The Political Life of Sensation

While sensory scholarship has burgeoned over time to address such domains of social scientific inquiry including materialities, art, religion, food and foodways among others, the political life of sensation remains a fairly underdeveloped area of sensory research, having only recently gained some traction in analyses of everyday political realms and encounters. This panel aims to bring together discussions on how the senses relate to varying political dimensions in social life. It locates the nexus of the senses, power, and politics across a range of topics comprising, inter alia, manifold statecraft and political behavior, political systems and biopolitics, citizenship and democracy, protest and demonstrations, and belonging, in illuminating the importance of studying the senses as political, and politics as sensorial. How are sounds deployed as a mechanism of
political power? How do social actors engage with the senses in contexts of war, violence, and conflict? How is political propaganda intertwined with sensory expressions of power and identity? By focusing on select sensory modalities and experience, as well as the sensorium in whole, the panel bridges the political and the sensible and attempts to challenge the assumed binary of which the former connotes reason and the rational, and where the latter is connected to the emotional and the affective.