The Body as Environmental Sensor - II

Abstract

This session will examine the body and its various senses in relationship to its varied environments. Presentations should seek to explore the connections and disconnections of the body to the changing world, broadly imaged. Recent STS and other scholarly literature on the environment has focused on how scientific knowledge about the world is constructed and contested, how humans cope with the effects of the Anthropocene, interspecies interactions and decentering of the human, and public science. These papers will extend these lines of inquiry by looping the human body back into the scientific and technological conversations about things like climate change, pollution, toxicities, etc. Possible questions this session will seek to answer are: How does the body witness the world – how is the body itself a “sensor” that produces data about the environment? How does the body as a sensor respond and react to its environments in productive and nonproductive ways? How are science and technology used to enhance or replace human senses and to what effect? What role do wearables, apps, and other mobile technologies play in extending human senses or changing how we “sense” the world around us? Submissions for this session are encouraged to think creatively about their delivery. Sounds, visuals, touch, taste, and movement are encouraged and traditional presentations are discouraged. How can we use our various senses to help make our arguments and present our own research?

Discussant

• Theresa MacPhail, Stevens Institute of Technology

Individual Presentations

• Evanescent Imaginaries: Women's Bodies and Household Smoke in Southern Vietnam - Jade Sasser, University of California, Riverside

• Maximizing the Body as Sensor: The Work of a Bantu Healer - julie laplante, University of Ottawa

• Toxic Sublimity and the Berkeley Pit as Pharmakon - Julia Huggins, Brown University

Session Organizer

• Theresa MacPhail, Stevens Institute of Technology