Publications

BOOK CHAPTERS AND JOURNAL ARTICLES

  • Constance Classen

Classen, C. & Howes, D.  (2020) “The Cultural Life of the Senses in Modernity” in A. Arcangeli, J. Rogge and H. Salmi, eds., The Routledge Companion to Cultural  History in the Western World. London: Routledge.

Classen, C. (2020). The Senses in the National Gallery, The Senses and Society 15(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1719744.

Classen, C. (2017). The Museum of the Senses: Experiencing Art and Collections. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017.

  • Charlene Elliott 

Elliott, C. and Greenberg, J., eds. (2021) Communication and Health. London: Palgrave.

Elliott, C. (2021). Food marketing and the regulation of children’s taste: On packaged foods, paratexts, and prohibitions. Canadian Food Studies, 8(1). 4-11 https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/448

Elliott, C.  (2021). Radical transparency: Food labelling, taste and the food citizen. Senses & Society, 16(1). 80-88. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2021.1876362

Elliott, C. (2020). From fun to fraught: Marketing to kids and regulating ‘risky foods’ in Canada. The Senses & Society, 15 (1). 45-53. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1715114.

Elliott, C. (2019). Sensorium®: The Splash of Sensory Trademarks. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 34 (2): 243-259. https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.13.

Elliott, C. (2018). Grab Gatorade! Food marketing, regulation and the young consumer. European Journal of Marketing, 52(12). 2521-2532. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-05-2018-0355.

 Elliott, C. and Ellison, K. (2018). Negotiating Choice, Deception and Risk: Teenagers’ perceptions of food safety. British Food Journal, 120(12). 2748-2761. https://doi.org/10.1108/BFJ-05-2018-0277.

Elliott, C. (2018). Beauty and the Banana: It’s a commercial promotion, not a public health campaign. Canadian Journal of Public Health, 103 (3). 436-438. https://doi.org/10.17269/s41997-018-0051-8.

  • Sheryl Hamilton

Hamilton, S. ed. (2020) Sensuous Governance. The Senses and Society, 15(1). 

Hamilton, S. (2021) Feeling by Looking: Public Health Handwashing Posters as Emplaced Vital Media. In Communication and Health (C. Elliott & J. Greenberg, eds.). London: Palgrave.

Hamilton, S. (2020) Introduction: Sensuous Governance. The Senses and Society, 15(1): 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1726059

Hamilton, S. (2019) Hands in Cont(r)act: The Resiliency of Business Handshakes in Pandemic Culture. Canadian Journal of Law and Society 34(2): 343-60. https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.26

Hamilton, S. (2019) Mediating Disease Cultures. Canadian Journal of Communication, 44.2: 151-156. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2019v44n2a3611

Hamilton, S. (2019) Envisioning a Habitus of Hygiene: Hands as Disease Media in Public Health Handwashing Campaigns. Canadian Journal of Communication, 44.2: 263-288. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2019v44n2a3402

Hamilton, S. (2017) Rituals of Intimate Legal Touch: Regulating the End-of-Game Handshake in Pandemic Culture. The Senses and Society, 12(1): 53-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2017.1268821

Hamilton, S. and Michell, S.  (2016) Playing at Apocalypse: Reading Plague Inc. in and as Pandemic Culture. Convergence: The Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies (2016): 1-20. 

  • David Howes

Howes, D. & Walfish, S. (2023) “Litigating the Carceral Soundscape” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 60 (1): 175-219. https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol60/iss1/4 

Howes, D. (2023) Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Dassié, V., Gélard, M.-L. & Howes, D. (2020) “Introduction: Habiter le monde” in V. Dassié, M.-.L. Gélard & D. Howes, eds. Habiter le monde: materialités, art, sensorialités. Anthropologie et Sociétés 44(1).

Howes, D. (2020) « Sentir le monde: Analyse critique, esthétique et juridique de la construction matérielle du sensorium moderne. » ” in V. Dassié, M.-.L. Gélard & D. Howes, eds. Habiter le monde: materialités, art, sensorialités. Anthropologie et Sociétés 44(1) 2020.

Lynch, E., Howes, D.  and French, M. (2020) “A Touch of Luck and a ‘Real Taste of Vegas’: A Sensory Ethnography of the Montreal Casino.” The Senses and Society 15(2).

Howes, D. (2019) “Prologue: Introduction to Sensori-Legal Studies” in D. Howes, ed., Troubling Law’s Sensorium: Explorations in Sensational Jurisprudence. 34(2) Canadian Journal of Law and Society 34 (2): 173-90. https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.28.

Howes, D. (2016) “Law’s Sensorium: On the Media of Law and the Evidence of the Senses in Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspective” in Sheryl Hamilton et al (eds.) Sensing Law, pp. 53-72. London and New York: Routledge. 2016

  • Marc Lafrance

Lafrance, M., & Carey, R.S. (2020). “Sensing the Skin: Acne Sufferers and the Dermatologization of Life.” Senses and Society, 15(1), 9-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1715116.

Lafrance, M. (2019). “Taking the Body Seriously.” In O. Davis & C. Davis (Eds.), Freedom and the Subject of Theory (pp. 164-173). Cambridge: Legenda.

Tamari, T. (2019). “Skin Matters: An Interview with Marc Lafrance.” Theory, Culture and Society, 36(7-8), 273-291. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276419862853.

Lafrance, M., & Carey, S. (2018). “Skin Work: Understanding the Embodied Experience of Acne.” Body and Society, 24(1-2), 55-88. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034×18760177.

Lafrance, M. (2018). “Skin Studies: Past, Present and Future.” Body and Society, 24(1-2), 3-33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034×18763065.

Lafrance, M. (2018). Études de la peau: Survol de la recherche anglo-américaine contemporaine. La peauologie, 1(3). Available online: http://lapeaulogie.fr/etudes-de-la-peau-passe-present-futur/.

Hammond, C., & Lafrance, M. (2018). “Interview: Cynthia Hammond and Marc Lafrance on Drawings for a Thicker Skin.” Body and Society, 24(1-2), 210-225. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034×18760178.

  • Elisabeth Roy Trudel

Trudel, E. (2022). “(Re)imagining a Sensing and Feeling Human: On the Creation of Exclusions Through the Visual in International Human Rights”. Doctoral Thesis. Spectrum Research Repository. Concordia University.

  • Christiane Wilke

Wilke, C. (2022) Legal Tragedies: US Military Investigations of Civilian Casualties from Airstrikes. In Technologies of Human Rights Representation, ed. by Alexandra Moore & James Dawes. New York:  SUNY Press.

Wilke, C. (2020) “Counting Civilians, Imagining Combatants: Investigating Civilian Casualties from Airstrikes in Afghanistan.” In: Technologies of Human Rights Representation, ed. by Alexandra Moore. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Wilke, C. (2019) Asymmetric Legality: The Invisibility of High-Tech Violence in Afghanistan, Public Seminar, 2 May 2019. http://www.publicseminar.org/2019/05/asymmetric-legality/ 

Wilke, C. (2019) “High Altitude Legality: Visuality and Jurisdiction in the Adjudication of NATO Air Strikes,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 34 (2), 261-280. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.15

Wilke, C. (2018) “How International Law Learned to Love the Bomb: Civilians and the Regulation of Aerial Warfare in the 1920s,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 44: 29-47. https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2018.1465335

Wilke, C. 2017. “Seeing and Unmaking Civilians in Afghanistan: Visual Technologies and Contested Professional Visions,” Science, Technology & Human Values 42: 1031 – 1060. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243917703463

Wilke, C.  “Beyond Law and Numbers: TWAIL questions about the ICC’s engagement with Afghanistan” (under review, TWAIL Review).

SPECIAL ISSUES – ABSTRACTS OF ARTICLES

  • Sheryl Hamilton, ed. (2020) Sensuous Governance. A special issue of The Senses and Society 15 (1).

Sheryl Hamilton – Introduction: Sensuous Governance. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1726059.

Marc Lafrance & R. Scott Carey – Sensing the skin: acne sufferers and the dermatologization of life
https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1715116

In this paper, we explore what we call the “dermatologization of life” and how it regulates the ways in which acne sufferers relate to their skin. We refer to these ways of relating to the skin as “skin sensing”. Through an analysis of the online narratives found on the website acne.org, we demonstrate how the skin sensing bound up with dermatologization both converges with and diverges from biomedical understandings of acne in three key contexts: the hormonal, the alimentary and the nocturnal. In doing so, we show that skin sensing involves a complex combination of pleasure and pain, excitement and exhaustion, and work and play. Ultimately, we suggest that the ways in which acne sufferers sense their skin open up a set of possibilities that not only disable but also enable them as they embark on the often all-consuming quest for a clear complexion.

Michael S. Mopas & Ekaterina Huybregts – Training by feel: wearable fitness-trackers, endurance athletes, and the sensing of data
https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1722421

A wide range of wearable fitness-trackers are currently available that allow users to measure, monitor, visualize, and record numerous training metrics including moving pace, distance traveled, average heart rate, and calories burned. Using qualitative data collected through semi-structured interviews with amateur endurance athletes, this paper examines what individuals do with their wearable fitness-trackers and the data they produce. Drawing on the work of Deborah Lupton and Sarah Maslen, we take up the concepts of “data sensing” and the “more-than-human sensorium” to highlight the embodied and sensory dimensions of digital self-tracking. We argue that while much of the appeal of fitness-tracking technologies lies in their ability to generate objective readings of one’s performance, these devices do not supplant less quantifiable and more subjective ways of understanding one’s self. On the contrary, the participants in our study use the quantitative data generated by a fitness-tracker in conjunction with their own self-assessments to gain a more holistic sense of what they are experiencing during training or on race day. For many of our research participants, the fitness-tracker became a central part of their identity and daily routine. Most participants were reluctant to train without their fitness-trackers, even when not preparing for an event.

Charlene Elliott – From fun to fraught: marketing to kids and regulating “risky foods” in Canada
https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1715114

In an era of industrialized food production, ultra-processed foods, “Big Food” marketing, and growing obesity rates, food has come to be framed as an object of risk – and as an object of regulation. Such reframing has fascinating implications related to issues of responsibility and decision making, especially when it comes to children’s food. This article probes the relationship between representation, regulation and “risky” consumption with respect to children’s food. I examine how child-targeted foods become framed as “risky” and what counts as “risky” food messaging under Health Canada’s commitment to restrict the marketing of unhealthy foods to children. Detailing the tension between food as a risk object and food as a child object, I suggest how issues of semantic provisioning and the politics of the unseen work to complicate and destabilize the (seemingly) straightforward process of prohibiting unhealthy food marketing to children.

Jessica J. Chapman – Introducing audio-vision into evidence: the impact of audio recordings and their technical limitations in police use of force cases
https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1715113

This article explores the technical limitations of audio recordings and how those limitations impact the reliability of sound evidence in police use of force cases. In audiovisual recordings, audio is often assumed neutral, redundant or to have the same limitations as its visual counterpart. Bringing together film theorist Michel Chion’s concept of audio-vision and the technical specifications of mobile audio recording, this article highlights how design priorities and compression processes can influence the way sound evidence is perceived. By failing to acknowledge audio recordings as distinct from their visual counterparts, they are rendered invisible and are therefore under scrutinized throughout legal processes. This neglect becomes notably problematic in cases of police use of force where audio/visual recordings often work to bolster the already privileged officer testimony.

Jarkko Toikkanen – Feeling the unseen: imagined touch perceptions in paranormal reality television
https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2019.1709301

In paranormal reality television, the medial evidence of senses adding to the visual and auditory may produce the most compelling intermedial experience. When little can be seen or heard, the lasting impact of a ghost hunting show may rely on what it makes the audience feel through the sense of touch. Even if the touch perceptions were imagined – or precisely because they were imagined – the experience can be all the more powerful. Intermediality research supplies the rhetorical devices of ekphrasis and hypotyposis as tools for a study of the television show Ghost Adventures. A definition of senses as media is advanced in conjunction with a three-tier model of mediality to lay open the intermedial experience involved in imagined touch perceptions as medium-specific instances of rhetorical figuration.

Constance Classen – The senses at the National Gallery: art as sensory recreation and regulation in Victorian England
https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2020.1719744

In 1850, the keeper of the National Gallery in London described the museum as being frequented by “school boys eating bread and cheese” and country folk who “drew their chairs round and sat down, and seemed to make themselves very comfortable”. As for the pictures on the walls, these were smeared with the fingerprints of inquiring gallery-goers. The tension between the National Gallery as an unfussy place of recreation, in which visitors could enjoy themselves at their ease, and as a prim site of regulation, in which visitors must learn to exercise tight control over their behavior, played itself out in elite nineteenth-century debates over the role of the Gallery as a public space. This article examines nineteenth-century representations of the ideal sensory role of the National Gallery and its problematic actual sensory life. This leads into a discussion of the ways in which the National Gallery and other public art institutions were imagined to function as the soft fingertips of the long arm of the law, transforming social disorder into social order and destructive sensuality into compliant sensitivity.

James S. Bielo – Experiential design and religious publicity at D.C.’s Museum of the Bible
https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2019.1709303

This article examines the sensory dimension of religious publicity, focused on the case of an evangelical museum in the United States. Washington D.C.’s Museum of the Bible (MOTB) was envisioned and funded primarily by conservative Protestants, and is a revealing case of religion in public life because most of the creative labor of design was conceived and executed by secular firms who do not typically work for faith-based clients. The professional expertise of these firms, “experiential design,” informs a sea change in contemporary museology and the expansion of the experience economy in late modernity. Ultimately, I argue that MOTB’s engagement with experiential design indexes the power of entertainment in late modern life, as the sensory repertoire at play operates with largely unquestioned legitimacy and presumed efficacy. By mobilizing the cultural capital of design, an evangelical museum makes a claim for diverse audiences in a deeply public setting.

  • David Howes, ed. (2019) Troubling Law’s Sensorium: Explorations in Sensational Jurisprudence. A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society 34 (2).

David Howes – Prologue: Introduction to Sensori-Legal Studies
https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.28

Sean Mulcahy – Silence and Attunement in Legal Performance
https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.18

Whilst the law maintains a right to silence, the sensorial and performative dimensions of that silence are seldom considered. This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, informed by legal theory and scholarship in the performing arts, such as theatre, performance studies, and music, as a way of understanding how silence plays in the court. The paper offers a typology to navigate the interpretation of silence in legal performance—both verbal and environmental—and to frame discussion of silence’s impact on the legal audience. The author concludes that silence is used and experienced in a similar way in legal and theatrical performance, namely as a means of attunement. The paper contributes new insights into the existing scholarship on acoustic jurisprudence and invites listening to the gaps in speech, the pauses, the background noise, and the silence in the court.

Safiyah Rochelle – Encountering the “Muslim”: Guantánamo Bay, Detainees, and Apprehensions of Violence
https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.14

This article focuses on the underlying sensorial entanglements that linger in spaces and moments of encounter between state violence and its targets. It argues that in Guantánamo Bay, these entanglements become routed through the bodies of the camp’s detainees, and they rely upon a particular reading of religion as being borne by bodies in such ways as to necessitate the use of specific techniques of detention and incapacitation. This discussion is framed using the notion of “apprehension,” in its affective and material forms, wherein perception, dread, and physical encounters in the camp unfold within a framing of Muslims as ontologically and materially distinct, and as being embodied in particular ways. In these processes of apprehension, the techniques and logics of violence deployed in the war on terror become further legitimated, and work reflexively to shape the ways in which the Muslim is known, encountered, and met with violence.

Suzanne Bouclin – Exploiter des techniques cinélégales pour mieux ressentir les effets qu’a la réglementation sur les personnes en situation d’itinérance
https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.27

Dans cet article, nous empruntons le vocabulaire des études cinématographiques pour visualiser le droit tel qu’il est utilisé, interprété et construit du point de vue des personnes en situation d’itinérance. Nous avançons que les modalités du droit s’expriment différemment dans les lois élaborées pour règlementer les personnes en situation d’itinérance. Les techniques cinélégales que nous proposons sont au fond des métaphores qui permettent de mieux nuancer les représentations sceptiques et instrumentalistes du droit. Ces façons d’éprouver la réglementation des personnes itinérantes peuvent également favoriser l’incarnation de la perception des interactions urbaines entre les personnes en situation d’itinérance et leurs interlocuteurs.

Charlene Elliot – Sensorium®: The Splash of Sensory Trademarks
https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.13

Sensory trademarks present a compelling case in which to explore the senses as “containers of possibility,” and this article explores the emergence and logic of sensory trademarks from a legal and marketers’ perspective. Using sensory trademark cases from the United States, I suggest that the current socio-legal environment opens a conversation about what I would call sensory capitalism—the monetization of the senses rather than the propertization of the senses—that requires intellectual property law to properly function. I argue that the sensory model espoused by the trademarking of the senses is one of the mass sensorium, whereby the “audience” universally recognizes marks as designating a particular source or origin of goods. The mass sensorium offers something quite novel, however, because embedded in it is the (corporate) promise of a lingua franca that valorizes all of the senses and generates a type of mediated affect that is shared.

Christiane Wilke – High Altitude Legality: Visuality and Jurisdiction in the Adjudication of NATO Air Strikes
https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.15

Air strikes are the signature modality of violence used by NATO militaries. When civilian victims of NATO air strikes have turned to courts in NATO countries, they have generally not been successful. What are the legal techniques and legal knowledges deployed in Western courts that render Western aerial violence legal or extralegal? The article analyzes the responses by European courts to two sets of NATO bombings: the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia and a September 2009 air strike near Kunduz, Afghanistan. The judgments rely on two forms of “legal technicalities”: the drawing of jurisdictional boundaries that exclude the airspace taken up by the bombers and the ground on which victims stood when they were killed as well as particular visual regimes that facilitate not seeing people on the ground as civilians.

John Shiga – The Nuclear Sensorium: Cold War Nuclear Imperialism and Sensory Violence
https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.17

This paper traces the sensory dimensions of nuclear imperialism focusing on the Cold War nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States military in the Marshall Islands during the 1950s. Key to the formation of the “nuclear sensorium” were the interfaces between vibration, sound, and radioactive contamination, which were mobilized by scientists such as oceanographer Walter Munk as part of the US Nuclear Testing Program. While scientists occupied privileged points in technoscientific networks to sense the effects of nuclear weapons, a series of lawsuits filed by communities affected by the tests drew attention to military-scientific use of inhabitants’ bodies as repositories of data concerning the ecological impact of the bomb and the manner in which sensing practices used to extract this data extended the violence and trauma of nuclear weapons. Nuclear imperialism projected its power not only through weapons tests, the vaporization of land and the erosion of the rights of people who lived there, but also through the production of a “nuclear sensorium”—the differentiation of modes of sensing the bomb through legal, military, and scientific discourses and the attribution of varying degrees of epistemological value and legal weight to these sensory modes.

Michael Mopas – Howling Winds: Sound, Sense, and the Politics of Noise Regulation
https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.19

This paper explores attempts made in North America to govern noise and uses the current debates over the impact of wind turbines on human health as a site for examining the politics of noise regulation. I address a number of key questions: First, how has noise been defined and how have these definitions changed over time? Second, how have we tried to control noise and on what grounds have we done this? Lastly, how have our responses to noise been shaped by who is making the noise and who is being disturbed? I argue that our understandings of noise and how we regulate it cannot be disentangled from the broader social, political, cultural, and technological contexts in which these discussions take place. Ultimately, the debates about noise regulation have as much to do with who is making the noise and who is being disturbed as the noise, itself.

Mariana Valverde – The Law of Bad Smells: Making and Adjudicating Offensiveness Claims in Contemporary Local Law
https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.20

The sense of smell seems to have resisted the kind of objective measurement process that might have facilitated settling competing claims about offensive smells by applying a general rule or standard. As a result, authorities, including courts,cannot avoid making subjective judgements of taste. A nuisance lawsuit out of Ontario regarding a mushroom farm, or rather its smells, is used here as one source of material about the difficulties of adjudication in this subfield of the “law of the senses.” Attention is also paid to a curious quasi-judicial entity, Ontario’s Normal Farm Practices Protection Board, charged with resolving, mainly through mediation, disputes about farm smells between farmers and non-farming neighbours. Overall, the article shows that the ex post facto, situated and complaint-driven logic of nuisance that nineteenth-century law used to govern offensive noises as well as nasty smells, and which left plenty of room for subjective judgements of taste, keeps reappearing in the present day. Nasty smells seem particularly impervious to modernization, that is to being managed through objective measurement and preventive regulation.

Sheryl N. Hamilton – Hands in Cont(r)act: The Resiliency of Business Handshakes in Pandemic Culture
https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.26

This article examines the persistence of the handshake in business circles despite its implication in the spread of communicable disease in contemporary pandemic culture. An examination of business etiquette discourse suggests that even during disease outbreaks or flu season, the business handshake remains an important visual and haptic legal gesture. While it may no longer produce a binding legal contract, it stages the parties as contractable subjects, as claiming the status of autonomous individuals committed to defining their intersubjective relationship through the norms of contract. The business handshake thus operates as a cultural site for the complex interaction of bodies and law, and the production of masculine, haptic-legal subjectivity.

Mark Antaki – Le tournant sensoriel en droit : vers un droit sensible et sensé?
https://doi.org/10.1017/cls.2019.16

Le tournant sensoriel en droit nous invite à vivre différemment le droit en reconnaissant la centralité de tous nos sens dans l’étude et la pratique d’une vocation qui nous appelle à la quête de sens. Il vise à renverser l’anesthésie générale qui afflige les études en droit, et en droit et société : la juridicité elle-même, c’est-à-dire l’essence du droit – les sens du droit – est une question sensorielle et sensuelle.

  • Marc Lafrance, ed. (2018) Skin Matters: Thinking through the Body’s Surfaces. A special issue of Body & Society 24 (1-2).

Marc Lafrance – Skin Studies: Past, Present and Future
https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X18763065

In this article, I introduce the critical study of the skin in three parts. I start with a reflection on what makes the skin such a suggestive and, arguably, special phenomenon. I then provide a brief overview of the key works, recurring themes and ongoing debates that characterize the skin studies subfield. And finally, I end with a presentation of the articles that make up Body and Society’s special issue on the skin, taking care to highlight how they both contribute to the subfield as it currently stands while orienting it towards new questions, concerns and challenges.

David Le Breton – Understanding Skin-cutting in Adolescence: Sacrificing a Part to Save the Whole
https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X18760175

Adolescents are said to be, figuratively speaking, thin-skinned. But their thin-skinnedness is also real: both ambivalent and ambiguous, the border between self and other is, for many young people, a source of constant turmoil. The recourse to bodily self-harm is a means of dealing with this turmoil and the feelings of powerlessness it generates. Drawing on extensive semi-structured interviews conducted over the course of the last twenty years, this article explores the experiences of adolescents who engage in self-cutting. A deliberate and controlled use of pain, this ‘symbolic homeopathy’ – that is, harming oneself to feel less pain – acts as a defence against externally imposed suffering. Far from being destructive, self-harm practices can paradoxically be understood as survival techniques. Part of a long-term, ongoing project investigating adolescent risk-taking, this article seeks to better understand the experiences of teens who injure themselves through skin-cutting.

Marc Lafrance and R. Scott Carey – Skin Work: Understanding the Embodied Experience of Acne
https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X18760177

In this article, we carry out a four-part study of why and how those with acne work on their skin. In the first part, we engage extensively with the clinical literature and reflect critically on what it has to offer. In the second part, we present our notion of ‘skin work’ and how it allows for a consideration of how acne sufferers relate reflexively to the surface of their bodies. In the third part, we discuss our data – which consists of over 200 threads from the electronic support group acne.org – and how we approach it in order to better understand the everyday practices associated with working on the skin. Finally, in the fourth part, we discuss our findings by focusing on three prevalent types of skin work and how they both shape and are shaped by identity categories such as gender and sexuality.

Cynthia Hammond and Marc Lafrance – Interview: Cynthia Imogen Hammond and Marc Lafrance on Drawings for a Thicker Skin
https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X18760178

In this interview, Cynthia Hammond sits down with Marc Lafrance in order to discuss the 30-year sketching practice that led to her exhibition, Drawings for a Thicker Skin, in 2012. In this practice, Hammond made small, quick drawings of the clothes she would need for trips or key professional events. As she explains, the drawings were not just essential to knowing what to pack; they were essential to being able to pack. While she never conceived of the practice as art, when invited to exhibit the drawings she found a way to relate this idiosyncratic and private practice to a larger set of ontological concerns. Clothing as a second skin is the key idea here, as Hammond and Lafrance explore what it means to navigate identity, idealized self-image, professional ‘passing’ and the skin ego.

David Howes – The Skinscape: Reflections on the Dermatological Turn
https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X18766285

This article theorizes the dermalogical turn – heralded by the publication of this special issue – from a sensory studies perspective. Sensory studies involves a cultural approach to the study of the senses and a sensory approach to the study of culture. The skin is both an object and means of perception. Understandings of the skin and of touch vary across cultures: the skin may be seen as social rather than individual, as porous instead of an envelope, and as knowledgeable or sentient in its own right rather than subservient to the eye or brain (i.e. cognition). These contrasting understandings have important implications for practice. Haptic Field, a performative sensory environment designed by Chris Salter, which enables the visitor to try on a second skin, is discussed as a means of shaking up conventional Western understandings of the skin and of touch, and facilitating the communication of skin knowledge across cultures.

PUBLICATIONS OF RELATED INTEREST

SMELL
Edited by Andreas Philippopolous-Mihalopoulos, Danilo Mandic, Caterina Nirta, and Andrea Pavoni
University of Westminster Press

HEAR
Edited by Danilo Mandic, Caterina Nirta, Andrea Pavoni, and Andreas Philippopolous-Mihalopoulos
University of Westminster Press

TOUCH
Edited by Caterina Nirta, Danilo Mandic, Andrea Pavoni, and Andreas Philippopolous-Mihalopoulos
University of Westminster Press

TASTE
Edited by Andrea Pavoni, Danilo Mandic, Caterina Nirta, and Andreas Philippopolous-Mihalopoulos
University of Westminster Press

SEE
Edited by Andrea Pavoni, Danilo Mandic, Caterina Nirta, and Andreas Philippopolous-Mihalopoulos
University of Westminster Press