Between April and May this year I have been a ‘Vanguard Fellow’ at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), University of Birmingham, working with Dr. Jess Pykett in Geography and Earth Sciences (GEES) and the ‘Embodied Geographies’ research group. It has been a lot of fun, and included: a day workshop, ‘Bodies 2.0. Embodied processes…
Touch: Sensing, Feeling, Knowing (Leeds Sadler Seminars)
The Humanities Research Centre at the University of Leeds, UK has a fascinating series of talks in their Sadler Seminar Series this year. Under the theme ‘Touch: Sensing, Feeling, Knowing’, a rich mixture of philosophers, psychologists and others are presenting, and the talks are convened by Professor Helen Steward (Philosophy), Dr Amelia DeFalco (English) and Dr…
Seeing, feeling, and showing ‘bodies-in-place’ – videography and the body
A new paper co-authored with Michael Glass, accepted (finally… bit of an epic story there) in Social and Cultural Geography here. You can also access an eprint here. Seeing, feeling, and showing ‘bodies-in-place’: exploring reflexivity and the multisensory body through videography This paper considers the challenge of representing embodied, multisensory experience of ‘bodies-in-place’ through film, an…
Hold Me Now – Feel and Touch in an Unreal World
The Studium Generale (public series of lectures) at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam for 2017–2018 is entitled ‘Hold Me Now’. I was asked to curate one of the days (March 22), and other days are organized by Jack Halberstam, Rizvana Bradley, and Karen Archey. There are some excellent people lined up. For my day, here…
An ecology of sensing: tracking embodied processes for science, fun, and profit
A talk in the joint CMU-University of Pittsburgh ‘Environmental Humanities Research Seminar’. My paper was delivered and there was a response by Jesse Stiles, Assistant Professor of Sound Media at CMU and an accomplished sound artist and musician. The paper was based on my invited submission to Resilience: A journal of the Environmental Humanities, a Special…
Talk at MIT, Feb 23rd
See MIT calendar for announcement and details. MIT Department of Architecture / Spring 2018 Lecture Series Design & Computation Series, organized by PhD student Athina Papadopoulou with Prof. Terry Knight “Architectures of the Oculomotor: Body Motility, Ocular Processes, and the Perception of the Built Environment” When it comes to perceiving the built environment, a static model of vision has been the…
‘Sensing Collectivities’ Ph.D. Summer School, Hamburg
This June in Hamburg is a Ph.D. Summer School in Hamburg with the theme of ‘Sensing Collectivities’, which runs alongside another workshop, ‘Thermal Objects’. Dr. Michael Liegl invited me to deliver one of the Keynotes. My talk is entitled: ‘Haptic Methodologies for Sensing Collectivities’. We are having what might be termed a ‘haptic moment’. In terms of…
Architecture of Sensation
An article just published in Body and Society, titled ‘Architecture of Sensation: Affect, Motility and the Oculomotor‘. It appears in an issue with an essay by Juhanni Pallasmaa, the Finnish architect, who I quote and feature in my article, quite some synchrony there. There is also an essay by the managing editor of the journal, Tomoko Tamari,…
Talk at Temple University, Feb 23rd
An upcoming talk in the Architecture division of the Tyler School of Art, Temple University. February 23rd. The title of the talk: ‘The Architecture of the Oculomotor: Body Motility, Ocular Processes, and the Perception of the Built Environment’, based on my recently-published paper for Body and Society.
‘Seeing With the Hands’ Book: Now Available
My book Seeing With the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch after Descartes is out now with Edinburgh University Press [link]. In the USA it is distributed by Oxford University Press [link]. You can buy it from Amazon UK or Amazon US. The back cover text is reproduced below: A literary, historical and philosophical exploration of…
Interview with journalist on the Social Softness Illusion (SSI)
Laura Tedesco, a freelance science journalist, interviewed me over the phone last month about a new piece of research just published on the so-called Social Softness Illusion. The article got published with the title Why Your Significant Other’s Skin Feels So Soft (But May Not Actually Be) on Yahoo Health. I had talked to Laura about…
Affect Theory Conference #affectWTF
So, over to Amish country for the first time in many years, to Lancaster, PA for the rather amazing Affect conference. The fluidity of audiences between rooms, appearing and then disappearing, was soon made clear – the conference was throwing out loads of live tweeting of sessions, a real social media presence. Highlights for me:…
