The Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA) have a fantastic conference each year. Someone told me about it last year too late, there was a ‘stream’ of panels with papers on the senses, so I kicked myself and resolved to submit something the following year. I nearly missed the deadline, but because …
The Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (SPHS), whose conference runs after SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), have accepted my paper on concepts of movement in Merleau-Ponty. The paper is entitled: The ‘handmaid of consciousness’? On the role of early neurophysiology in Merleau-Ponty’s motricity. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of bodily movement in Phenomenology of …
Two separate but related intriguing new touch technologies for robots from Georgia Tech has some intriguing implications. The first being Charlie Kemp’s development of a form of tactile sensing for robotic arms (Kemp was supervised by the world-famous Aussie roboticist Rodney Brookes). Reported in the New York Times (here) and elsewhere, searching in cluttered places for …
Around November of 2012 I started having conversations with Professor Eva Simms at Duquesne University. We met through the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (SPHS) mailing list. Then we got talking with Alex Kranjec, a relatively new faculty member who does fascinating work in a neuroscience lab. This is pretty unusual for Duquesne, …
The Einstein Forum based in Potsdam, near Berlin, has asked me to contribute an evening lecture ahead of a full day’s discussion, a symposium, about touch. Fantastic stuff, and you can read more about the event here. It includes Martin Grunwald, from the Haptik Lab in Leipzig, whose research concentrates on the psychological and neurological aspects of haptic …
It would be remiss not to include more details on the actual contents, you know… so a table of contents, and the flyer (PDF) from the publisher: Contents Introduction: placing touch within social theory and empirical study – Mark Paterson, Martin Dodge and Sara MacKian 1. Negotiating therapeutic touch: encountering massage through the ‘mixed bodies’ of Michel …
So here it is. A call for papers for a conference session back in 2007, organised initially by Sarah Mackian, Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins. My involvement later on, and the thought-provoking, well-attended sessions led to us proposing an edited collection. And here we are, years later, with the actual book on its way to … Continue reading »
From Hägerstrand’s “Action in the Physical Everyday World” (in Cliff et al., Eds, Diffusing Geography: Essays after Peter Haggett) “Touch — or contact — is the most fundamental and general relation we encounter, directly with the body and indirectly by experiencing its importance in the living and non-living world around us.” We cannot argue with … Continue reading »
Using a fascinating combination of ridges like fingerprints for fine-grained texture sensing, plus a fluid casing for its vibrotactile sensors, this is a fascinating approach from USC to the haptic perception of textures. Apparently 95% accurate, judged against a database of textiles, this is better than human assessment. As with all forms of sensory perception, … Continue reading »
It has been an incredibly long time coming. The original conference session was in 2008. The papers were mostly written and finished two years ago. But only in August 2012 will we finally have the printed book! Touching Space, Placing Touch [links to publisher website]. I’m happy with what eventually resulted – there was a maturation … Continue reading »
Rather wonderful news: after a lunch with the Dean of the McAnulty College of Liberal Arts at Duquesne University, I was invited to be Scholar in Residence. I’ve filled in the forms and means I’ll be able to have regular visits to the wonderful library, with its Center for Phenomenology. This section of the library has archives including … Continue reading »
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,600 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 43 trips to carry that many people. Click here to see the … Continue reading »
Months ago I was invited to speak at an event in a seminar series at Northwestern University, Illinois. The title of the series: The After-life of Phenomenology. So how could I refuse? So on October 27th I flew out to deliver the paper. It turns out there aren’t many phenomenologists there any more, but some … Continue reading »
