Seminar: Sensing
Sensing can be manifold and radically divergent depending on the practices and entities involved in “making sense,” yet “the senses” are often classified according to well-known categories, where the sites of sensation are often described through humanistic lenses. However, sensing could be transformed through more-than-human and environmental affiliations that distribute sensation rather than make it the privileged domain of cognizing humans. This seminar, part of The Shape of a Practice public programme, explored how default approaches to sensing are a product of specific cultural, political, or even human habits. By focusing on the embodied, the extended, and the environing qualities that sensing has, the seminar oriented around how perception can be habituated as well as unlearned.
- Case StudyMichelle Lai, Huiying Ng
Re-earthing Through Collective Study
Geographer Huiying Ng and urban farmer Michelle Lai’s case study presents methods for intentionally unlearning conventional perspectives of landscape.
Sensing, Knowledge production, Ecology, Agriculture, Landscape, Human-environment relations
- Case StudyRaphaël Grisey, Bouba Touré
Sowing Somankidi Coura
An archival research and film project chronicling the cooperative of Somankidi Coura, founded in Senegal by returning migrant workers in 1977.
Sensing, Agriculture, Ecology, History, Migration, Colonialism, Community
- Case StudyChristina Gruber
Reflections of the Past
Breeding and releasing sturgeons in the Danube River, biologists seek new ways to perceive what ecological conditions both the fish and the human need to prosper.
Sensing, Species, Biodiversity, Human-animal relations, Ecology, Sound
- Case StudyImani Jacqueline Brown
The Remote Sensation of Disintegration
Imani Jacqueline Brown’s project utilizes technologies of remote sensing to map the colonial and ecological violence of the fossil fuel industry.
Sensing, Violence, Environmental Justice, Extraction, Scale, Human-environment relations, Ecology
- Case StudyJohan Gärdebo, Adam Wickberg
Environing Media and the Anthropocene
Charts and maps shape our understanding of the world but beyond this, how do data and representations actively form environments?
Sensing, History, Media
- Case StudyBabak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai
Labour Lung
Labour Lung is part of a series of work examining the handing over of our total biological and cognitive functions to capitalist technologies.
Sensing, Capitalism, Embodiment, History, Air, Sound
- Case StudyGrupo de Pesquisa em Ecologia das Práticas, Fernando Silva e Silva
There is Power in Coming Together Time and Again
Notes from the Grupo de Pesquisa em Ecologia das Práticas on the messy task of crafting common worlds in the Anthropocene.
Sensing, Epistemology, Knowledge production, Education, Community
- Case StudyMichael Swierz
When House on the Prairie Became Possibility Island
Ecologist Michael Swierz’s invitation to attune to our own physical embodiment as a focal point for responding to the Anthropocene.
Sensing, Wisdom, Resilience, Knowledge production, Future, Ecology
- Case StudyMargarida Mendes
Environmental Sensing
Margarida Mendes considers the relationships between the body, environment, and industry, and speculates on the sonic residue of toxicity in Mississippi’s petrochemical corridor.
Sensing, Toxicity, Water, Pollution, Ecology, Sound
- Case StudyCharles T. Wolfe
Hierarchy of the Senses and Materialism of Touch
What misperceptions stem from the privileging of sight as “the noblest of the senses” in Western thinking?
Sensing, Modernity, Embodiment
- contributionYasaman Sheri, Allison Stegner
Interview: Sensing
Seminar moderators Allison Stegner and Yasaman Sheri reflect on the pathways, pitfalls and rewards of collectively learning to sense differently.
Conversation, Sensing, Embodiment, Human-animal relations, Affect, Scale
- contributionImani Jacqueline Brown, Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani, Adania Shibli
Histories of Disintegration
Histories can often be told through the changes in a landscape; about what has changed and come to form, but most of all, what is excluded altogether.
Case Study, Film, Conversation, Climate change, History, Indigenous Rights
- contributionChristina Gruber, Lynn Peemoeller, Nikiwe Solomon, Adrian Van Wyk
Approaching a Waterway
Artists discuss sturgeons pushed to the edge of extinction and the future of a chemically polluted river near Cape Town.
Conversation, Case Study, Species, Water, Extinction, System, Ecology
- contributionImani Jacqueline Brown, Brian Holmes, Margarida Mendes, Huiying Ng, Abbéy Odunlami
Place and Space
How do materials from different forms of research communicate with each other?
Experiment, Conversation, Case Study, Engagement
- contributionBabak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai, Katrin Hornek, Margarida Mendes
A Trace, a Breath
Using sensory work, artists explore how the effects of opium relate to colonialist and capitalist extraction, and convey a tale of industry and the Latvian geological landscape.
Reflection, Sound, Storytelling, Conversation, Capitalism, Settler Colonialism
- contributionRavi Agarwal, Michelle Lai, Paulina Lopez, Huiying Ng
Social Witnessing
Two case studies focus on two very different landscapes, and attempt to account for the changing relationships that make them over time.
Case Study, Mapping, Film, Field Study, Ecology, Capitalism, Agriculture
- contributionRaphaël Grisey, Gilly Karjevsky, Patricia Reed, Fernando Silva e Silva, Nikiwe Solomon, Ela Spalding, Spółdzielnia Krzak / Krzak Collective, Rosario Talevi, Bouba Touré, Simon Turner, Monique Verdin
Coordinating Practice
The Anthropocene has a coordination problem. This discussion highlights the many challenges of coordinating projects at different scales, both spatially and temporally.
Conversation, Reflection, Field Work, Local knowledge
- contributionRaphaël Grisey, Bouba Touré
Xaraasi Xanne—Crossing Voices
Raphaël Grisey and Boube Touré chronicle the practices of a self-organized farming cooperative founded by former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977.
Film, Engagement, Conversation, Migration, Settler Colonialism
- Sara Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
Michael Backus, Natural Fish Lure: Lampsilis Mussel and Bass, 2010, video stream.
Jodi Byrd, “To Hear the Call and Respond: Grounded Relationalities and the Spaces of Emergence,” for American Quarterly, Johns Hopkins University Press, 201.
Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy, “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities,” for Social Text, Duke University Press, 2018.
Coco Fusco, “We Need New Institutions, Not New Art,” Hyperallergic, 2020, online essay.
Édouard Glissant, translated by Betsy Wing, Poetics of Relation, University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Eva Horn, “Air as Medium,” Grey Room, MIT Press, 2018, online essay.
Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, University of California Press, 2013.
Davi Kopenawa, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, Harvard University Press, 2013.
Ailton Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, House of Anansi Press, 2020.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest, Berkley Books, 1976.
Natasha Myers with Carla Hustak, “Involutionary Momentum: Affective Ecologies and the Sciences of Plant/Insect Encounters,” for Differences: A journal of feminist cultural studies, Brown University, 2012.
Malidoma Patrice Somé, Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman, Penguin, 1995.
