places animated with prayer” for the transformative energy that resides there through ritualized practices, they reaffirm an affective atmosphere of religiosity. In Orthodox Eastern Europe and elsewhere, a confessional tradition is allied with state borders, further normativizing this affective atmosphere and giving it pronounced political implications. When an affective atmosphere of religiosity inspires practices that are intentionally designed to prompt experiences rendered meaningful in otherworldly terms, over time such performativity can create mimetic instincts that become second nature. This is an essential step to religion becoming an expedient political resource and to the emergence of religious nationalism or a confessional state.

A través de la perspectiva y obra de las “Cinco pieles” del artista y arquitecto austríaco Hundertwasser, se invita a repensar la forma de permanecer en el mundo, lo que lleva a realizar una propuesta de análisis por medio de las interfaces, dejando a un lado el ámbito tecnológico y entendiéndose como lenguajes que derivan en ‘formas de interacción’ ambiental, artística y arquitectónica. Con esto se propone una visión más compleja con respecto de las “Cinco pieles” para la significación del universo, en la que se logre la convivencia equilibrada entre el animal humano, las especies no humanas y el entorno, como un todo de permanencia común. The perspective proposed in the work of the Austrian artist and architect Hundertwasser “Five skins”, invite us to rethink the way of staying in the world, which leads to an analysis through the interfaces, leaving aside the technological field, and being understood as languages that derive in environmental, artistic and architectural “forms of interaction”. This is a complex vision about to the artist and “Five skins” for the meaning of the universe, in which a balance between the human animal, non-human species and the environment as a whole coexiste.

To offer some thoughts on the sensorial aspects of homelessness in North America, the author likes to draw upon ethnographic research that he conducted in a homeless shelter in downtown Boston, the main findings of which are noted in a book entitled Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless. The point is not that psychiatric or political-economic approaches to the question of homelessness are necessarily misguided or incorrect. The shelter was set up by the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, or DMH, in early 1981 to provide temporary housing for persons troubled by mental illness. Many shelter residents had spent a significant time on ‘the street,’ which most spoke of as if it was a single location with a singularly forced sensorium of fear, cold weather, isolation, and transience. Some of the otherness faced by residents involved commands and instructions asserted by staff.

The article discusses the relevance of sensor-technologies as media. Beyond technical affordances sensors act as agents of implementing and activating a more-than-human sensorium within encompassing technoecologies of sensation. Outlining the onto-epistemological implications of being ‘in touch with’ sensor-media, the contribution raises questions of what it means to be included in an infrastructure of sensorial interfaces - not only of tech-assisted human-to-human or human-to-machine communication, but of unmanageable processes of machine-to-machine exchange. Delineating sensors as media necessitates reflections on the temporal relations that define the ‘contemporary condition’ of intensified global computation, technological interconnectedness and the ontogenesis of sensor-media milieus, their respective temporalities and concomitant (an)aesthetics of experienced time.

This article draws on ethnographic and archival material to examine a contemporary, neuroscience informed politics of care focused on the child sensorium (understood as an embodied neurobiological endowment and material and political resource). I frame care-taking practices focused on children’s sensory endowment, responsivity, and difference as a form of biopolitical regulation in which children, parents, therapists, and educators are implicated. As such, I examine how such care intersects with political, economic, and educational forces and circumstances that differentiate North American childhoods and reconfigure expectations of children and parents. In the process, I relate medicalized sensory difference to shifting skill demands for children that emphasize emotional control in public and educational contexts. Moreover, I highlight how privileged parental engagements with scientific knowledge and practices of therapeutic care focused on children’s sensory endowments and difference articulate with these new skill demands but also deploy embodied sensorial–neurological difference/neurodiversity as a means to transform dynamics of stigma and control within children’s and families’ lives and educational contexts. At the same time, I show how attempts to cultivate sensory capacities and engagements with medicalized sensory difference are implicated in broader biopolitical dynamic of exclusion that unevenly recognizes difference/disability.

Sensory trademarks present a compelling case in which to explore the senses as “containers of possibility,” and this article explores the emergence and logic of sensory trademarks from a legal and marketers’ perspective. Using sensory trademark cases from the United States, I suggest that the current socio-legal environment opens a conversation about what I would call sensory capitalism—the monetization of the senses rather than the propertization of the senses—that requires intellectual property law to properly function. I argue that the sensory model espoused by the trademarking of the senses is one of the mass sensorium, whereby the “audience” universally recognizes marks as designating a particular source or origin of goods. The mass sensorium offers something quite novel, however, because embedded in it is the (corporate) promise of a lingua franca that valorizes all of the senses and generates a type of mediated affect that is shared.

Background This article takes a transdisciplinary view of the media sensorium by applying humanities, social science, and engineering perspectives to the relationships among sensory perception, cognition, and how people come to understand their worlds through the senses. Analysis The goal of this article is to engage with the provocation that the sensorium, a concept that Marshall McLuhan brought to media studies in the 1960s, provides the lens through which we observe that communication is the expression of cognition via the combined potentiality of physiology and technology. “Sensory technologies” are used as analytical vehicles in a technological journey from the Walkman to 21st-century telecommunications. Conclusion and implications The reader is given a call to action to use the full spectrum of the sensorium to locate and act on transformative contemporary processes underway. Contexte Cet article adopte une approche transdisciplinaire envers le sensorium mediatique en appliquant des perspectives provenant des sciences humaines, des lettres et de l’ingenierie aux rapports entre la perception sensorielle, la cognition et la maniere dont nous apprehendons notre monde par les sens. Analyse L’article a pour but d’examiner cette idee provocatrice que le sensorium—concept que Marshall McLuhan applique aux medias dans les annees 1960—nous permet d’observer comment la communication, en exploitant un potentiel a la fois physiologique et technologique, parvient a exprimer la pensee. Ainsi, les « technologies sensorielles » servent de vehicules analytiques dans un voyage technologique qui va du Walkman des annees 1970 jusqu’aux telecommunications du present siecle. Conclusions et implications Cet article invite le lecteur a maximiser le potentiel du sensorium afin de reperer les processus transformatifs en cours actuellement et d’agir sur eux .

The aim of this paper is to argue for an interdisciplinary research agenda to the study of reading. We discuss the methodological and educational/practical challenges and opportunities that an embodied cognitive and distributed language perspective entails for literacy and education research. Although an increasing body of research pivots on the embodiment of reading, reading still tends to be theorised as a sequence of internal processes used to interpret texts. A distributed perspective replaces this code view with an embodied and multi-scalar description of the activity. This ‘embodied turn’ generates valuable results that involve not only the whole body (as a multi-sensory organ), but a historical, skilled body that affects the reading ecology. Consequently, an embodied and distributed perspective is not only a matter of drawing on multiple sensory modalities in the here-and-now that conglomerate in the human sensorium, it also highlights the interconnected habits that enable readers to enact cultural practices based on writing systems. Skilled linguistic action allows readers to construe symbolizations, re-evoking parts of their individual life experience. Embodiment thus involves a perspective that links multiple timescales, thereby moving beyond local coordination of body and artefact. While the sensorial richness of our body is a prerequisite for engaging with a text, the reading activity becomes even more complex than interconnecting the many bodily modalities, when we think of the body in terms of lived experience. Building on this multi-scalar view, the paper seeks to demonstrate the integrative potential of a distributed approach to reading as well as some initial educational implications of such a distributed perspective.

In this article, we address an existing lacuna in the sociology of the senses, by employing sociological phenomenology to illuminate the under-researched sense of temperature, as lived by a social group for whom water temperature is particularly salient: competitive pool swimmers. The research contributes to a developing ‘sensory sociology’ that highlights the importance of the socio-cultural framing of the senses and ‘sensory work’, but where there remains a dearth of sociological exploration into senses extending beyond the ‘classic five’ sensorium. Drawing on data from a three-year ethnographic study of competitive swimmers in the UK, our analysis explores the rich sensuousities of swimming, and highlights the role of temperature as fundamentally affecting the affordances offered by the aquatic environment. The article contributes original theoretical perspectives to the sociology of the senses and of sport in addressing the ways in which social actors in the aquatic environment interact, both intersubjectively and intercorporeally, as thermal beings.

Leaning on two fields of expertise (literary studies and film studies), this chapter discusses two particular scenarios of the shared imagination of neoliberalism, which allow the unfolding of different considerations regarding the Pacific. In the first scenario, I go to the question of history and the erasure of the Pacific, and discuss the book La casa del dolor ajeno by the Mexican writer Julian Herbert. The second scenario is the Latin American connection in the work of the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai, addressing the question of imagination and sensorium, or the way in which neoliberal aesthetics and affects connect across the Pacific. In doing so, I propose to think the transpacific relations as a shared history and contemporaneity of affective experience. This, in turn, seeks to argue for the need to think transpacific cultural flows and circulations beyond topics of representation, identity and Otherness.

Recent studies on plant-environment and plant-human relationships reveal the need to reassess thescales of perception, sensitiveness and cognition of living systems. The complexity of plant's emergingbehaviors in interaction with the environment is supported by the signature of the electrome and theplant sensorium, a strong argument to establish the singularity of the living and weights its consequencesin evolutionary, ecological or socioeconomic terms. This paper highlights the cognitive value of access tothe experience of plants and its fundamentally mesological or ecoplastic nature, that is to say in directconnection with a singular milieu. This dynamic coupling makes it possible to explain the co-construction ofan intelligible and sensible world without the use of a brain, principle that reframes the concept of intelligentbehavior while revealing both the frontiers in cognition and the strong transdisciplinary challenges of anacute awareness of the man's fragility as of the planetary ecosystem at the era of the Antropocene.

This chapter points to the presence of a tactile politics of perception that might help us understand the intersections between human subjectivity and the social collectivity. A long tradition of Western philosophical reflection on the senses has identified touch as the lowest sense, the most animal, servile, and unconscious of the resources of the human sensorium. At the same time touch was conceptualized as the most fundamental sense and the basis of all sensory perception. In American history, an acutely developed tactile understanding of sacred energy has often been invoked as a defining feature of religion and politics. This tactile understanding is sensitive both to the transgressive and punitive qualities of heat and to its vitalizing properties. Among the many evocations of “sacred fire” to be found in American culture, one seemingly marginal ritual, firewalking, had gained a considerable following by the end of the 1990s.

The historiography of theatre/performance embraces complicated culturally contingent circulation of different forms and manifestations of repertoires accounted for as Critical Media History. This argument is based on two principles: first, performance and theatre are not categorically opposed to each other but rather closely related (there is no theatre without performance, so theatre history exists within performance practice and performance history can likewise be nested within theatre practice). Second, theatre/performance are historically and culturally contingent media ecologies, interdependent with various media representations yet offering specific perspectives. This privileges materiality linked with the sensorium, location in time and space (or across times and spaces in manifestations of situatedness), historicising, and scaling (zooming in to examine specific phenomena while also describing related developments), emphasising social production and reception.

Sensory experiences have generated a diverse sociological, anthropological and psychological literature. This paper illustrates an approach to the idea of lost sensoria and their social and cultural manifestations. Images of sensory expe­rience, postulated synchronicity of sensory processes and the concept of ethno­poetics constitute a theoretical basis for the concept of lost sensory experience., Tematem niniejszego studium jest doświadczenie sensoryczne oraz jego spo­łeczne manifestacje. Wychodząc od klasycznego porządku pięciu zmysłów, przedstawione zostaną alternatywne porządki sensoryczne oraz ich spo­łeczne i kulturowe umocowanie. Językowe obrazy doświadczenia zmysło­wego, postulowana synchroniczność procesów sensorycznych oraz koncep­cja etnopoetyki stanowią podstawę prezentowanej koncepcji zagubionych sensoriów.

The chapter offers preliminary notes towards an analysis of the forms of sensing and making sense that emerge at the interface of the organic and the technological� I argue that these forms have the capacity to productively challenge and expand our understanding of the key notions of aesthetics – aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment – and with that, to rethink the pre- vailing anthropocentrism of aesthetic tradition, shifting attention to the phenomenon that was at the roots of the aesthetic project, namely aisthesis, or sense-perception� One useful context for such an inquiry is a media ecological approach, with its emphasis on relations between different agencies and the shifted role of subjectivity� The questions then include: How can the aesthetic perspective complement the existing theories of forms of cognition within biolog- ical and technical systems? What are the best terms for the analysis of the qualitative aspects latent within the interpretative procedures that happen in living and nonliving matter? And vice versa, how can the “microperformances” and sensorial acts at the cellular and molecular levels affect how we conceive of human perception? Looking at the operations of relating at either human or nonhuman levels through the prism of a medium that underlies them helps to ground this discussion in a particular way� The chapter features particularly the aesthetic strategies exercised by a number of contemporary artists that bring to the fore the mediatic operations as sensory events and exemplify ways of engaging with the broader ecology of media sensorium, still to be discovered and cognized� Keywords: media ecology, sense act, sensing, aesthesis, microperformativity, performative epistemology, art

This article examines how sensation and affect make different kinds of resilience meaningful to communities. Through a case study, we analyze public deliberation about a proposal to expand interstates in Tampa, Florida. We describe how evidence introduced by opposing sides foregrounded conflicting sensory experiences. The resulting sensoriums upheld different aspects of the city’s identity as worth maintaining. Drawing from recent scholarship defining resilience as something that can always be done otherwise, we suggest that resilience is better understood as entangled with public affect. We argue that a key point for rhetorical intervention in city planning is considering which futures and visions of resilience are being imagined for publics.

This paper explores the perception of inaccessibility as it reflects the cultural education of the sensorium. Following Gilroy, sensorium is taken here to mean the dense weave of historical experience that organizes the relations among the senses and perception itself. With this concept, I examine texts related to accessibility management at a large Canadian University. These texts include a 2017–18 email exchange regarding accessibility between a subway station and a university building, as well as the first policy statement on ‘The University and Accessibility for Disabled Persons’ from 1981. Through these texts, I show how people, now as then, are taught to sense disability as excludable. The paper demonstrates how the sensorium is educated to exclude a concern for the history, responsibility, as well as the touch of the actual physical environment. In pursuit of a re-education of the sensorium, this paper reveals how disabled people are sensed as potentially includable in the future while excludable in the present.

This paper challenges the notion of a human sensorium through critically reviewing the 2016 Honours project, Hydrophilous and the Observatorium, of Interior Architecture graduate Emilie Evans. Evans’ speculative design project highlights the boundless relations and encounters with which human bodies are inescapably intertwined. Her graduating design project manifests the consideration of other bodies—both living and non-living—in spatial practice and questions the authoritative role of designer as sole author of any project. Instead Evans acknowledges beings, forces and processes beyond human that we are inextricably engaged with. In reflecting on this project, we discuss perceived binaries of human and more-than-human sensoriums, and demonstrate how these conventions obscure the ways humans attempt to control nature via interiorised landscapes. Evans’ work illustrates the commingling of bodies, materialities and sensorial affects that stretch beyond the realm of a speculative student project, and which speak to tangible and immediate futures. Emerging debates about the Anthropocene have prompted key aspects of this project, as well as a desire to design for a fluctuating environment: the hyper-saline water body of Don Juan Pond in Eastern Antarctica. This review explores entangled bodies, landscapes, and sensorial experimentation, and ultimately demands a reconfigured understanding of designers working in spatial practice. As such, we posit their strength as ‘curators’, and nature as any project’s true creator, while acknowledging humans’ limited power in a world of forces primarily beyond their hitherto-assumed control. Rethinking the future(s) of spatial practice involves ‘becoming-with’ others in space and time, and privileging a more-than-human sensorium allows us to design-with a vast assemblage of beings, forces, and planetary processes.

Rhetorical scholarship has recently made significant contributions to an emerging “meta-field” that we might loosely call “shit studies.” In this essay, we review scholarship pertaining to the study of “shit” in communication. Specifically, we review current trends in the theoretical orientation of shit studies by advancing the ideas of points de sensorium and/as the stank of rhetoric. Drawing on theories of the point de capiton (quilting point), we are able to note some commonalities in the study of shit in communication scholarship. The stank and the points de sensorium speak to a theorization of affect and bullshit-texts.

This article aims is to explore a perspective of the ontology of becoming, that makes it possible to study the emergence of phenomena and thereby broaden the understanding of how knowledge is created. It is written in close connection with research in posthumanism and new materialism. What hat has been lacking in these perspectives has been a clearer connection to ontological points of departure. It is therefore the purpose of this article to describe, based on ontological positions, both philosophical points of departure and methodology and research practice. The article is structured in three parts, where the introductory part describes basic ontological starting points. The second part describes how a research apparatus can be constructed and used to carry out analyses based on the ontology of becoming. A research apparatus where the body’s senses and mobility are given a prominent role through a haptic sensorium. The third part describes examples of phenomena that can be explored with an onto-analysis of becoming. Among these, special focus is placed on the border phenomenon of sound. The result of the article is a perspective that can contribute to renewed insights into how phenomena are created with the world.

Christian devotional practices are of a very ambiguous nature, they encompass the passage from the realms of the body to the realms of the mind, and, in the case of involved revelatory phenomena, even to the states beyond the intellectual. In Late Medieval Christianity, these practices can initially be described as conscious, culturally oriented performances that use different media in order to mobilize the devotee’s affect (affectus) through the use of her/his senses. Therefore, facing devotion may be coherently understood as studying human perception in its relationship with a multimedial contextual frame. If this perspective is right, the initial question may be: how can processes that are hardly documented and which, by definition, involve the devotee’s inexpressible experience of the sacred, be approached and done justice? From a modern critical perspective, every conception of the human sensorium is mediated by cultural assumptions in which the number of senses, their supposed hierarchy and their possible interactions related to religious practices, present great variation, depending on the source used to interpret them. Therefore, recreating processes from the past that encompass perception, experience and/or a revelation is an extremely problematic issue, at least from the point of view of historical hermeneutics. For instance, the precise, critical significance of ‘affection’ in religious contexts that imply the aforementioned passage from the physical to the numinous must be discussed. When the expression ‘affective practices’ is inserted into the academic discourse, are we emphasizing the media used to cause the experience, the effects of these media on the user, the experience itself or the whole process? Pointing to this affective character could be, but should not be, a sympathetic method with which to approach our understanding of meditative processes in a scholarly but patronizing way. In fact, most of the times, the synchronic perception of the devotee conveys the idea that what s/he underwent was a real, sacred experience, wheter it was caused by an external input or caused by the process itself.

Fragrance has long been connected to the fashion and apparel industry and has played an integral part in branding, marketing, experiential retailing, textiles, appearance management, consumer behavior, and communication. Fragrance offers sensual, expressive, and symbolic qualities and is one of the components of a multi-sensory aesthetic experience where apparel, the body, and the environment interact (Fiore, 1993, 2010). Like fashion and textiles, fragrance evolves and innovates with the world we live in, and its place in the fashion and apparel industry should be revisited for new opportunities that capitalize on its unique characteristics.

Jenkins explores the Black Mirror (2011–) episode, “The Entire History of You,” in relation to two other narratives about prosthetic memory and wearable computers—Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 feature film, Strange Days and Steve Mann’s 2001 book, Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of Wearable Computers. Black Mirror’s Grain, Strange Days’ SQUID, and Cyborg’s WearComp each represent new media technologies which enable humans to record, process, access, and share their perceptual experiences in real time, resulting in what Mann describes as a “cyborg perspective.” Each is an extension of the human sensorium, which opens up radical possibilities for managing knowledge and interacting with others. Yet, in each narrative, “old troubles” catch up with us, as powerful institutions and systemic inequality shape how this technology gets used in practice.

Alvan Lucier’s score, I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), provokes the architectural surround into a Janus-faced prosthesis, de dicto/de re (about the said and the sensed), as well as in locus sin quo (but if there is, where?). In order to arrive at the creative work made possible by the edited collection, this chapter uses Lucier’s score and acts as a locus sin quo to consider three ongoing laboratory projects, each using off-the-shelf hardware to reengineer the poetic imaginaries of surveillance, control, spatial practice, and speculative design. My first case is DIY’s laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) into covertly sensing human signature and event detection by operationalizing the resonant/sonorous surround. My second case directly exploits the same sensorium to instead hunt untapped perceptual modalities for feeling and navigating invisible space. My third case is the “Transborder Immigrant Tool” (TBT), a global positioning satellite (GPS) hack by “artivist” collective Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT)/b.a.n.g. lab for assisting immigrants navigating and crossing the Mexico/US border. Rather than suggesting a solution therein, the chapter appropriates the challenge as a creative bead both on Foucault’s idea of counter-conduct and back to Lucier(’s) sitting in a room.

There are significant pressures within UK Initial Teacher Education (ITE) to maintain and reproduce notions of knowledge as fixed, universal and therefore ‘bankable’ through transfer or transmission. Such views, as embedded in educational structures, separate teachers from learners and learners from contexts. An interesting subset of this trend is the case of music and science education, both of which share in a tradition of materialist practice, where knowledge-making derives from the use of ‘instruments’. A representational view of knowledge in these subjects has historically privileged tradition, canon, and reification in music, while emphasising facts and theories as separate from values in science. While these representational views of knowledge have been contested by feminist theory, materialism, and complexity theory, there remain significant challenges in developing music and science student teachers who are response-able to a view of knowing as active, dynamic, emergent and entangled. This chapter explores the use of sensory learning tools and activities with two groups of music and science student teachers. Thinking with Donna Haraway (Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Duke University Press, New York, 2016), we engage with the ‘trouble’ that such tools and activities create, both in terms of the students’ learning, the lecturers’ positioning and the socio-political contexts of such trouble within ITE.

The negative affects of this violent occupation—fear, threat, humiliation—quell hope, setting limits on the potentials of political agency. This article documents the corporeality of the Occupation in Hebron, evoking the body as materially contingent to explore agential capacities within the delimiting affects of the violent sensorium. Drawing on fieldwork with Palestinian activists engaged in providing political tours of Hebron, I argue that by reappropriating the violent affects of occupation, this form of activism demonstrates agency that resists “political depression”. Theoretically, I argue further, at hand is an empirical account of the “autonomy of affect” giving rise to critical hope amid a sensorium of fear. The research presented, therefore, contributes to addressing a key question for resistance in Palestine (and beyond): how fear—a predominant affective register of contemporary politics—might be harnessed towards (renewed) political agency and resistance to oppression.

This essay presents a transdisciplinary project whose objective is to create a sensorised insole built with latex (Hevea brasiliensis) to measure physiological variations of the human body, as well as to graphically represent affective reciprocal exchanges of the human behaviour with the environment. The purpose is to improve our enactive system through the use of various physiological sensors (e.g. pressure, galvanic skin response and temperature sensors), which can be processed and visualised by revealing the affective exchanges of the body while walking in the city, pinned on a map as data visualisation. Inspired by the enaction theories, the output of sensors and devices application that models the perception as a laboratory phenomenon, as proposed by Dr Ted Krueger, the investigation directed by Dr Domingues is conceived for the expanded sensorium and for the reengineering of life. The artwork is inserted in the domain of aesthetic investigation of art as experiences related to topics on art ...

The article develops Marshall McLuhan’s approach to the interplay between media, the sensorium, and reality. McLuhan’s concepts of “acoustic space” and “visual space” are unfolded with regard to the consequences that digital media will have on the human ability to perceive reality. Reality–sensorium interaction is systematized in the article. This systematization includes the environments of the given, the represented, and the induced. These environments are shaped by sequential stages of media evolution, which relate to preliterate media, alphabet-based media, and digital media. Existing and upcoming media technologies are presumed to alter human biology and transcend it. Within the set of media technologies that alter human biology, artificial flavours, electrically induced senses, immersive media, augmented reality, and virtual reality are treated. Within the set of media impacts that will change the human sensorium, the dismissal of gravity (related to the McLuhanian “angelism” of electronic discarnate man), the switch in navigation from biological networking to social networking, the sense of others, and the thirst for response are treated. Plato, Lenin, Wittgenstein, Benveniste, Logan, Carr, Shirky, and other thinkers are employed in the article to support these McLuhanian speculations, and sketch out prospective trends in the evolution of media and the sensorium.

The increasingly intense level of competition of the National Spelling Bee in recent years suggests that this “brain sport” has become a complex site for the politics of language standardization, media, and childhood competition. In this article I delve into this nexus to explore its heart: sound. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at spelling bees and with spellers, families, officials, and media broadcasters, I examine how spellers experience the word as a melange of sounds, the embodied processes that inform their orthographic choices, and how this sensory process made viewable for media audiences who may know little about orthography. Employing what Steve Feld (2015) has called “acoustemology,” I analyze competitive spelling through the lens of “firstness,” a concept the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1955) identified as a mode of being replete with unmediated feelings and qualities. Two-minute spelling bee turns serve as ethnographic examples of language materiality that reveal the complex routines that spellers undertake in each spelling bee round. This onstage sensorium also provides a basis upon which media broadcasters create metasemiotic frameworks through which to observe and understand the complexity this sensory activity. Video abstract: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TOnAokn96E

A documentary film producer situates key scenes for her work-in-progress film on youth, culture, and farming near the United States–Mexico border, Remembering How to Eat, in terms of theories of memory, place, and ecology; border studies; cinematic spectatorship; and sensory ethnography. The paper argues that documentaries about food and farming can help render a sense of place-based memory and identity, particularly on the border, which is typically characterized by mobility and transience. Such films can help cultivate a sense of food sovereignty in communities by rendering a multisensory engagement with the culinary and agricultural past. Such engagement includes not solely plants and farming processes but stories, recipes, and folktales. The paper lays the groundwork for a documentary cinematic aesthetic that gleans from these cultural materials a borderland sensorium that treats food and plants as active agents that compel us to act in certain ways. This approach can not only help transmit th...

From 1960 to 1964 the Science Museum in London experimented with the technique of audio guide known as the radio-guided tour. The scheme formed part of a Museum-wide initiative dedicated to the education of the ‘average visitor’: a growing body of the museum-going public with a popular interest in science and technology. This paper positions the radio-guided tour within a period of rapid development at the Science Museum characterised by the reconfiguration of its landscapes of exhibition. It shows how the radio-guided tour helped to navigate new techniques of exhibition display, particularly that known as ‘exhibition as landscape’, which aimed to cultivate the appropriate sets of emotion necessary for an appreciation of, and, importantly, a feeling for, science and its applications in technology. The paper contributes to literature on the sonic and mobile makings of landscape, in particular that which has called for a critical phenomenological approach concerned with the social, cultural and political dimensions of embodied engagements with landscape practice. It also contributes to recent museum studies literature with its foregrounding of the body and the sensorium in the configuration of the spaces of knowledge at the museum.

The authors in this collective discussion engage, disaggregate and unpack the triangulation of security, technology and architecture, across a range of contemporary spaces/places. Reflecting diverse interdisciplinary commitments and perspectives, the collective discussion considers security, technology and architecture in urban environments and global/local interfaces, borders, borderlands and ports of entry, and even the sensorium, from soundscapes of the airport to teargas laden environments. From quotidian to high-tech, these interventions tease out the increasing ferocity of architecture and/in its relationship with technology and security. © The Authors 2016.

Scholars in Pursuit of Elusive Sexual Knowledge Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015Anybody interested in sex, the politics of sex, sexual identity, or sexual education in contemporary society needs a historical perspective. Such is the pedagogical principle that underlies Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. In response to a sex-obsessed yet sex-negative U.S. culture, she advocates a "capaciously conceived" sex education that constitutes a "disposition towards sexual variation" (2015, 122). Yet this is merely the political frame for a rich and scholarly contribution to the study of early modern sex, which is also, most importantly, a methodological intervention of relevance to anyone studying sex in any historical period.Above all, Valerie Traub's latest book is an impassioned call for all those studying the history of sexuality to confront shared methodological challenges. A key message is that different disciplinary approaches, which currently divide the field and its practitioners, are best acknowledged, recognized, and embraced. Traub urges us to "capitalize on the difficulties" and linger in moments of methodological or conceptual impasse (63). The book is an impressive, thorough probing of the challenges raised by a range of different approaches to thinking about sex in the past, which is essential reading for all, if sometimes difficult and discomforting. It is a text that puts us through our paces whatever our theoretical stance; whether literary critic, queer theorist, or historian, we will each in turn find the unspoken assumptions on which our own methodologies are based and the flaws of our conceptual premises exposed in uncompromising detail. Targeting queer temporality, for instance, Traub argues that its undoubted value in challenging teleological and hegemonic approaches to the past is undercut when scholars reject all chronology as heteronormative, and are unable therefore to appreciate the value of the historian's enterprise. We must acknowledge the ways in which empirical and historicist work (in history, anthropology, and sociology) has produced sophisticated scholarship that speaks directly to the questions driving the queer project, and to which, indeed, it is profoundly indebted (78). Turning her sights on social historians, her discomforting critique of the widely adopted methodology of "social contextualization" lays bare its unfortunate consequences: it can be near impossible to study the physical reality and meaning of sex acts in the past, since all attention is focused at the level of the cultural discourses that organize sex into social structures, identities, and relationships. We therefore lack a history of sexuality that knows what people did and what it meant, and Traub urges us to adopt a historicized understanding of sexual variation (focused on the study of sex acts), albeit one which avoids deploying presumptive knowledge about how sex happens, in what positions or with what body parts. Taking aim elsewhere at the "history-as-affect" approach whose potential she fully appreciates, she also poses the challenge: "[M]ight the sensorium . . . be laden with unacknowledged epistemological freight?" (134). She explores the risks of equating historical research with erotic encounter, and the possibility that the "fantasy resolution" it facilitates might lead a scholar away from the autonomy of the past (136).It is in the focus upon knowledge about sex as the object of her investigation, rather than sex on itself, that Traub articulates a productive new direction for historians of sexuality. The chapters consistently and variously put the methodological questions about how we approach the making of historical knowledge into dialogue with epistemological questions about what knowledge is and what sexual knowledge looks like in a way that reshapes our very concept of sexual knowledge as an analytical category. …

This article compares the late work of Guyanese author Wilson Harris with that of the English writer and critic John Berger. Taking Theodor Adorno’s reflections on late style as its point of departure, it situates the unconventional aesthetics of both writers in relation to the changes in society and experience unleashed by late capitalism. Focusing on Harris’s The Ghost of Memory (2006) and Berger’s From A to X (2008), the essay argues that the formal logic of these novels registers the pressures generated in the era of late capitalism by the unfolding dynamics of the neoliberal regime of accumulation and the fallout from the increasing financialization of the world-economy since the 1970s. Both texts work to protest the radical simplification of human and extra-human nature central to finance capital’s drive to transform all of reality into generic income streams. Sharing an emphasis on the need to revitalize the sensorium and to overcome the Cartesian separation of mind and body, society and nature, Harris and Berger maintain the possibility of an alternative mapping of global community.

Media Architecture often focuses on creating solutions that trigger our visual sense. The perception we have about the urban environment is however influenced by factors that affect all our senses. In this full-day workshop we will focus on our auditory sense and explore future possibilities of sound and media architecture.

An understanding of religion as a practice of mediation has great potential to open up new methods and theories for a critical study of religion. Leading beyond the privileged medium of the text, this understanding approaches religion as a multi-media phenomenon that mobilizes the full sensorium. The central point of this article is that forms of visual culture are a prime medium of religion, and studying them offers deep insights into the genesis of worlds of lived experience. Pictorial media streamline and sustain religious notions of the visible and the invisible and involve embodied practices of seeing that shape what and how people see. Discussing the implications of the “pictorial turn” for the study of religion, I argue that a more synthesized approach is needed that draws these fields together. The methodological and theoretical implications of this approach are exemplified by turning to my research on video and representations of the “spiritual” in Southern Ghana.

O objetivo do artigo é discutir o processo de aprendizado na comunicação digital. As mídias e redes digitais fazem emergir práticas de comunicação que facilitam a apropriação, criação e compartilhamento de textos híbridos (oral, visual, tátil). Essas práticas digitais exploram as sensorialidades do corpo e operam em situações concretas, mobilizando saberes, habilidades e atitudes que a sociologia do aprendizado denomina de construção de competências (PERRENOUD, 1999). Por apoiar-se em situações concretas, estimular corpo e engajamento, o aprendizado por competências se diferencia do aprendizado formal, frequentemente abstrato e descontextualizado, o que pode explicar o interesse dos educadores na comunicação digital. Conclui-se que o aprendizado digital opera como rede sociotécnica. Assim, retoma-se a etimologia de texto e revela-se que a cultura escrita o despiu de qualidades fundamentais: texto inclui textura (relevo, sensorium) e trama (rede, intertexto) (MCKENZIE, 2004).

This essay is part of a larger body of ongoing research and publication investigating how current shifts in the material relations of money, commodities, and social abstractions shape processes of contemporary subject formation. By moving dialectically through today's landscape of social abstraction, we analyze subject positions under postcrisis conditions starting with that of the entrepreneur, trying to better understand the social and political possibilities foreclosed by contemporary subjectivity. If the contemporary subject is a derelict shell housing data bodies, social commodities, and quantified selves, we need to develop another materialist understanding of the subject that looks to the collective production of affects and rationalities in resistance, which both exhibit and forecast the surpassing of the symptoms of our present.

“We cannot open our eyes to things without distancing ourselves from what we seek. Separation is the price of vision” (de Certeau in Enclitic 7: 24–31, 1983). Yet, what happens when what we see at a distance grabs us, touches us, drawing us closer (Blanchot 1981)? Is this not the experience of film? In this article I argue that modulating distance lies at the heart of perception and filmmaking, palpable tensions in moving closer-to (proximal) and distancing-from (distal) bodies and things, entangling senses across the sensorium in what is called haptic perception and, by extension, haptic cinema. I explore modulation in distancing in revisiting Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neorealist film, Umberto D., a film customarily discussed in optical-ocular terms. En route we experience De Sica’s artistry in conveying ‘instants in life’ and ‘spectral distancing’ and we have a visitation with Agamben’s (2000) gestural cinema which exposes the mediality of film, opening up haptic-ethical thought and expression. In the final section I push toward a phenomenology of film inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) reversibility in perception and Morris’s (2002) associated ideas of tactile resonance and reverberation. I articulate a phenomenology of filmic-body couplings as lived moments in touch that resonate, reverberate and linger as affective intensities, taking cinema beyond the theater, screen, spectator, image, and representational logics.

In this article, Doonan analyzes two performances presented by the SensoriuM, a collaborative participatory art platform in Montreal, Quebec. In doing so, she shows how the SensoriuM makes publicthrough curatorial and dramaturgical practice. By making public,she refers to the active translation of materiality into representational forms, and also to the assembling of humans and non-humans in participatory performance. Doonan describes the concrete audiences bounded by the live events, as well as the more amorphous and immeasurable publics that are brought into being through the circulation of texts, including digital images, videos, and oral presentations. Drawing from science and technology studies and more-than-human geographies, she explores “epistemic publics,” or the animal, organic and machinic configurations that come into being in the process of creating (objects of) knowledge. Doonan analyzes two specific performances: Midsummer Mile End Foraging Tour and Hunter, Gatherer, Purveyorto show how these processes of making public are enacted. Both performances use food as a medium to complicate and undo binaries of public/private, self/other, domestic/wild, depressed/revitalized. The meanings and uses of particular places are brought into question through embodied and symbolic means. Doonan argues that these performances work to de-design the city by queering its dominant discourses and creating intimate spaces of exchange.

This introductory chapter highlights some of the central features of the complex and shifting landscape in which each are embedded. It considers how the relationship between the fleshy, material, biological body and that of culture has been played out and debated in recent years within the social sciences. The chapter examines the impact of the sensory revolution in a range of disciplines and its implications for how we re-conceptualise body-self-society relationships over time in different settings and cultures. It explores the work of scholars who have actively engaged with the senses and the sensorium in their studies and have added to the understanding of the multi- and inter-sensoriality of embodied experience in physical cultures. This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book.

Introduction Drawing on theoretical and conceptual tools relating to ‘sensory work’ within sociology and sociological phenomenology, in this chapter we address the under-researched sense of thermoception, the lived experience of temperature perception. We explore this particular sensory modality as experienced within our own chosen sporting domain of distance running. Drawing on the findings from two automethodological research projects, we describe some of the complex sensuosities of our ‘intensely embodied’ experiences of heat and cold (Allen-Collinson & Leledaki, 2015). In exploring thermoception, we seek to remedy the relative lack of social science research into this important dimension of the sensorium and, commensurate with the purposes of this edited collection, to challenge received notions of the ‘classic five senses’ as traditionally conceptualised within ‘Western’ science.