Atmospheric Sensorium

This presentation will consider the role of atmospheres in orienting our everyday sensorial and affective experience, with a focus on thermal and olfactory media. I'll discuss interdisciplinary critiques of air conditioning as an infrastructure of thermal normativity that contributes to social and racial difference across multiple scales, as well as a range of cultural texts that defamiliarize, critique, and explore alternatives to air conditioning. After considering the insidious capacities of temperature as a force of social differentiation and thermal violence, I'll consider narratives that experiment with scent as a medium of sensorial worldmaking that can alter time, space, and patterns of human and more-than-human relation.

 

registration