Sense-Making

Reviews / Votes

This book is required - and most engaging - reading for any historian interested in the "world of the works." Worlds which in hermeneutics must be described in words, appear through sensory (re)creations by means of original methodologies, revealing in their immediacy a plurality of meanings that must be considered to truly understand the past. Sense-Making is also crucial to open up significant and hopeful alternative futures in our compromised world. This book makes uncommon sense.

- Alberto Perez-Gomez, O.C., Saidye R. Bronfman Professor Emeritus in Architecture, McGill University, Montreal

This is an exceptionally rich book combining both broad critical overviews of the sensory studies literature and targeted case studies - or etudes sensorielles. It offers the reader methodological reflections on how to address the role of the senses in the past and future through detailed writing and imaginative artistic interventions probing the sensorial and material worlds and lives beyond the present. This book wonderfully accomplishes the difficult task of enabling the reader to imagine past or future sensations through engaging art-based practices. In this way, Sense-Making is a landmark contribution to the emerging literature within sensory studies centring on sensing and making sense in the absence of co-presence.

- Mikkel Bille, Professor in Ethnology, University of Copenhagen

Sense-Making shatters temporal boundaries to reveal how we perceive, remember, and imagine across the vast expanse of human experience. This groundbreaking collection fearlessly traverses the archaeology of perception, the ethnography of the present, and the speculative sensoria of tomorrow-charting an exhilarating journey from a sixteenth-century castle to orbital space habitats. The volume unites archaeology, anthropology, history, geography, and sociology in a radical exploration of how culture tunes our neurons across time. Through immersive exhibitions that engage taste, touch, smell, sound, and sight, the contributors pioneer sensory extrapolation as both method and revelation-inviting readers to experience the ephemeral smells of medieval edifices, the hallucinatory intersensoriality of research-creation, and the imagined sensations of more-than-human entities in the cosmos. Moving beyond the tyranny of vision, Sense-Making champions proximity senses and embodied knowing, proving that perception isn't locked away in the human brain but emerges through cultural practice, artistic experimentation, and shared experience. This is scholarship you can taste, touch, and feel-a manifesto for the senses that demands we get our hands dirty in the material torrent of past, present, and future worlds.

- Anne W. Johnson, Universidad Iberoamericana