702
Exploring Sensescapes of Home: Smell, Touch and Taste

Tuesday, 12 July 2016: 09:00-10:30
Location: Seminar 33 (Juridicum)
TG07 Senses and Society (host committee)

Language: English

Home is complex and complicated, stems from everyday practices and polyrhythmias of (co)habitation, is infused with memories and emotions, consists of things and objects, and spans space/time. We consider smells, tastes, and touch to be important sensory qualities of home in its complexity, on both the actual and imaginary levels: processing of food, cleanliness, ambiances (and identities) as well as the experience related to them, particular smells (including bodily ones), tastes, surfaces and textures or absence thereof – to name just a few – are of extreme importance for becoming at home, taking care of it, mourning for it, imagining it and striving for it. 
For this regular session, we invite scholars interested in the sensory dimension of home, and particularly in the sensescapes of smell, touch and taste and their interconnections. Despite recent growth of interest in these “other” senses they still deserve greater scrutiny. The three senses, distinct as they are yet interconnected, have strong bearings on memory, emotionality and identity and as such are important for explorations of home, its materiality, imaginaries as well as politics and gendered/ethnicised/age-related practices. 
We invite papers on: 

  • Research of how the three senses are employed in production and consumption of home; 
  • Explorations of smell/touch/tastescapes of home and the ways they contribute to the emotionality of feeling at home and the ambiguities/contingencies of home; 
  • Methodological issues related to the research of smell/taste/touchscapes (of and at home) including ethnographic, experimental and (critical) analytical methods.
Session Organizers:
Petr GIBAS, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic, Blanka NYKLOVA, Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic and Karolina PAUKNEROVA, Center for Theoretical Study, Charles University in Prague & Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic
Chair:
Noorman ABDULLAH, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Posters:
The Complexity of the Sensory Experience of Home on the Example of Window
Ivana HERMOVA, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic
See more of: TG07 Senses and Society
See more of: Thematic Groups