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Ehsan Akbari is an artist, educator, and educational researcher. Currently, he is working as a lecturer and coordinator in digital pedagogy and literacies at the University of Regina. A central theme of his research is the role of the senses in how we perceive and interact with technology, our surroundings and each other. Sensory awareness can be a valuable educational tool for encouraging and deepening awareness of both physical and online spaces. This awareness is a critical component of digital citizenship, and citizenship in general, in the twenty-first century. Akbari’s doctoral dissertation, “Spatial and Collective Learning through Mobile Photography and Creative Cartography,” involved using a design-based research methodology to investigate how the mobility, networking, sensory, and mapping capabilities of smartphones could be utilized in art and media classrooms to encourage high school students to attend to their everyday surroundings. Akbari’s Master’s thesis, “Soundscape Compositions for Art Classrooms,” explored ways in which the process of listening, recording, and editing everyday soundscapes can be incorporated into art education to expand students’ awareness of their surroundings and allow them to experience quotidian environments in different ways.

Ehsan defended his thesis, entitled “Spatial and Collective Learning through Mobile Sensory Photography and Creative Cartography” in November 2020, and will graduate at the Spring Convocation in June 2021.

Raphaëlle Bessette-Viens is a doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program at Concordia University. Their collaborative research-creation project is interested in the sensorial and affective dimension of elective breast and torso surgery. Their research interests engage with an intersectional framework with a special focus on critical disability, crip and queer theories. Coming from a background in gender studies and visual anthropology, they are interested in the ways non-fiction and experimental filmmaking can be employed in participatory research-creation which explores embodiment.

Rodrigo D’Alcântara (b. Rodrigo de Alcântara Barros Bueno) is a transdisciplinary visual artist, film/video-maker, and currently a PhD fellow in the Interuniversity Doctoral Program in Art History at Concordia University (Montreal, CA). His research dives into the intersections between gender studies and counter-hegemonic studies, analyzing, updating, and subverting concepts and imagery that have contributed to maintaining a colonial structure in contemporary Latin America. In the course of his Bachelor’s degree at Universidade de Brasília, he was supervised by Prof. Dr. Karina Silva e Dias, from the fields of studies in contemplative art, urban landscape, and tourism.
In 2016, while a Master’s student in the Theory and Experimentation Program at the School of Fine Arts at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), D’Alcântara began to participate more frequently in collective art exhibitions, in the academic agenda, and to work as an independent curator. In 2019, D’Alcântara taught as a volunteer professor of the LGBT+ Institute of Brasília, in the fields of videoart and dissident images. Rodrigo’s dissident artworks have been screened internationally, in countries such as Austria, Brazil, Belgium, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, among others. Co-supervised by Dr. John Potvin and Dr. May Chew, he is currently focusing on non-linear inquires and on rescuing non-hetero-cisgender ancestral views. He has been highlighting works of art produced mainly by contemporary Brazilian BIPOC LGBTQI2+ artists, who challenge the current patriarchal model exposing it as a reflection of the colonization process that is still so prevalent in these territories and worldwide.

Golriz Farzamfar holds a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture and a Master’s degree in Urban Design. She is currently pursuing research towards the M.Des. in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. Golriz has professional experience of around 12 years in the realm of designing and managing different projects with the focus on the field of medical landmarks. In recent years, she also kept her connection with academia and was teaching two Architectural design courses, including “Museum design” and “Multi-family Residential”, as an adjunct lecturer. Attending different conferences and courses in healthcare architecture, Golriz has gained extensive practical and theoretical knowledge in this research area. Her academic and professional background along with a strong passion for promoting a great role for design in the provision of healthcare has drawn her to focus on the topic of “healing architecture and urban design” in her graduate research. She is interested in the improvement of wellbeing through different senses especially touch and hearing. She has carried out studies on urban healing soundscapes with a view to translating and linking city and hospital together.

Solène Froidevaux holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Lausanne (2019), for which she was awarded the Equality Prize from her Faculty. She is a sociologist of the body, specializing in feminist theories (included feminist & queer phenomenology), sports studies, urban studies, and ethnography. In her doctoral thesis she analyzed the ways in which Swiss sports shooters (firearms shooting and archery) become gendered subjects by being bodily embedded in a specific sport material world including weapons. During her scientific stay at the Centre, she will deepen her analysis on the sensory landscape of Swiss sports shooting and on the sensory relationship with weapons among Swiss sports shooters.

Her current postdoctoral project “Gender embodiment during hard physical effort: Ethnography of endurance tests within sports medicine centers” examines the sensory dimension of athletes’ lived experiences. In dialogue with exercise physiologists and ultra-endurance sportspeople, this research aims to report to what extent perceptual norms and material devices involved can affect bodily performances. Her project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Beside of her academic work, Solène Froidevaux advises cities in Switzerland and sports federations on the implementation of (sport) equality policies, especially in the public space.

Adela Goldbard is an interdisciplinary artist/educator/scholar from Mexico City. She holds an MFA as a Full Merit Fellow in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature from the National University of México (UNAM). She is a PhD student in the research-creation stream of Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia University and a member of the National System of Artistic Creators of México.

Goldbard investigates how radical community performances can subvert the imposition of hegemonic narratives, and how performances of violence and destruction can become aesthetic tools of resistance against power. She is especially interested in how collectively building, staging, and destroying has the potential to generate critical thinking and social transformation. Goldbard’s practice draws on experimental/collaborative/sensory ethnographic research and brings together sculpture, video, photography, sound, text and traditional textiles, pottery, woodwork and pyrotechnics. Her recent projects include a pyrotechnic play with/for the Mexican community of La Villita in Chicago, commissioned by Gallery 400 (University of Illinois, Chicago, 2019-2020) and a socially engaged art project with/for the P’urhépecha community of Arantepacua, commissioned by the XIV FEMSA Biennial (Michoacán, México, 2020-21).

Goldbard’s doctoral investigation focuses on developing a Poetics of Violence: a research-creation project proposing that dramatic violence with its aesthetical potential—ritual, collective, affective—can become a tool for the unsilencing of non-hegemonic narratives, for epistemic decolonization, and to support struggles for justice and autonomy. Her research-creation will take place in the Andean region of Bolivia and Perú.

Roseline Lambert est étudiante dans le programme de doctorat Social & Cultural Analysis sous la supervision de David Howes au département de sociologie et d’anthropologie de l’Université Concordia. Son approche vise à rapprocher la poésie et l’anthropologie dans son projet de thèse de recherche-création. En 2019-2020, elle réalise une ethnographie sensorielle avec des personnes souffrant d’agoraphobie et d’anxiété sociale à Oslo, en Norvège, le pays avec la plus forte prévalence d’agoraphobie en Europe. Elle a publié deux recueils de poésie aux Éditions Poètes de brousse : « Clinique » en 2016 et les « Couleurs accidentelles » en 2018. Elle a remporté le prix québécois de poésie Félix-Antoine-Savard en 2017. Elle a enseigné le cours Art, Aesthetics and Anthropology à Concordia en 2019 et elle a travaillé comme coordonnatrice de recherche et comme conseillère scientifique en santé publique et en santé mentale durant quatorze ans pour l’UQAM, l’INSPQ, et le CHUM.
Roseline Lambert is a PhD student in Social & Cultural Analysis under the supervision of David Howes at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of Concordia University. Her approach seeks to intertwine poetry and anthropology in her art-based research project. In 2019-2020, she pursues a sensory ethnography with people suffering from agoraphobia and social anxiety in Oslo, Norway, the country with the highest prevalence of agoraphobia in Europe. She published two collections of poetry in French : “Clinique” in 2016, and “Les couleurs accidentelles” in 2018, published by Poètes de brousse in Montréal. She won the Quebec Félix-Antoine-Savard Poetry Prize in 2017. She taught Art, Aesthetics and Anthropology (ANTH 302) at Concordia in 2019 and she worked previously as a research coordinator and scientific advisor in public health and mental health research projects during fourteen years at UQAM, INSPQ, and CHUM.

Erin Lynch is an interdisciplinary scholar and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Sensory Studies who works at the intersection of space, mediation, culture, and the senses. She was recently awarded a PhD in Social and Cultural Analysis from Concordia University. Her doctoral research explores how city-sanctioned mobile tourism apps impact users’ experience of urban spaces and attractions. Erin used multi-sited sensory ethnography to investigate how these “extensions of the senses” mediate the dynamic site of the tour – where narratives about the city are conjured on a shifting stage – and consider what kinds of histories, meanings, and experiences are privileged by these emergent tourism practices.

Erin holds both a Bachelor of Social Science and a Masters degree in Criminology from the University of Ottawa, where she studied how popular imaginaries about geographies of crime take shape on film, and how the maps of meaning we layer over the world are constructed somewhere between the “real” and the “reel.”

As she continues to explore how our cultural understandings and experiences of space are mediated, Erin is currently co-authoring research on the sensory ambiance of the casino.

Karen Messer is a PhD student in Concordia University’s individualized program (INDI), working at the intersection of Geography, Sensory Studies and Applied Human Science. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from the University of Victoria and a MA in Human Systems Intervention from Concordia. Karen’s research focus draws from this interdisciplinary background by taking an embodied and sensorial approach to the often unseen and intangible impact of the physical environment on our day-to-day interactions and relationships.

Spatial perception is subjective, but can be characterized by three overarching conditions: social, as predicated by our cultural predisposition and social context, 2) emotional, our personal and empathic response, and 3) embodied, translated by our senses. By investigating the interconnectedness and co-determination of mind, body and environment, we begin to access a more complete and nuanced knowledge system. Under the assumption that spatial affect extends beyond measurable boxes and units, Karen’s current research themes are:

• to explore the ways in which our day-to-day built environment is utilized and thought of from a social, emotional and embodied perspective particularly in regards to innovation, engagement and well being;
• to investigate the correlation between sensory aptitude and spatial awareness, and finally;
• to enhance our understanding and precipitate new experience based discourse around space as an active agent co-creating our day-to-day experience.

We have all walked into spaces that should feel good, should work well, and should encourage innovation, but do not. The contemporary detachment from post modern mass-produced space has led to a longing for authentic places in which we feel more emotionally connected and supported. At the same time a hyper-designed, utopian landscape where every object, colour, texture, scent has been considered and manufactured to conjure the desired effect is taking us in the wrong direction. It is this fear that underlines the importance of using our whole body, accessing all of our senses, to engage with our surroundings rather than manifest spaces designed to stimulate and modify our perception. How can space be empowering and support creativity as a process, rather than simply emulate it aesthetically? Karen will be exploring these, and other daily encounters in her new blog:
www.afinemesser.com

Karen Messer defended her thesis, entitled “Relational Space: An Entangled Exploration of Office Space Research” in February 2021 and will graduate at the Spring Convocation 2021.

Leona Nikolić is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at Concordia University specialising in new media, app studies, and digital humanities. Her research explores relationships between technology and spirituality, the ways in which we believe in technologies, and the embodiment of consciousness in our digital objects. She is particularly interested in astrology apps for smartphones as sites of knowledge production that both shape and are shaped by ambivalent cultural narratives about human and artificial intelligence, as well as the potential for algorithmic media and AI to generate authentic spiritual experiences.

She first began investigating digital cultures and practices during her B.A. in Art History at Carleton University through research on new media art, net art, and post-internet art. During this time, she worked at the Ottawa Art Gallery, organised events at the Carleton University Art Gallery, and curated contemporary art exhibitions and performances in Ottawa and Montréal. She continued her studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal, completing a research-creation M.A. in Communication and Experimental Media. Her master’s thesis, Techno-Spirituality and the Digital Self: From Smartphone Applications to Immersive Installations, examined the mediation of the self and of reality through spiritual smartphone apps for meditation, astrology, and divination. This master’s thesis also consisted of a creative project— a digital meditation experience designed to reveal the participant’s ‘digital aura’ through a subversive exploration of our intimacy with our smartphones. At UQAM, Leona was an active member of Hexagram, an international research-creation network, and of CELAT (Centre de recherches Cultures – Arts – Sociétés). She also served as a Coordinator for the 19th Inter-University Communication Studies Student Conference at UQAM.

At Concordia University, Leona is a member of the Centre for Sensory Studies; the Media History Research Centre and the Speculative Life Cluster of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology; and the Global Emergent Media Lab. She is conducting her research under the supervision of Jeremy Stolow, an expert in religion and media studies leading innovative research on the use of media technologies as instruments of spiritual practice.

Leona has been invited to present at academic conferences in Montréal, London, Istanbul, and Tours (France). Her research has been published in academic journals, her creative writing has been featured in various literary publications, and she has participated as an artist in a handful of group art shows. Her latest publication appeared in MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory (State University of New York at Buffalo) and she recently participated in a round table, “What We Do with Screens and What Screens Do to Us” at Écran Total: Exhibition & Symposium (Centre de design de l’UQAM).

Gabriel Peña is an artist, architect and professor, currently pursuing a PhD in Humanities at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University. His research ‘Engineered Reflection’ analyzes the possibilities to modify the perception of space and built environment through glass reflection. The fields of anthropology, art, architecture and engineering define the spectrum of research in his proposal.
Gabriel holds a Bachelor in Architecture from the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León and a Masters degree in Collective Housing from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. After his Masters, he has specialized in the perceptual dimension of the domestic and built environments through teaching and artistic practice. He has taught architecture studios at UDEM, CEDIM and UANL. He has held grants from the Empresa Municipal de la Vivienda de Madrid, FONCA Young Creators / National Trust for Culture and the Arts Mexico, Arquetopia and CONACYT / National Council for Science and Technology. Gabriel has exhibited work at Museo Metropolitano de Monterrey, Jardín de las esculturas Xalapa, Galeria Conarte Monterrey, Mexico National Library, Gallery 2 CRGS and at FEMSA XII art biennale.

Ika Peraic is an artist and designer currently pursuing a PhD in Humanities at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (Croatia), BDes from the Faculty of Architecture – School of Design in Zagreb and an MDes from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Her master’s thesis ‘Museum as a platform for a speculative investigation: Exploring the possibilities for a postcolonial museum through practice-led research’ involved a speculative investigation, combining theory and design practice with a view to developing a more complex understanding of the relationship between tangible and intangible heritage of relevance to the invention of more appropriate ways of expressing indigenous cultures and creating museum displays more sensitive to alternative forms of knowledge. Through her PhD studies she will explore further how conventional exhibition spaces and museums could be critically reconstructed in order for performative spaces to unfurl. She is interested in investigating ways to express the relationship between tangible and intangible knowledges without reifying them in visualist terms, but instead foregrounding their sensorial dimension. Affect-driven aesthetics interested in the often messy ongoing-ness of process enables her to imagine modes of expressing things that are curious, inquisitive, messy, risky, and attentive to the gathering of what is neglected or rendered absent within the dominant discourse (or, in short, non-didactic). She is interested in how an approach that foregrounds sensorial experience and its affective charge can help us understand “things” in new ways, and design exhibition spaces that are situational (open to contingency and chance) and sensitive to alternative forms of knowledge.

Melanie Schnidrig is an art historian from British Columbia, Canada. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Humanities at Concordia University, Montreal. She graduated with a BFA from the University of the Fraser Valley in 2012, and completed the Contemporary Art, Design and New Media Art Histories (MA) program at OCAD University in 2015. During her masters research, her interests came to focus on problematizing the ocularcentrism of western art history by interrogating the multisensorial and synesthetic qualities of contemporary installation art. The resulting dissertation was awarded the Outstanding Major Research Paper Award from OCAD University. Schnidrig’s PhD research continues on this trajectory. Her thesis research amalgamates the disciplines of art history, psychology and anthropology. In so doing she aims to address both the psychological and anthropological foundations of synesthetic responses and multisensorial perception, while exploring ways synesthesia-like responses can be stimulated by artworks.

Ariana is an MA student in the Social and Cultural Anthropology program at Concordia University. Her current research is concerned with the representation of nature in the practice of naturalist illustration. In the midst of an unparalleled global environmental crisis, her research focuses on how the figure of the 18th-century naturalist through the recuperation of a more sensuous relationship with nature can help us to reconfigure social practices and environmental ethics. Her project seeks to understand how a practice with a colonial legacy and a socio-cultural specific aesthetic is recontextualized in a community of practitioners in Mexico City, in the present. By becoming a student of naturalist drawing, she likewise explores apprenticeship as an ethnographical method and the fertility of blurring disciplinary boundaries between science and art for the practice of anthropology.

Her interest in communities of practitioners, beyond the academic learning environment, is informed by her experience as a social activist in Argentina where she participated in a feminist network to grant safe information and emotional support to women who decided to get an abortion. This experience drove her to study a Diploma in Sexuality: Bodies, Human Rights, and Public Policy at Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM). She holds a BA in International Studies from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (UTDT) in Argentina. Her attentiveness to modes of expertise derives from five years of working as a ‘digital expert’ at a high-tech company.

In the quest of using the senses as a mode of inquiry, one of her recent projects investigated the sensorial dimensions of ice skating. In dialogue with multimodal anthropology, her work experimented with a mix of methods (skating, writing, drawing, photography, and archive) to explore what it means and what it feels like to ‘go skating’, from the standpoint of an immigrant in the Canadian winter context and the sensibility of a former skater. She argues that a sense of belonging emerges from movement, in relation to memory and the body sensing in a new setting.

Jayanthan Sriram is a member of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. He is currently enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD Program at Concordia, and serves as the Coordinator of the Exploration in Sensory Design research team. His research focus (and mission) is to promote olfactory aisthesis as aesthethics through the exploration of functional scenting and perfumery. His PhD project “The Life of the Ephemeral – Building Olfactory Aesthethics” (WT) will offer a critique of the general neglect of corporeal and olfactory values and the disqualification of the aesthetics of smells in everyday life, by engaging the perspective of the creators and curators of such expressions as well.

Through his exposure to Media Studies, Philosophy and Theory of Literatures and Cultures during his B.A. and M.A. at the Eberhard-Karls University Tübingen, Jayanthan came to question the view of mind as the unlimited source of all knowledge, and became acutely conscious of the singular restriction of a logocentric shedding of skin in favor of reason. He proposes that the breathing, listening and experiential center of culture is the human body instead, and that logic and language spring from a sensory and phenomenological grounding. Jayanthan’s work tries to express this through engaging with the aesthetic fundament of Baumgarten theory of aesthetics not through Kant but Spinoza and especially Gernot Böhme’s recent theory of atmospheres. In this, the socio-political tinging of our sensory experience should appear on the forefront of aesthetics, not as a theory of art as the pure, disinterested form of artistic expression, but in the words of Böhme himself as “aesthetic labor”. This concept can carry implications of discrimination and exclusion based on sensory experience in all temporal stages of ideology, before, with and after its logocentric expression. Whether it is the labeling of difference in ethnic minorities as inferior by smell and culinary practices in their moral or societal value or the acute distinctions of how a male or female body is supposed to smell, an aesthethics of olfaction tries to capture these movements and intricacies.

Jayanthan’s focus on the ephemeral stretches beyond olfaction to his writing on art and music. He is an editor for the Stuttgart art magazine Sonnendeck and runs a blog reviewing music. His writing is equally inspired by philosophical theories as it is by cultural expressions or aesthetic labor – interweaving Merleau-Ponty with the music of Thou, the visuals of Jon Rafman or a nose like Alessandro Gualtieri. All expressions prove to create powerful means of consumption and distinction and as such deserve consideration under the lens of a new aesthetic unafraid to employ sensory studies, post-colonial approaches and critical understandings of hegemony and philosophical systematization.

Jessie Myfanwy Stainton is an emergent researcher and multi-media artist completing her Masters in Media Studies at Concordia University, under the supervision of Dr. Arseli Dokumaci. Her research-creation thesis explores intellectual disability, sensory design and storytelling through textile creation. Drawing on co-design strategies, she utilizes craft-based methodology and textiles-as-media to explore the boundaries of communication, addressing the sensory hierarchies embedded within.

Pivoting from the world of theatre and performance, Jessie completed an undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of British Columbia. After a semester abroad at the University of Birmingham, she circled back to the arts experimenting in film and textile-based practices. Interdisciplinary by nature, her areas of interest weave around her textile practice, critical disability studies, affect and feminist theories, sustainability, and questions of corporeality. Jessie is an executive member of the Access in the Making Lab and an active member of the Textiles & Materiality Milieux Cluster, and the Feminist Media Studio.

María Vargas is a Ph.D. student in Humanities at Concordia University in Montreal and is a research assistant at the Acts of Listening Lab in the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and a member of the Center of Sensory Studies. Maria is currently investigating how dance, sensory ethnography, and video creation facilitate listening between different cultures in the context of migration individually and collectively. Her work finds its way into the intersection between embodied anthropology and art creation. She is interested in retrieving social memory to ignite self-awareness and agency through participatory methodologies. Maria holds a B.A. in Social Anthropology from Universidad Nacional de Colombia and an M.A. in Visual Anthropology and documentary making from F.L.A.C.S.O. University. During this period, she researched the politics and poetics of representation in participatory documentary editing with indigenous communities. In her interest in feminist perspectives, Maria has made dance and documentary videos where ethnographies of sensory memories allow the creation of empowering narratives for women in diverse contexts.

Burcu Yaşin is an interdisciplinary scholar/pianist/jazz vocal who works at the intersection of sound studies, sensory studies, and embodied research methodologies. Trained as a musician, she received her master’s degree in musicology with a thesis entitled A “Sonic” Transformation Story: Gaziosmanpaşa Sarıgöl Urban Renewal Project, which sheds light on the sonic impact of the ongoing gentrification of the Romani neighborhood Sarıgöl, Gaziosmanpaşa/Istanbul.

As a Ph.D. student in Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities doctoral program, she aims to explore how the Romani communities living in Istanbul use wedding ceremonies to construct their identity, claim their existence in space, and constitute an “imagined now,” taking the women’s experiences at the center.

Additionally, the project also aspires to grasp how gentrification rendered Romani communities imperceptible in Istanbul, leaning on the literature of sensory studies.

She is also co-founder of the platform I AM NOT ALONE IN THIS SHIT that collects the sounds of protests related to women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.