Third ISA Forum of Sociology (July 10-14, 2016)

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Artistic Practices and the Senses

TG07 Senses and Society (host committee)

Language: English, French and Spanish

This session invites papers that explore the relationship between artistic practices and the interplay of the senses, stressing the role of the arts as a dynamic field for social integration, interactions and transformation. 
Artistic practices are linked with sensory exploration and representation of our relation with the world and others. They enhance multi-sensorial experiences to foster the continuity of traditions, to promote new propositions challenging sensory paradigms and/or to encourage sensual relations amongst different cultures. 
How do aesthetic practices contribute to the sensory formation of a specific community? Do those practices, through the engagement of the senses, reinforce or blur social borders? How can the dynamics of perception, doing or attending artworks, promote social interactions and create new possibilities for social change? 
Artistic propositions – including rituals, activism, installations and new technologies – partake to reactivate and redefine individual and collective identities, challenging the local and the global, the past, the present and the future, in our “mobile” world.
By sharing multi-sensory experiences, how can these practices reconfigure notion of identities and encourage alternative ways to integrate other perceptions and intercultural collaborations? What are the sensual relations between the artistic proposition and the context/environment of presentation? How can the dislocation and relocation of aesthetic practices create new cross-cultural spaces to propose alternative ways for the “distribution of the sensible”? 
This session welcomes diverse approaches at the intersection of the arts, sociology and the senses – from scholars and practitioners – to encourage cross-pollination of sensory knowledge, through interdisciplinary and multi-cultural exchanges. Posters: