The Senses in Interdisciplinary Perspective
This new discussion and reading group will meet approximately two times each quarter and will bring together faculty and students from across disciplines, schools, and campuses to address questions related to the senses, a subject currently enjoying renewed focus in a number of fields. We will necessarily traverse several intellectual terrains, including social history, cognitive and biological sciences, and phenomenology, but we invite you to help us in further deciding whither we will wander in our discussions this year.
Workshop Events
NEW Faculty/Student Work Group on the Senses
Organizational Meeting
Tuesday, September 29
4:30 - 6:30
Kresge 2-370
Organizers:
Cristina Traina, Religion
Mary Weismantel, Anthropology
Gregory Mitchell, Performance Studies
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS TO ENGAGE
Cultural and historical difference and specificity in how the senses are understood and experienced
Hierarchies of senses, troubling the primacy of sight
How to understand the impacts of our senses on our neural systems, our emotions, and our intellects?
The role of the senses in structuring language and thought
What do the senses offer us in terms of research methods themselves?
How might scholarship on the senses inform ethics and public policy (e.g., treatment of
children, labor issues)?
How does research on the senses complement or contradict related inquiries into the body, affect, cultural tastes, and desire?
