Upcoming
We are finalising our schedule for 2024-5. Please join our mailing list to hear when this year’s events are announced!
Past
Simeon Koole, Book Launch: Intimate Subjects: Touch and Tangibility in Britain’s Cerebral Age
In conversation with Mark Paterson.
The session can be viewed here.
When, where, and who gets to touch and be touched, and who decides? What do we learn through touch? How does touch bring us closer together or push us apart? These are urgent contemporary questions, but they have their origins in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, when new urban encounters compelled intense discussion of what touch was, and why it mattered. In this vividly written book, Simeon Koole excavates the history of these concerns and reveals how they continue to shape ideas about “touch” in the present.
Public Lecture: Sensing the World – An Animals’ Perspective
This session was recorded and can be viewed here.
The University of Bristol’s Senses and Sensations research group is delighted to announce an exciting public lecture delivered by two academics working to examine animal senses in different ways and from different angles. In this event, Mark Paterson – who is currently a Benjamin Meaker Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol – will explore the histories of experiments on animals to understand the sense of touch. These ideas will be placed in conversation with the work of Nathan Morehouse (IRiS, University of Cincinnati) and his own examinations of animal senses, in which he focuses on vision in spiders. Thinking across different senses, species, times and places, the work of these two scholars will illuminate our understanding of the senses by drawing our attention away from our human selves, and towards those who sense very differently.
Nathan Morehouse, ‘The Evolution of Looking and Seeing: New Insights from Colorful Jumping Spiders’
Insects and spiders face an important challenge: their lifestyles often rely heavily on vision and yet their small size imposes severe spatial constraints on their visual systems. As a result, these tiny animals offer a number of inventive solutions for miniaturized visual sensing, with jumping spiders arguably at the apex. In this seminar, Dr. Morehouse will highlight his recent work to understand how jumping spiders see the world, how these visual capabilities have evolved over time, and how their unusual visual systems have shaped the ways that they communicate with each other.
Mark Paterson, ‘A wander through the perceptual worlds of animals and humans: more-than-human sensing’
The classic 1934 essay ‘A stroll through the worlds of animals and men’ by Jakob Von Uexküll remains fresh and is continually in print. Why do we return to it? First, it opens out the consideration of the senses beyond our anthropocentric limitations. The perceptual world of other species, based on different arrangements of senses, is endlessly fascinating. Second, it reveals not just the perceptual differences, but what is shared between humans and nonhumans, that is, ‘interanimality’. What happens if we consider a larger ecology of sensing beyond the individual human subject, then, one which accommodates both human and nonhuman perceptual worlds? In the academic world there is interest in what cultural geographers, anthropologists, and others consider a “more-than-human world”, and the multispecies entanglements of Donna Haraway. Meanwhile, there are intriguing artistic experiments that seek to escape the replication of human sensing through digital technologies, looking to nonhuman bodies and experiences for inspiration.
Mark Paterson, ‘Affective touching human/nonhuman’ (Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professorship Welcome Lecture)
25 June, 3-4:30pm. On campus: LR8, 21 Woodland Road.
We missed touching our friends, loved ones, and lovers during the COVID lockdowns, of course. The explosion in pet ownership is testament in part to the need to fulfil our tactile needs in other ways. So-called ‘slow’ (affective) touching, such as hugging, stroking, and grooming feels good and enhances social and emotional bonds, but is difficult to replicate through technology. There is increasing evidence of the role of affective touch in mitigating stress and maintaining homeostasis for the organism. On the other hand, ‘fast’ (discriminative) touch, which detects the surfaces and qualities of objects, has been researched for much longer, and has a history of replication through devices and machines. For affective or ‘slow’ touching, such behaviours have long been observed and written about in biology, ethology, social psychology, and nonverbal communication literature, for example, but only in recent decades have there been investigations into the underlying neuroscience in humans. In this talk I explore and contextualize the neuroscience behind affective or ‘slow’ social touching, how it operates across human and nonhuman species lines, and the possibilities for folding into future technologies. Artificial hands and e-skin are developing rapidly, and humanoid and animal-like (zoomorphic) robots are increasingly targeted to domestic and healthcare tasks. It is therefore opportune to ask about the role of pro-social touch within human-machine interactions, and their place in what some roboticists are starting to call Artificial Empathy (AE). The first part of this talk offers some history of neuroscience background about the gap in research between ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ touching, and the second part investigates the role of affective touching across human and nonhumans, including human and nonhuman robot forms.
Timothy Cooper, ‘National Weather? Contesting the 1987 Hurricane’
22 May 2024, 4-6pm. On campus: Hums Research Space, Arts Complex,
This paper presents ongoing research into the history of the ‘Great Storm’ of 1987. On the night of 15th to 16th October 1987, a powerful depression struck the southern counties of England. One of the strongest of twentieth-century storms the gale caused widespread destruction of property, the loss of millions of trees, as well as shutting down much of the City of London a few days before the stock-market crash of Black Monday. Despite being a regionally specific event, the story was very quickly translated into a ‘national’ event placed within the context of British historical narrative. This paper explores how a weather event was produced as a ‘national disaster’, and the ways in which that claim, constructed by metropolitan political and media elites, was contested across Britain. Using data from an analysis of the Mass Observation Project directive, issued in the wake of the storm, I argue for seeing the storm as a much more contested and political event than has subsequently been remembered. The storm was widely viewed by mass observers through a lens of regional inequality and the spatial divisions intensified by the impact of the neo-liberal ‘Thatcher revolution’. I argue that the kind of life-writing data offered by Mass Observation provides a crucial perspective on the social and political context of this ‘natural’ event, enabling an excavation of the contestation and politicization of the weather in modern Britain, as well as a way of exploring the ‘politics of nature’ as seen ‘from-below’.
Inger Leemans, ‘Stuffy bibliophiles or Smellwise research groups? Pathways for Trans-disciplinary Smell Studies’
21 February 2024, 4-5pm (UK time). Zoom.
Smell studies is a fast expanding, but quite loosely organized field of research and development, primarily focused on the cultural role of smell. How can we combine different kinds of (academic, professional, commercial) expertise to better study and acknowledge the role smell and olfaction play in (historical) cultures? In this lecture, Inger Leemans will discuss how the Odeuropa project has combined academic and professional knowledge to develop new methodologies for scent research and education. She will do this by presenting a case study she is currently working on: moldy, musty, and stuffy smells.
Inger Leemans is a professor of Cultural History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the principal investigator of the NL-Lab at the KNAW Humanities Cluster. Her research branches out from early modern cultural history (1500-1850) towards the history of emotion and the senses, the history of knowledge, cultural economy, and digital humanities. As Project Lead of the EU Horizon 2020 project ODEUROPA: Negotiating Olfactory and Sensory Experiences in Cultural Heritage Practice and Research Leemans has helped to develop a trans-disciplinary project on olfactory heritage and sensory mining.
Ute Leonards, ‘Designing inclusive spaces – A view from the vision sciences’
6 December 2023, 4-5pm (UK time). Zoom.
Please register here to receive the Zoom joining link.
The sensory makeup of an environment can optimally support or it can hinder people’s ability to concentrate, think, work and learn, and to interact with other people. It affects people’s emotions and mood, their creativity and more generally, their health and well-being. Sensory stressors induced by poor sensory design choices are the key contributor to migraines (estimated at 90%), costing the UK population alone around 43 million days off work and education each year (Migraine Trust, 2022). In education and work environments, sensory stressors have been shown to disproportionally affect people living with neurodiverse conditions (including e.g. ASC, ADHC, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Dyspraxia, Tourette’s, OCC, depression), keeping them from performing to their real potential and even causing them to fail (e.g. Dwyer et al. 2023). Yet, current design standards do not take evidence into account that would allow designers to cater for differences between individuals in how they react to environments. Here I provide evidence that individual reactions to environments are not random but predictable, and how the investigation of the dynamics between visual perception, cognition and locomotion might help us find solutions to pressing societal issues such as reducing falls risk in an ageing population or furthering inclusion in an increasingly neurodiverse society – all by sensory sciences helping to inform design choices. I will finish my talk with an appeal that we need to work across disciplines to develop a systemic framework of Sustainable Urban and Architectural Design that is informed by sensory sciences.
Chris Millard, ‘Harnessing, Managing or Partitioning Autobiographical Disclosure: Personal Experience and Academic History’
25 October 2023, 4-5pm (UK time). Zoom.
This session was recorded, and can be viewed here.
Historians (as a group) tend to struggle with personal experiences and their work. Autobiographical disclosure, personal experience and emotional investment is not touched on as part of PhD training, and for career historians it usually appears (if at all) firmly constrained in prefaces, acknowledgements, forewords, afterwords, epilogues and appendices. There is also a thriving market for late-career historians to pen their autobiographies, explaining their scholarly output, but at some distance from their work of “the history itself”. However, there are some historians, from at least the 1970s, drawing on different disciplinary traditions (psychoanalysis, anthropology, postmodern literary criticism, critical race theory, feminism and general political activism) who have tried to bring “the personal” into a productive and fundamental relationship with their scholarly output. Sometimes this concerns personal experiences in archives, sometimes it centres around aspects of sexual orientation and/or gendered and/or racial identity, and at others it involves particular experiences or events (e.g. motherhood, child abuse, psychiatric diagnosis, miscarriage, rape). This talk will show how various traditions that influence history bring with them a link or prompt to “the personal”, and will examine how personal experience has been used or managed in various works of history. This is in the context of my own historical work on Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, my mother’s persistent illness behaviour, and my childhood in and out of hospital on various pretexts. It centrally asks, not only how have we got to a place where historians might manage these personal experiences usefully in their work, but what does it mean at a basic level to “have experience” of something that one is researching.
Idea Exchange Workshop
6-7 June 2023.
Tuesday 6 June
15:30-16:00: Will Tullett’s Manifesto for Sensory Research.
16:00-17:00: Sensory Ethnographic walk led by Austin Read (Geography).
Wednesday 7 June
9-9:15: Introduction
9:15-10: Speculative Mapping led by Rebecka Fleetwood-Smith.
Coffee break
10:15-11:15: Health and disability
Abs Ashley, Lena Ferriday, Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, Ulrika Maude, Patricia Neville, Will Pooley
11:15-12:15: More-than-human surroundings
Andy Flack, Simeon Koole, Georgia Nelson, Joan Passey, Alice Would
Lunch break
1:15-2:15: Representations
Barbara Caddick, Oliver Dawson, Susan Harrow, Milo Newman, Danny Riley, Will Tullett
2:15-3:45: Creative workshop led by Catherine Lamont-Robinson.
Coffee break
4-5: Reflections (Will Tullett) + future group plans
Melanie Kiechle, ‘From Nuisance to Sensitivity: The Shifting Logics of Public Health’
Wednesday 19th April 2023, 4 – 5:30pm (UK time). Online. Register here.
Co-hosted with the Centre for Environmental Humanities.
Organized public health got its start in the United States by rooting out and regulating “nuisances,” those elements of the environment that were understood to be detrimental to health. Nuisances included such things as marshy ground, standing water, dense smoke, and foul odors—things that citizens could readily identify through their physical senses. As boards of health struggled to keep pace with citizen complaints, they began considering the “sensitiveness” of the complaining citizen. When Board members determined that the complaining citizen was overly sensitive or had coarse senses—often because of their gender, race, or class status—Boards of Health did not act on their nuisance complaints. Drawing from the writing of public health reformers and Board of Health officials, this talk will pinpoint the important role that sensitivity played in the development of public health. Beyond the details of these events, the talk argues that we need to consider the history of sensitivity as we continue to develop sensory history.
Melanie Kiechle is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech. She is interested in environmental and bodily knowledge in periods of change. Her book, Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Urban America, 1840-1900, explores how Americans used their sense of smell to understand and react to industrial growth and urban concentration between the rise of the public health movement and the Progressive Era.
David Howes, ‘Bringing the Senses to Academia, and the Academy to Its Senses’
Wednesday 8 March 2023, 4 – 5:30pm (UK time). Online. Register here.
Co-hosted by the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science
When the poet Baudelaire walked “the forest of symbols,” he discovered that “sounds, fragrances and colours correspond” (in the words of his well-known poem entitled “Correspondences”). Indeed, it would be “really surprising,” he proclaimed elsewhere, “if sound could not suggest colour, if colours could not suggest a melody … things being always expressed by a reciprocal analogy.” Nonetheless, “modern professors of aesthetics,” according to the poet, have “forgotten the color of the sky, the form of plants, the movement and odor of animals,” and their “rigid fingers, frozen to their pens” are unable “to play over the immense keyboard of correspondences.”
Fortunately, in the wake of the sensory turn in the human sciences of the early 1990s, many academics have come to their senses and the sensorium has emerged as a major focus of much social and cultural inquiry. This presentation will trace the genealogy of sense-based research in the humanities and social sciences. It will go on to pinpoint some of the lingering obstacles to a full-fledged sensorial revolution in scholarship, such as psychologistic and biologistic treatments of the senses. These treatments are shown to ignore or suppress the sociality of sensation and cultural contingency of perception. By way of closing, it will be shown how such hindrances can and must be transcended.
David Howes is Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia University, Montreal as well as an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University. His latest book is called The Sensory Studies Manifesto: Tracking the Sensorial Revolution in the Arts and Human Sciences.
Centre for Environmental Humanities, ‘The Future of the Environmental Humanities’ Workshop
Monday 20 February 2023, 10 – 5pm, Humanities Research Space.
An event organised by the Centre for Environmental Humanities, with a contributing panel by group members Andy Flack, Victoria Bates and Lena Ferriday, on Senses and Sensory History, and Milo Newman on Approaches and methods.
Contributions will be in the form of short, five-minute ‘provocations’, rather than traditional papers, with plenty of time for discussion. The workshop will also serve as a chance for us to think together as a community about where the Centre should be focusing its efforts.
Programme
10am: Introduction.
Adrian Howkins & Paul Merchant, CEH Co-Directors.
10:15-11:30: Approaches and methods.
Michelle Bastian (University of Edinburgh), Helen Thomas-Hughes (Cabot Institute), Milo Newman (School of Geographical Sciences).
Coffee Break
11:45-1pm: Blue Humanities and Hydro-Humanities.
Laurence Publicover (English), Paul Merchant (Modern Languages), Joan Passey (English).
Lunch Break
1:45-3:00: Senses and Sensory History.
Andy Flack (History), Lena Ferriday (History), Victoria Bates (History).
Coffee Break
3:15-4:30: Energy Humanities.
Marianna Dudley (History), Melina Antonia Buns (University of Stavanger).
4:30-5pm: Wrap-up. Where next for CEH?
Mark M. Smith, ‘The Last Reenactment and Applied Sensory History: How History and the Senses Can Make a Difference’
Wednesday 8 February 2023, 4 – 5pm (UK time). Online. Register here.
Mark M. Smith is a Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, the author of numerous books on the American South and a foundational thinker in the field of sensory history. His research is concerned with helping to restore the full sensory texture of history and examine what the senses in addition to seeing might be able to tell us about historical experience and causation.
Hannah Thompson, ‘“Blindness Gain” and the Danger of Accessible Art’
Wednesday 2 November 2022, 4 – 5pm (UK time). Online. Register here.
Co-hosted with the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science
This talk will use examples from 3 Parisian art galleries to argue for a new approach to the display and interpretation of art. Most large museums and galleries work hard to make a few pieces of art accessible to blind and partially blind beholders. My research shows that this kind of access can do more harm than good. Here, I will use my theory of “blindness gain” to suggest that more inclusive approaches, informed by the practice of ‘creative audio description’ are the best way to create properly inclusive gallery experiences for everyone.
Hannah Thompson is Professor of French and Critical Disability Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. Professor Thompson has published widely on French literature and theory, the body, gender, sexuality and disability.