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Qualia: Thinking the Senses

Qualia: Thinking the Senses

Publié le par Bérenger Boulay (Source : Boris Wiseman)

Call for Papers

Qualia : Thinking the Senses
Conference & Research Project

Institute of Advanced Study
University of Durham
28th, 29th and 30th March 2008



Advisory committee: Professor Emerita Claude Imbert (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Department of Philosophy, Member of the European Academy of Sciences); Professor Ivo Strecker (University of Mainz and University of Addis Ababa, Department of Anthropology); Mr Jean Khalfa (Trinity College, Cambridge).


The aim of this interdisciplinary conference, and the research project associated with it, is to explore the ways in which different disciplines theorise the qualitative dimension of experience and integrate the sensual into their working-models of a range of phenomena. It will explore sensory perception in different times and places, in its multiple relations to the literary and the artistic as well as to the political and social. It will create a forum for an exchange of points of view between researchers in the fields of literary theory, history, art history, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, geography, cognitive science and other areas still. It will also involve practising artists and writers.

When John Locke argued that one should not think of snow as being white but as causing whiteness, in much the same way that fire causes pain, he raised a fundamental and still open question about the relationship between the subjective and objective dimensions of experience. The aim of this conference is not so much to return to this philosophical problem as to explore the many thought-worlds with which the human and social sciences have populated the space between the perceiving subject and the material world, between the self and his/her sensory environment. Our working hypothesis will be that the sensible world is the site of a series of complex operations whose broader semiotic, affective, social, political and poetic, significance still remains to be discovered and understood. In this respect, we will be concerned not only with relatively concrete forms of social practice – a sociology or anthropology of the senses – but also with more ephemeral productions, from myth-making to music, from poetry to the functioning of memory. In other words, we will be concerned with sensory experience at many different levels: its scientific description and analysis, its place in social dynamics, its textual and plastic representation, its interface with language, etc.

In its historical dimension, the qualia project will be concerned with the interrelationship between different discourses on sense perception -- scientific, philosophical, literary, artistic – and with the way they have impacted on one another in the course of their development. We will ask how science and technology have reconfigured our relationship to the sensible. Here, the history of ideas leads to a history of sense perception itself. It was T.S. Eliot who suggested that there occurred in the 17th century a ‘dissociation of sensibility […] from which we have never recovered'. One may ask, in his wake, what has happened to sense-based knowledge in the modern post-industrial world and the era of mass communication? And what indeed is the specificity of sensory modes of understanding and of their relationship to logic(s)? Said differently: trying to grasp the nature of perceptual experience, and its place in contemporary research, is another way of trying to grasp what it means to be human.


Research Project

A further aims of this conference is to assemble a small international and interdisciplinary team of researchers to work on a more targeted aspect of the ‘qualia' project. It is envisaged that this group will be involved, in particular, in the development of a collaborative research funding application. This may involve applying for a period of funded in-residence collaborative research at an overseas institution. For informal inquiries and further information please contact Dr Boris Wiseman (boris.wiseman@durham.ac.uk).


Possible topic areas (not exhaustive):



• Language and sensation
• Sensing in/through/beyond texts
• The poetics of sense perception
• Metaphors and sense perception
• Music and the senses
• Sensing the body
• Sense perception and virtual reality
• The political manipulation of the senses
• Sensory experience and the construction of the social
• Technology and the senses
• Genealogies of the senses
• ‘Minor' senses (e.g. proprioception)
• Synaesthesia/sensory interrelations
• Beyond sensation/sensory excess
• Sensing the unfamiliar
• Alterity and the senses


Please send proposals by the end of May 2007 to:

Dr Boris Wiseman
Conference organiser and research project co-ordinator:
Inaugural Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study.


The French Department,
University of Durham,
Elvet Riverside,
New Elvet,
Durham,
DH1 3JT,
United Kingdom

boris.wiseman@durham.ac.uk