Haptic Trouble
Drawing on the polysemy of trouble in critical theory, this conference proposes to interrogate haptic trouble as a site of sensory and social subversion, urging us to acknowledge the unresolved discontents of the haptic, to embrace its critical disturbances, and to test its emancipatory potentialities.
10-11 October 2025
Maison de la recherche de la Sorbonne nouvelle, Salle du Conseil
4 rue des Irlandais, Paris
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TACT (Touch, Arts, Affects)
Sorbonne Nouvelle University & Institut Universitaire de France
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Keynotes:
Georgina Kleege (Berkeley)
Amber Musser (CUNY)
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Programme
Friday, 10 October 2025
9.30 am: Introduction
Rae Aumiller (Radboud) and Caroline Pollentier (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Haptic Trouble”
10 am-11.30 am: Out of Touch
Chair: Rae Aumiller (Radboud) and Caroline Pollentier (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Stephen Hughes (UCL): “The Lonely Dreams of Touch Without a Body”
Anna Ciaunica (UCL): “Losing Touch with Oneself: Depersonalisation Experiences Modulate Vicarious Affective Touch and Self Touch”
Vivienne Matthies-Boone (Radboud): “Out of Touch? A Critical Disability Perspective on Long Covid”
11.30 am-12 pm: Coffee Break
12pm-1pm: Technological Troubles
Chair: Carole Maigné (Lausanne)
Neda Zanetti (Lausanne): “Viscous and Vibrant World – Tactile and Metastable Knowledge with Gilbert Simondon”
Julien Dehut (University of Rouen Normandie): “Some Haptic Rhetorical Aspects with Touchscreen: Touch and Technological Trouble”
1 pm-2.30 pm: Lunch buffet
2 pm-3pm: Black Affects
Chair: Thomas Constantinesco (Sorbonne)
Erica Fretwell (Albany): “Black/out Power”
Omari Weekes (CUNY Queens College): “Touch My Body: The Haptics of Bodily Attunement in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters”
3pm-3.30pm: Coffee Break
3.30 pm-5 pm: Vulnerability/Resistance
Chair: Alexandra Poulain (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Sam Dolbear (London): “Distant Gestures, Moving Lives: On Healing and Proximity”
James Garrison (UMass Lowell): “Reconsidering the Life of Power: Touch and the Aesthetics of Vulnerability”
Alan Palacios (Leiden University): “Carnal Disruptions in the Aesthesis of Abya Yala (Latin America): Tactical Strategies of ‘Tantear’”
5pm-5.30pm: Coffee Break
5:30 pm-6.30 pm: Keynote
Amber Musser (CUNY): “Hapticality and the Sphinx: Simone Leigh's Fugitive Sphinxes”
Chair: Rae Aumiller (Radboud)
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Saturday, 11 October 2025
10am-11 am: Skin Ethics
Chair: Rae Aumiller (Radboud) and Caroline Pollentier (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Rebekka Klein (Goethe University Frankfurt): “‘From Skin to Skin’ – Jean-Luc Nancy’s Post-deconstructive Materialist Understanding of Touch”
Gwendolyn Bolderink (Leiden): “‘I Want Your Hands On Me’: How to Be a Sex Object”
11am-11.30am: Coffee Break
11.30am-12.30pm: Haptic Fictions
Chair: Yasna Bozhkova (Paris Nanterre) and Jaine Chemmachery (Sorbonne)
Katja Haustein (Kent): “Alone with Others: Tact & Contact in Henry James”
Sreedevi D (Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur): “Memories of Untouchability: A Study of Senses, Memory and Writing”
12:30-2pm: Lunch buffet
2.30 pm-3.30 pm: Haptic Materials
Chair: Marie Laniel (Picardie Jules Verne)
Marit Grøtta (Oslo): “Light as a Haptic Medium: On the Atmospheric Turn in Art and Aesthetic Theory”
María José Vizcaino (Montclair State): “Raising Tactile Awareness in Henry Moore’s Sculptures”
3.30 pm-4 pm: Coffee Break
4pm-5pm: Sensing Disability
Chair: Àger Pérez Casanovas (Barcelona)
Sarah Neelsen (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Touching Disability? From Pity to Sensorial Diversity in Early German Disability Studies”
Kathleen Sitter (Calgary): “Crip Haptics and the Politics of Touch: Tactile Resistance in Disability Arts Installation”
Coffee Break: 5pm-5.30pm
5.30 pm-6.30 pm: Keynote
Georgina Kleege (Berkeley): “Dancing with Sculptures: A Touch Docent Makes Haptic Trouble”
Chair: Caroline Pollentier (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
6.30 pm: Closing Words
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In the last decades, the rise of affective touch as a distinct neurological category has significantly revalued the developmental and therapeutic benefits of the tactile sense (Olausson et al. 2010; Morrison 2016). According to neuroscience and cognitive psychology, touch is not just pleasurable and desirable–it is vital to growth, care and bonding from the earliest stages of life to the complex relationality of social life across species. The sense that touch is beneficial is perhaps nowhere as evident as when it is lacking. For Richard Kearney, an increasingly digitalized society calls for recovering our most vital sense” (2021). Alternatively, Mark Paterson sees the “futures of affective touch” in the reparative potentialities of companion robots and socially assistive robots (2023).
The nostalgia for lost touch, like the utopian hopes for assistive touch, responds to haptic scenarios of comfort and consolation. What happens, however, when touch does not just alleviate but generate trouble? Can we complicate these curative narratives of touch by engaging with the frictions, failures and disputes of tactile experience? For Hortense Spillers, touch entangles the promises of healing with the violence of coercion. As such, it constitutes a “formidable paradox, which unfolds a troubled intersubjective legacy–and, perhaps, troubled to the extent that one of these valences of touch is not walled off from the other, but haunts it, shadows it, as its own twin possibility” (2018, quoted in Rizvana Bradley 2020). Taking its cue from Spillers’s insight into the affective contradictions of touch, this conference proposes to interrogate haptic trouble as a site of sensory and social subversion, urging us to acknowledge the unresolved discontents of the haptic, to embrace its critical disturbances, and to test its emancipatory potentialities.
Drawing on the polysemy of trouble in critical theory, this conference will place touch at the interdisciplinary intersection of aesthetics, political philosophy, cultural and material studies, and the biomedical humanities. If “trouble is inevitable” and calls for “what best way to be in it” (Butler 1990), if it blurs the ontological limits of materiality in “mixed-up times” (Haraway 2016), then our attempt at recovering the disturbances of touch will articulate touch and critique, addressing touch as a “critical sensibility” (Fretwell 2018) that disrupts and remodels relationality. Perhaps haptic trouble arises from the reflexivity of this sensory modality—one is touched when one touches (Husserl 1952). If the variable limit between self and other, self and self, and self and things is not just considered as a chiastic “synergy” (Merleau-Ponty 1964) but also as a contested limit, then touch, though long relegated behind visuality, constitutes a crucial critical sense.
Focusing on tactile aesthetics, our conference will be particularly attentive to promote the revaluation of tactile thinking in literature, aesthetics, arts and media. From “tactile poetics” (Jackson 2015) to “video haptics” (Marks 2002) and “touchscreen archaeologies” (Strauven 2021), from the copolitics of contact improvisation (Bigé 2023) to the body-centered medium of performance and the materiality of sculpture, our discussions will interrogate the criticality of touch in a variety of aesthetic forms and contexts.
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Image: A Fingerless Glove
Artist: Veronika Pausova - Photography by Laura Findlay
Courtesy of Bradley Ertaskiran
"An image of the poster for the Haptic Trouble conference, with a striking composition that resembles a Surrealist collage. The warm purple background evokes the texture of fabric, crossed by subtle, luminous lines that form almost-square patterns. On the left foreground, a big black glove—rendered with the glossy sheen of latex—draws immediate focus. Thin red threads tangle around its fingers, climbing upward to come together with additional strings of red and deep purple that emerge from the glove’s opening. These threads rise and then cascade downward in a fluid motion, spilling toward the lower-left corner. There, they entwine with four delicately drawn fingers, pale and softly shaded, which appear to float against the fabric-like backdrop. A faint shadow along their right edge enhances their ethereal presence" (visual description by Àger Pérez Casanovas).