September 2016

At the beginning of his famous Treatise of Human Nature the philosopher David Hume declared, boldly, that “‘[t]is evident that all the sciences have a relation, greater or less, to human nature; and that however wide any of them may seem to run from it, they still return back by one passage or another.” This “Science of Man”, as Hume described it (women were comprehended in his term), involved the study of human life in all its various aspects.

‘Embodied Values: Bringing the Senses back to the Environment’, a John E. Sawyer Seminar, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation .

Through a series of workshops this project addressed in turn the senses of sight, touch, hearing, taste, and smell from various disciplinary perspectives to deliver humanities perspectives on environmental models of the senses and what constitutes the haptic. The Sawyer Seminar concluded with an international conference in December 2011: Sensory Worlds: Environment, Value and the Multi-Sensory.

Conference 20-23 March 2002

Conference abstracts

This interdisciplinary conference brought together scholars from countries in both the ‘new’ and ‘old’ Europe to address forms taken by new relational modes of belonging in the context of globalisation processes, new migration patterns and the action of new political subjects.