The symposium is unfortunately cancelled.

Intermediality and the body II

Feeling, perceiving, making sense:

Intermediality and the senses

March 6, 2024

9.00-16.00 CET

Arranged by Intermedial Studies, Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences, Lund University

LUX building, Room B352 and Zoom 

Human and non-human bodies encounter the world and navigate and survive in it while seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting it. If bodies are our interfaces for interacting with the environment, senses are what enable these interfaces in channeling data and providing a basis for meaningful interaction and communication. Our understanding of the sensorial systems has been challenged and nuanced in recent decades thanks to advances in psychology, medical sciences, cognitive studies, animal studies, among other fields of study. In the same line, this symposium is an invitation for intermedial studies to engage more critically and diversely with the question of senses and sensorial perception across different media and intermedial relations.

Different media engage different constellations of our senses in differing degrees in such a way that intermedial and multimodal phenomena are as well inter- and multisensorial phenomena. Despite its significance and its acknowledgement as a fundamental modality of mediation, the sensorial still remains to be unpacked in intermedial studies. With this symposium, we intend to problematize the recurrently presumed universality of senses by foregrounding how different bodies, shaped at the intersection of various materialities and discourses of gender, sexuality, race, (dis)ability, class, and culture, sense and make sense differently as they mediate and are mediated.  

While delving deeper into the ‘audio’ and the ‘visual’, we also aim for challenging the supremacy of the audiovisual in intermedial studies to open up for examining the potentials of the olfactory, haptic, and gustatory in mediation. Questioning the conceptual and terminological relations and tensions between senses and other concepts like affect, emotion, feeling, and experience, we intend to go beyond the classical, externally defined five-senses human constellation and embrace less discussed notions such as: interoception (sensing the internal state of the body), proprioception (body awareness and sense of position) as well as ‘sensory exotica’ or senses in non-human and more-than-human bodies.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

·        Theorizing the sensorial modality 

·        Beyond the audiovisual: Culinary, textile, and olfactory media

·        Cognitive approaches to intermedial sensing

·        Sensing, media, and medical discourse

·        (Dis)abilities and intermedial communication

·        Non-human and more-than-human sensing in and across media 

·        Senses, media and memory

·        Senses and media literacy

·        Senses and the digital

·        Sensing the technical: cellphones and other gadgets as sensorial resources  

Maintaining the successful, workshopping structure of the previous versions of the symposium, we invite short contributions of maximum 10 minutes in form of short research presentation, case introduction, and creative practice.

Please send a short abstract (max. 200 words) and a one-line bio to Nafiseh Mousavi at nafiseh.mousavi@kultur.lu.se before Feb 1, 2024. You are also welcome to contact Nafiseh if you have questions. Note that lunch and coffee breaks are included.

Very welcome to Lund!

Intermedial studies, Lund University

Nafiseh, Mikael, and Mats