Sensory studies arises at the conjuncture (and within) the fields of anthropology • sociology • history • archeology • geography • communications • religion • philosophy • literature • art history • museology • film • mixed media • performance • phenomenology • disability • aesthetics • architecture • urbanism • design

Sensory Studies can also be divided along sensory lines into, for example, visual culture, auditory culture (or sound studies), smell culture, taste culture and the culture of touch, not to mention the sixth sense (however it might be defined)

Endorsement – Mark Paterson

How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation

by Mark Paterson

This book opens a new chapter in the archaeology of knowledge and the body. It charts how the inchoate mass of sensations within the bodily interior became the focus of scientific inquiry from the mid-1800s onwards. As Paterson details with stunning lucidity, the work of pinpointing and measuring the physiological and psychological mechanisms responsible for our feelings of pain, fatigue, motoricity and proprioception (the sense of one’s own body) laid the foundation for a radically new understanding of human subjectivity as rooted in the sensorimotor. To read this deeply touching book is to come to know one’s innermost self from a rigorously empirical and objective yet intimately familiar angle.

– David Howes, author of The Sensory Studies Manifesto (forthcoming, The University of Toronto Press)