Analytical and comparative endeavours of elucidating how everyday life and its variegated avenues are mediated through the senses and the body have rarely been pursued in non-Westernacademic scholarship. Since this includes issues of morality, foodways, power relations, religious beliefs, and class dynamics, we ask what such neglect says vis-à-vis the production of knowledge in disciplinary fields such as sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy, architecture and so forth? How can the study of the body, senses, and emotions thus help us understand social relations and social structures/institutions further in different regions and societies in Asia? How does the body, senses and emotions delineate the boundaries of selfhood and “others”? How do smell, sound, touch and other sensory modalities produce moral and emotional orders which govern access to spaces in specific contexts in Asia? How are urban spaces built and designed through emotional, embodied and sensorial knowledge in Asia? How can we use the lens of emotional and sensory politics to talk about cities as sites of deep structural inequalities and asymmetries? How do food, rituals, performance, religion, tradition, consumption, aesthetics, education, popular culture, and other aspects of the everyday intersect with the embodied, sensory and emotional knowledge, and urbanity?

When? 16th and 17th February 2023

What? In-Person Workshop

Where?  National University of Singapore

Potential Panels (non-exhaustive):
• City life and urban encounters that intersect with sensory practices and expressions in
delineating group boundary making, transgression, and resistance
• Embodied remembering and forgetting across the domains of heritage, historiography and
social memory making
• The role of the senses and emotion in economic practice
• The sensory lives of material culture, the arts, and performance
• Religion, practices, and beliefs and sensory engagements with the physical world
• Sense making and embodied research in physical cultures
• Sensorialities of food, foodways and foodscapes
• Migrant sensescapes and notions of belonging

This workshop is part of the Shaping Asia network (shapingasia.net), and also co-organised with TG07 Senses & Society of the International Sociological Association. Please submit an abstract of approximately 400 words (with title, author contact details, and 5-6 keywords) by 20th November 2022 to the workshop convenors:

Kelvin Low kelvinlow@nus.edu.sg
Noorman Abdullah socnooa@nus.edu.sg
Thomas Stodulka thomas.stodulka@fu-berlin.de