Sensorystudies.org

I am going to show you some examples of sensory courses in different world's universities and their theoretical aims, which ones I find really interesting.

"This seminar will explore the philosophical and historical foundations of sensory experience and will examine how sensory modes inform literary and artistic expression and how the senses connect, interpret, determine, and sometimes disconnect us from the world of representation. In seminar discussions, we will consider the traditional model of the five senses and contemporary society’s altered modalities of sense perception."

Altman Seminar: Sensory Knowledge.

"What does it mean to study the senses?  What are the possible relationships among physiological capacities and modes of social and cultural organization?  What are the possible relations among sensation, thought, and experience?  How do questions of essentialism and antiessentialism play out when we consider phenomena that cut across physiological and sociocultural domains?  How do theories and histories of sensory experience shape the ways we talk about media and mediation generally?  Why have sight and hearing so often been singled out in social and cultural thought; is their differential treatment warranted?  Is it possible to invoke a conceptualization of sensation apart from a conceptualization of linguistic sense?"


Audiovisuality: The Public Senses.

"Some have argued that it is precisely the senses which enable an escape from political boundaries. Even if language and thought can be controlled (they have their own rules, their own grammars, their own concepts) perhaps the senses cannot. Judgments of beauty, tastes of deliciousness, sensations on the skin – these have long been thought to resist the control of totalitarian states and bring people back to their inner freedoms. But what if political environments make us feel? (Not emotionally, which they obviously do, but literally?) What if what we sense has a political component? What make us feel, see, touch, taste, and smell in certain ways? What as a consequence becomes unfeelable, unseeable, untouchable, untasteable, unsmellable, and thus unthinkable?"



Problems in Political Theory: The Politics of Sensation.