Researching the Sensuous:

The Issues: We sense the world through our bodies and tune our senses by our actions in time and place. We learn to sense through practice and store that knowledge bodily. The organizing premises for the seminar are: 1) that the body is an inescapable mediating instrument between sensing human beings and their worlds, an instrument which is tuned by practice to those worlds; 2) that built and natural environments, technologies and cultures, organize the flow of information to the body from the world beyond the skin in ways which are specific and researchable; 3) that some of this awareness can communicated through language; and 4) some of what we know bodily eludes symbolic representation. This gap between sensing and telling, between knowing which is embodied and knowing which can be inscribed, varies contextually.

This seminar workshop explores these linked challenges: -how to research the sensuous, de-centering the visual to allow the tactile, auditory, gustatory and olfactory to register in our research projects; -how to specify spatially, temporally and by cultural and technological context the information the sensing body transmits - how to conceptualise the embodied mind and ‘being as doing’, both departures from Cartesian legacies and mid-C20 cognitive psychology -how to present and represent the sensuous, particularly the portion which eludes symbol and code, in artistic and scholarly production.

We will read theory which considers the body as specific to time and place, field research on the historical and contemporary sensing body and examine creative practices which explore these subjects. The course is organised as a workshop, at its centre the opportunity for participants to research and write about an instance in which these sensuous challenges are at play. Reports on this research will be circulated for admiration and critique by the members of the seminar in the last 4 weeks of class.

Evaluation

Plagiarism Reminder

Schedule and Course Readings

Bibliography and Research Paper Resources

Instructor for Geography 588: Prof. Joy Parr