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…
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…
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….
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…
‘Why Haptic Media Studies?’, Media in the Wild conference, Siegen
Last month I gave a talk at ‘Media in the Wild‘, the Annual Conference of the Collaborative Research Center Media of Cooperation, University of Siegen in Germany. Thoroughly enjoyed it, with papers by Arjun Appadurai (NYU) and William Urrichio (MIT). Abstract of the paper I gave: Why Haptic Media Studies? The ‘haptic moment’ we were waiting…
We need to talk about… AI
Last month The Guardian newspaper’s podcast series ‘We need to talk about….’ was about Artificial Intelligence. I submitted a question, and this was recorded for the podcast and addressed by the panel. The question? About the role of physical characteristics of AI machines, how we humans relate to their physicality, as robots become more prevalent…
‘Vanguard Fellow’, IAS, Birmingham
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…
