A few months ago an independent curator, Maryam Ghoreishi, contacted me about her exhibition 'Out of Sight, Beyond Touch' at the Center for Book Arts in New York scheduled for early summer. This was before the COVID-19 lockdown got serious, and the intention was to have the work of four Persian artists on show, with... Continue Reading →
more than human touch: workshop
material encounters: a workshop on more than human touch This is a British Academy funded Workshop around robotics and care organized by Amelia DeFalco (Medical Humanities, University of Leeds) and Aimee van Wynsberghe (Robot Ethics, Delft University, Foundation for Responsible Robotics). They asked me to speak, and my paper will be “Sensational Interactions with ‘Sociable... Continue Reading →
Affect & Embodiment in Human Robot Interaction
'Affect and Embodiment in HRI' Workshop accepted for 15th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction, Cambridge, UK, March 23-26, 2020 Along with Cherie Lacey, Lecturer in Media Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, and Caroline Yan Zheng, PhD candidate & visiting lecturer at Information Experience Design, Royal College of Art, our workshop 'Affect and... Continue Reading →
Sensory-Motor project finds home with University of Minnesota Press
I am absolutely delighted that the manuscript I've been working on for the past several years has found a home with University of Minnesota Press. The previous Humanities Editor, Danielle Kasprzak, showed interest in my project quite a while back and we talked regularly at conferences. One of her last actions before leaving the Press... Continue Reading →
‘Work Forces’ Workshop: automation and the transformation of labour
The following text was one of the outcomes of the 'Work Forces' week-long workshop run by the History of Art and Architecture (HAA) Department at the University of Pittsburgh, and in which I was fortunate enough to participate... The ‘Continuous Miner’. A phrase that has a rhythm, and sounds almost poetic. Like Handel’s famous suite... Continue Reading →
‘Haptic Media Studies’ workshop, UCL, July 10
'Haptic Media Studies: Touch and Desire in a Digital Age' is the name of a one-day Symposium at the UCL knowledgelab, as part of their In-Touch project. The wonderful Professor Carey Jewitt has invited David Parisi and myself to speak. Full details are at the UCL website. There are two papers and two responses: David... Continue Reading →
Video introduction to Body & Society paper on pain
The video abstract for my recently published Body and Society article ‘On Pain as a Distinct Sensation: Mapping Intensities, Affects, and Difference in ‘Interior States’’ is now 'live' on the Theory, Culture and Society (TCS) website. I use images from the article and provide an overview of the paper. Have a look here. It's also on... Continue Reading →
Blindness, neuroplasticity, and technologies of sensory substitution
Thanks to an invitation from the editors, Brian Glenney and José Filipe Silva, a chapter has appeared in their rather wonderful Routledge collection The Senses and the History of Philosophy (2019). There are contributions from some well-known philosophers of perception and of ancient philosophy, too. My chapter neatly follows from Brian Glenney's chapter on the Molyneux... Continue Reading →
Pain as sensation – after Elaine Scarry
It took two years from initial submission to final publication. It started with an invitation to a conference in Brighton, UK in 2015 celebrating 30 years of Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain. She was there, and gave a keynote. Subsequently a special issue of the journal Body and Society was put together by the conference organizers.... Continue Reading →
Alphonso Lingis at SPHS
My friend Tom Sparrow of Slippery Rock University has been editing the Alphonso Lingis Reader for University of Minnesota Press. The book was just released, and there was a launch panel at SPHS (Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences), part of the SPEP conference, at Penn State University on Sunday. Alphonso (or, as he likes... Continue Reading →