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:…
‘Motricity, n.’
Etymology: < French motricité (1855) < motrice , feminine of moteur (adjective; see MOTORadj.) + -ité-ITY suffix. Physiology Motor function; the faculty or power of movement by the body or a body part. ‘motricity, n.’. OED Online. June 2015. Oxford University Press. http://www.oed.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/view/Entry/122763?redirectedFrom=motricity& (accessed August 13, 2015)
‘Intimate Listening’: paper for Emotional Geographies conference 2015
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…
Chapter in ‘Geographical Aesthetics’ volume
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…
Talk on robots as ‘companion species’ at Carnegie Mellon, Jan 14th
So my next upcoming talk is at Carnegie Mellon University, at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, on January 14th, 4-5.30pm. Link on the CMU website is here. Here is the title and abstract: Robots as ‘companion species’? Designing for disability and the mixed spaces of human-robot interactions There is a burgeoning ecology of robots as “machines…
The Tongue Display Unit (TDU) at UPMC: seeing with the tongue?
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…
Book on blindness, ‘Seeing With the Hands’, now with Edinburgh UP
As the book progressed, the original idea of a quirky history with some cross-over readership started to mutate into something more historically and philosophically consistent. My reading around Descartes and Locke especially added some necessary epistemological context, whilst a recent translation of an essay by Grosrichard (originally in Cahiers pour L’Analyse) where the Molyneux Question is…
‘Google Glass for cops’: wearable cameras, surveillance, and Ferguson
At the end of June I submitted an article to the Journal of Geography in Higher Education on using Google Glass based on the Urban Studies fieldtrip. In between receiving the reviewers’ comments (which were hearteningly, unmistakably positive, the first time this has happened for several years…) and then doing the edits for the final version,…
