This conference held at the University of Edinburgh on 7-9 December 2011 was the final event of the two-year Sawyer Seminar: “Embodied Values: Bringing the Senses back to the Environment”, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Through a series of bi-monthly seminars the project explored each of the traditional Western senses in turn, focusing on the sense in question and its particular relation to the environment. Each seminar involved a day-long meeting that was discursive, detailed and participatory in nature. Visiting scholars/practitioners presented papers for discussion that described their current research/practice on the topic. Interdisciplinary, interrogative and exploratory in tone, each seminar included an opportunity for all the participants to explore the sense in question through a practical, or experiential, session, and each was concluded by an evening public lecture by a scholar of international standing.
The final conference – “Sensory Worlds: Environment, Value and the Multi-Sensory” – posed the question: what contribution can a sensorially-engaged Humanities make to environmental thinking and action? The conference examined the multi-sensory and reflected upon the historical, contemporary and possible future relations between the senses (from balance to taste to the haptic and beyond). The keynote speakers were David Abram, author of ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ and ‘Becoming Animal’ and Iain Borden from The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
Information about the whole Sawyer Seminar is published on the project website including recordings of many of the talks given at the Seminars and the Conference.