Sensing Beyond Borders

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

What happens to the sensorial when it intersects with the spatio-temporal circulations, exchanges, and politics of late industrial governance (Fortun 2012, 2014)? In conversation with feminists M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2010), this panel explores how the entwining of space, time, and sensing contributes to, upholds, and/or undermines the seductive corporeal illusion of a clearly bounded nation-state, while calling attention to the ways that spaces and bodies operate in systems of global power (Agard-Jones 2013). Motivated by a transnational feminist praxis committed to mapping the geopolitical, (neo)colonial and imperial genealogies of power that undergird knowledge production around health, belonging, and citizenship, we think with (and think to push), how sensing is imbricated in or resists the uneven asymmetries of power and privilege. Through examination of waves in earth and water, investigation of the ways that vaccination evokes suspicion while medical education relies on sensed learning, as well as exploration of the ways that microbes and chemicals are sensed at nodes of border crossing, we trace how affective intensities, bodily senses and moral sensibilities are palimpsestic, contagious, fluid, and circulatory; how they move, not only across and between borders over time, but with multiple effects that are oftentimes bound up in and responsive to the sedimentation of conquest and colonialism.

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / Sensing beyond borders

Chair

• Christy Spackman, Harvey Mudd College

Individual Presentations

• Reading a Wave Buoy - Stefan Helmreich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

• Palimpsestic Refusals: Vaccination and Felt Protection in Barbados - Nicole Charles, University of Toronto

• Sticky objects: towards an imploded global history of sensory education in medicine - Anna Harris, Maastricht University; John Nott, Maastricht University

• Tainted Flesh, Tangled Waters - Christy Spackman, Harvey Mudd College

• Sensing Food Safety at the Border - Heather Paxson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Session Organizer

• Nicole Charles, University of Toronto