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... Continue Reading →
Katy Bennet from the University of Leicester approached me months ago to speak at the 'Emotional Geographies' conference in Edinburgh in June. I went to the first ever Emotional Geographies conference in Lancaster back in 2003, and Katy's session is about Listening, so I said yes. It was an opportunity to work on some of... Continue Reading →
A chapter that I wrote some time ago recently went through the proofs stage and will come out in the edited collection Geographical Aesthetics edited by Harriet Hawkins and Libby Straughan. The chapter, 'On Aisthêsis, "inner touch" and the aesthetics of the Moving body', develops material from the How We Became Sensory-Motor research program, and will... Continue Reading →
Courtesy of staff at University of Pittsburgh's Medical Center (UPMC), in September 2013 I was invited to the Sensory Substitution Lab to do something that I have wanted to do for years: have a hands-on experience with a device that I have written about. WICAB's 'BrainPort' is a 'sensory substitution' device that translates a visual feed from a camera... Continue Reading →
"OK Glass - direct me to coffee" The end of day 3 of the Urban Studies fieldtrip - we're in Kuala Lumpur, it's hot and humid, and we are encouraging the students to use Google Glass and handheld video equipment to gather impressionistic street-level data in the different quarters (Chinese, Malay, Anglo, Arabic) in the city.... Continue Reading →
After a call for papers for a special issue 'Sensorium Commune' of the journal Communications, edited by Marie-Luce Girard and Olivier Sorost, I didn't realize what a fascinating journal it was. Not a straightforward 'communications' journal in the American sense, it was set up by Roland Barthes and others in France in the 1960s. Some... Continue Reading →
A special issue of the rather fantastic Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature [disclosure: I have an article coming out in the next issue] devoted to Alphonso Lingis has material including an interview a short original article, and the text of a public address. The article, 'The Weight of Reality', has his usual mixture of... Continue Reading →
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 it... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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... Continue Reading →
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