More-than-human senses and sensations
21 June - 31 July 2024
Biography
Mark Paterson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He has an interest in the history and science of bodily sensation, and technologies of the senses. He is author of books including The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Routledge, 2007), Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (Edinburgh UP, 2016), and How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). He is co-editor of Touching Space, Placing Touch (Routledge, 2012) and of a special issue of ACM Transactions in Human-Robot Interaction (2023), 'Designing the Robot Body: Critical Perspectives on Affective Embodied Interaction'. He is on the Editorial Board of the journals The Senses and Society (since 2008), Emotion, Space and Society (since 2014), and Multimodality & Society (since 2021). He is currently writing a short book for Cambridge University Press, Affective Touching: Neurobiology and Technological Applications.
His current research is concerned with the role of embodiment in the histories of human-robot interactions. For more information, visit http://sensory-motor.com.
Project Summary
Research explicitly on the senses and sensations appears regularly in conferences, journal articles, and books in the humanities (especially History, English, Philosophy) and the social sciences (Sociology, Human Geography, Anthropology, Psychology), even as new neuroscientific discoveries about the processes underlying sensory perception emerge. This is a rapidly developing multidisciplinary area, therefore, which thrives on collaboration and knowledge-sharing rather than remaining disciplinarily specific.
By gathering a range of postgraduate, early career, and more established researchers across the University of Bristol, and inviting contributions from international scholars in the United States and Canada, this project examines the role of science and the history of science in the identification, observation, and measurement not only of human but also animal sensing, opening out consideration of the senses beyond the anthropocentrically normative individual. Since initial sensory research was laboratory-based through experimental physiology, psychophysics, and later neuroscience, what about the role of the senses in prosocial behaviours such as grooming and communication between humans, between nonhumans, and between humans and nonhumans? What happens if we consider a larger ecology of perception beyond the individual human sensing subject, one which accommodates relations between human and nonhuman? Jacob von Üexkull had famously written ‘A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men’ in 1934, but recently there has been great interest in what cultural geographers, anthropologists, and others consider, after David Abram in his Spell of the Sensuous (1996), a “more-than-human world”. Similarly, the ‘multispecies’ entanglements that Donna Haraway explores in her When Species Meet (2008) and elsewhere has been influential for others, including work on ‘multispecies ethnography’ (e.g. S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, 2010). Adding technologies of the senses, and the proliferation of sensors, into the mix, how might such ways of thinking encompass nonhuman objects such as robots with animal or android morphologies?
Details of Professor Paterson's lectures and seminars will be listed on our Events page in due course. You can also contact Professor Paterson's host Dr Andy Flack for further information.
