Our monthly research sessions run over two days with online meetings forming the core of our activities. Ph.D. candidates also have regular one-to-one tutorials with members of their supervisory team, and ad hoc group meetings around activities such as the production of our publication The Transtechnology Research Reader. We also hold periodic informal in-person meet ups.
The year starts and ends with an intro meeting in September and business meeting in June where we plan and confirm our activities for the year. The monthly sessions have a seminar on day one and a research update session.
Day 1 Seminar runs from 1pm-3pm. In our Zoom Meeting Room. We meet for lunch before the seminar at 12:30pm. Each session will be a collaboration between one registered researcher and one contributing researcher with two 20-30 minute papers.
Day 2 Research update sessions [times TBC]. Using a round table format researchers take it in turns to talk through their current work and thinking.
Our seminar series has an annual theme to which presenters respond, offering them the chance to stretch themselves intellectually and explore new territory. Additionally some researchers who are close to submitting or defending their Ph.D. thesis will present their project to the group as their contribution to the year.
24-25 Transtechnology Research Seminar Series: That Makes Sense: perception, reality, and world.
This year’s series takes as inspiration David Howes’ 2023 book Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses, in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law, which explores sensory anthropology and it’s many interdisciplinary connections. Doing so allows us to take an empirical philosopher’s (Mol, 2021; Drayson, 2022) approach to our research topics and focus on how we can understand and approach perception within transtechnological investigations.
Drayson, H. (2024) Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses, in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law by David Howes
2024/25 Session Dates.
Transtechnology Research Group Intro Meeting
25 Sep 2024 at 12:30 to 15:00, BST
Meet up – Transtechnology Research – Soup and Moor Walk
28 Sep 2024 at 11:30 to 14:00, BST
Transtechnology Research Group Seminar Series: Introductory Seminar: That Makes Sense: perception, reality, and world.
16 Oct 2024 at 12:30 to 15:00, BST
This year’s series takes as inspiration David Howes’ 2023 book Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses, in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law,which explores sensory anthropology and it’s many interdisciplinary connections. Doing so allows us to take an empirical philosopher’s (Mol, 2021; Drayson, 2022) approach to our researchtopics and focus on how we can understand and approach perception within transtechnological investigations.
A review of Howes’ book is attached and a full calendar of the seminar series is available on the TT website here.
How Is It Like to Feel a Bat? Theories in support of the ‘extended sensorium’.
Dr Hannah Drayson. Respondent Prof. dr. Michael Punt.
In this seminar I will discuss the relationship between the sensory and the cultural, by exploring some of the theoretical models that help us think through the bio-cultural nature of perception. Kicking off from Howes’ disagreement with Ingold over the idea that phenomenal experience is given as a whole – and does not contain a social dimension (see attached chapter 5 – pp.144-174), I will present a framework of ideas that allows of an understanding of how the social is embedded within the sensory. Considering ideas from ecological psychology, epigenetics, and actor-network theory – I will show how these models allow us to bring the biological, social, and technological into our understanding of how reality is both constructed and present in experience. It is my intention to share how these approaches extend the idea of sensing, for example showing how we might think of the senses as social, distributed, and purposive. I will look to Howes’ (2023) suggestion that we move beyond the extended mind to the ‘extended sensorium’ and consider what this notion can, considering the ideas discussed, bring to trans-technological studies of media and perception. I will also explain my playfully worded title with reference to some of the methods that allow us to factor the sensorium into our work.
David Howes, 2023. Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law. Penn State University Press.
Annemarie Mol, (2021) Eating In Theory. Duke University Press: Durham and London.
Hannah Drayson; Review of Eating in Theory by Annemarie Mol. Leonardo 2022; 55 (5): 544–546. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_r_02265
Researcher Seminar Sessions
13th Nov 2024 at 12:30 to 15:00, GMT
Lucinda Guy – Sensory transmissions: metacommunication in speech broadcasts
Abstract
When we listen to radio broadcasts, is it an entirely aural experience? Or are our bodies responding kinaesthetically, empathically in response to those we hear? And are there sound recording practices that enhance, or detract from, such experiences?
In the last one hundred years, the practice of recording voices outside of the studio has changed, from the use of a van load of cumbersome equipment, to the use of digital recorders in our pockets. This can be seen as an evolution towards democratisation of the production process, due to increased ease of capturing and storing vast amounts of data and improved fidelity. However, recording people’s voices is still subject to additional noise from the acoustics of the space, wind, electromagnetic interference, machine noise of the recording device, and the incidental sounds of the human body and its clothing.
In this seminar I argue that such noises can be read as information about the relationships between interviewer, interviewee, their locations and their audiences. I will use examples from the radio ballads of the 1950s and 60s, and more recent material from my own productions, to pay attention to this information, and how the text and the paralingual material work together to provide a more complete image of the person speaking and the meaning of what they say.
This analysis of noise in speech broadcasts is helpful for radio producers when considering where to draw the line around what kind of audio quality is good enough, how to increase involvement from untrained producers, and how to work with archive material. Furthermore, I am making a case that a sensory ethnographic approach is particularly apt for community radio in line with its aims of increased access to media production, widening of voice and building empathy in order to challenge social divisions.
11th Dec 2024 at 12:30 to 15:00, GMT
Karen Squire – Sedition enacted in print
In this seminar I will unpack the theory and practice entwined in my research methodology. I will do this through telling the story of my adventure to the British Library to study the many editions of a very particular mining textbook and also by relating these findings back to my own printmaking practice.
In the course of my research, I have been looking at examples, within the early modern print industry, of instances where print shop labourers ensured that traces of their working made it into the final printed books they were producing. They were (my thesis argues) exerting control in the form of resistance to the capitalised working practices that had changed not only their day-to-day praxis, but through this, the way they related to the world around them. In my thesis I am referring to their resistance as sedition enacted in print and in this seminar, I will reveal a first glimpse of my recovery of the material traces of these seditious acts.
Frieda Gerhardt – “Lens Flares and Goosebumps” – Sensory Film Theory in Practice
This seminar will give a brief overview of the filmmaking (and especially camera & lighting) techniques that correlate with sensory film theories. These include concepts like ‘haptic visuality’, ‘film phenomenology’ and ‘embodied spectatorship’, which I will also consider within the so-called sensory turn of the 1980’s and 90’s and how it became visible in filmmaking conventions. My main focus however, is to lay out the formal technologies and methods that put these theories into practice and consider how I have and/or will use them in my own film projects. These projects take forms like short experimental, non-narrative documentaries, which deal mainly with subjective experiences of sensory perception and processing. In the past this has been largely limited to my own lived-experience, but for my PhD project I am further investigating potential creative expressions of the sensory experiences of other people on the neurodiverse spectrum.
Respondent: Dr Edith Doove.
8th Jan 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, GMT
Edith Doove – Talking with my cat – a multispecies sensory approach.
In this seminar I will discuss a multispecies sensory approach to anthropology that leads me from the recent more-than-human turn in anthropology to reflections on prehistoric cave paintings. In their article ‘A sensory approach for multispecies anthropology (2020), Fijn and Kavesh attribute the relatively recent animal turn in anthropology to (the translation of) literature by Haraway (2003, 2008, 2016), Ingold (2013), Descola (2013), Viveiro de Castro (2014) and Tsing (2015). While these introduced notions of “joining with and learning from the more-thanhuman” (Ingold), making kin (Haraway) or the arts of noticing (Tsing), Latour’s post-human actor-network theory or Von Uexküll’s Umwelt are important predecessors. Fijn and Kavesh focus in their article on “how both sensory and multispecies anthropology have the capacity to guide anthropologists in their ability to capture the subtleties of morethan-human engagement, connection and relatedness”, referring to an earlier article by Howes (2019) in which he briefly discusses multispecies ethnography. Where he mentions the intriguing project ‘Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds’ by Ayelen Liberona and Natasha Myers (2019) in which observational film making plays an important role, Natasha Fijn also used these means in her exhibition More Than Human: The Animal in the Anthropocene (2020), notably through GoPro-filming on horse back.
This leads me to a recent documentary on the Cave Chauvet in the south of France and its drawings made by homo sapiens 36.000 BC (ARTE, 2024). As remarked in the documentaryhumans would have encountered principally animals when leaving their habitat which would make a more-than-human approach a natural state of being. The documentary discusses amongst others a possible cohabitation with wolves since their presence can be found deep in the cave. This can only be explained by making use of fires present to lighten the space. Possibly the most impressive is the section with drawings of horses and other animals that on the undulating walls and the play with light seems to move in a pre-cinematic kind of way. Looking at this scenery is a drawing of a figure that is half female, half bison/lion. As in the lion-man sculpture from Hollenstein from more or less the same period, the head is animal, the body human, which to me seems to be significant in itself. Noticeably are also the scenes in the documentary in which the making of the cave drawings is re-enacted, specifically the touch of the charcoal on cave walls to render the animals’ forms.
These observations make me considering talking with my cat, rather than using one of the current various AI-driven apps to translate her, as literally getting in touch. Both with her and a prehistoric more-than-human sense of being.
References:
Fijn N, Kavesh MA. A sensory approach for multispecies anthropology. Aust J Anthropol. 2021; 32:6–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12379
Howes, D. Multisensory Anthropology; Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2019; 48:17–28.
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218- 011324
Liberona A, Myers N. Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds, 2019.
https://becomingsensor.com/
Grotte Chauvet – Dans les pas des artistes de la Préhistoire, ARTE 2024,
https://youtu.be/kqkWK0fe2ZU ? (available until 30.01.2025)
5th Feb 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, GMT
Theo Humphries - A Case for Humour-Centred Design: (Mis)Understanding Humour and Laughter as Responses to Design and Design Innovation.
This thesis contributes to an under-explored contemporary discourse of humorous design and an emerging field of humour-centred design. Of particular concern are occasions when design outcomes (and by extension designers) are laughed at, because such laughter has been perceived to challenge the authority of design: its creations, processes, ideologies, and professionalism. Proceeding from the position that design has sought to take itself seriously as a profession, and critiquing problem-solving models that underpin design’s attempts to control humour, some instances of humour and laughter are presented as perturbations: moments of professional anxiety when design’s control over humour has been lost. The research identifies a cause of this discomposure to be a shortcoming in designerly understandings of humour — humour being conventionally placed outside of design analysis. This theoretical study, grounded in case analysis, draws from discourses of design theory, humour theory, and entanglement theory, and is replete with examples of gelastic design (funny design). A concept of malentanglement is formulated to describe design audience’s interpretation of the entanglement/fittingness of design as somehow incongruous, explaining that this is particularly the case with design innovation. Thereby, the thesis provides new designerly understandings of humour and laughter by reconceiving the problem as the solution: humour and laughter, herein understood from a more entangled perspective, become welcome indicators of genuine design innovation, rather than expressions of derision. By opening up the scope for finding new methodological approaches to design, design strategies can be developed that are sufficiently subtle and coherent in their terms to engage with humour and laughter as both welcome indicators of design innovation, and as tools of design in themselves.
Steven Doughty– “Sensing Others” – Examining mediated social presence.
Contemporary presence or tele-presence research favors the environment and media-space, with an emphasis on the creation or recreation of sensation and perception in virtual environmental space. This focus is likely the result of recent rapid advances and adoption of technologies such as virtual reality headsets (VR), augmented reality (AR), and smartphones. It detracts however from another common experience of presence, mainly the production of the other in space as opposed to the production of a space. Additionally, the focus on communication and computer technologies minimizes a myriad of ways presence is produced, mediated, and given material form through art, medicine, or ritual.
This seminar presents and examines some initial research and questioning around how presence, specifically social tele-presence, is mediated through technologies. With special attention to those cases and examples in which sense and perception of other persons and agents appear to precede understanding those individuals as others. Common examples and experience may include the feeling or sensation of being watched while on a walk in the woods or sensing the presence of the divine during meditation or prayer.
The discussion will focus on one way in which experiences of presence are mediated by technologies through the misalagnments with the physical world. Subjective experience of directly sensing, perceiving, or being-in the world is considered by some scholars a first-order experience. While first order experiences are typically in agreement with a physical and material understanding of the world, often an individual’s sense and perception is not in alignment with the understood physical world. This misalignment produces the experience commonly identified as presence; or the perception of something, somewhere, or someone being present in physical space the is not agreed on physical being “*there*”. Technologies which correct, augment, or otherwise modify senses and perceptions are commonplace, if not ubiquitous, throughout global cultures and societies. Frequently, these technologies or techniques are used intentionally to produce second-order or mediated experiences across space or tele-presence. The experience of tele-presence is strongest when an individual fails to fully account for the inclusion of technologies in their current experience.
5th Mar 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, GMT
Nick Peres – The Sensory Conditions for Innovation: Frugal Thinking, Fertile Ground in Healthcare
This seminar explores both the concept and the transformative role of boundary innovation spaces in fostering healthcare innovation, drawing upon established research and real-world implementations at Torbay and South Devon NHS Foundation Trust. Building on my contribution to “Meeting the Inclusion Challenge in Innovation” (Iakovleva et al., 2024) and my doctoral research, I examine how the creation of specific environmental, cognitive, and sensory conditions can cultivate innovation within resource-constrained healthcare settings.
Central to this discussion is the “three-way interface model” being established at the Digital Futures Lab, where patient experience, clinical expertise, and digital innovation intersect to encourage healthcare solutions. I will explore how these innovation spaces function as sites of embodied knowledge exchange, where the lived experience of illness and care becomes an important counterbalance to purely technical perspectives. Through ethnographic observations of the Digital Futures Hub, I will illustrate how these spaces create a distinctive phenomenology of innovation—one that privileges experiential knowledge and fosters a heightened sensory awareness essential for transformative healthcare solutions.
The seminar will showcase some examples of how frugal innovation approaches have yielded notable results, such as the eye-tracking wheelchair control technology developed in-house for £400 and a virtual ward monitoring systems achieving 72% cost reduction compared to commercial options. These examples highlight how minimal viable solutions, developed through participative co-design, address challenges while promoting long-term transformation in healthcare delivery. The seminar will also interrogate the ethical dimensions of healthcare innovation, examining how boundary spaces help navigate the tension between technological solutionism and the human-centered values essential to compassionate care.
By examining the evolving governance frameworks that support these innovation spaces, the seminar will discuss strategies for establishing innovation-conducive environments that balance technological advancement with humanistic values, while navigating the “punctuated strategic equilibrium” that characterises innovation within NHS settings.
References
Bessant, J., Halkes, M., & Peres, N. (2024). Digital futures—enabling innovation through a boundary space. In T. Iakovleva, E.M. Oftedal, & J. Bessant (Eds.), Meeting the inclusion challenge in innovation: Giving voice to users (2nd ed.). De Gruyter.
Edgerton, D. (2007). The shock of the old: Technology and global history since 1900. Oxford University Press.
Fritzsche, A., Jonas, J., Roth, A., & Möslein, K. (2020). Innovating in the open lab: The new potential for interactive value creation across organizational boundaries. De Gruyter.
Iakovleva, T., Oftedal, E. M., & Bessant, J. (Eds.). (2024). Meeting the inclusion challenge in innovation: Giving voice to users (2nd ed.). De Gruyter.
Kneebone, R. (2016). Simulation reframed. Advances in Simulation, 1(1), 1-8.
Latour, B. (2008). A cautious Prometheus? A few steps toward a philosophy of design. In Proceedings of the 2008 annual international conference of the design history society (pp. 2-10).
West, M., & Chowla, R. (2017). Compassionate leadership for compassionate health care. In P. Gilbert (Ed.), Compassion: Concepts, research and applications (pp. 237-256). Routledge
2nd Apr 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, BST
Zinnia Wang– Immersion as Critical Approach: Interrogating Ocularcentrism in Immersive Curatorial Practices
This seminar discussion takes David Howes’s critique of textualism and ocularcentrism as a starting point to rethink what “immersion” actually does. While immersive exhibitions are often celebrated for their multisensory engagement, I want to question whether this shift is as radical as it appears. Drawing on examples from contemporary art installations, museum displays, and VR-based exhibitions, I examine how immersive design walks a fine line: it gestures toward multisensory experience while often reinforcing the same visual regimes it claims to escape.
In doing so, I frame immersion not only as a sensory anthropological approach to understanding immersive experience, but also as a de-ocularcentric analytical lens through which to examine the use of immersive media in curatorial practice. Do immersive exhibitions truly unsettle the sensory hierarchy, or simply repackage ocularcentrism in technologically enhanced form?
Suggested reading: Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses, in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law by David Howes. Chapter 1from p.21-29; Chapter 2 from p.49-61.
Dr James Sweeting. AI, Luddites, and Hauntological Cyberpunk.
This talk adapts a paper that as of writing is in its final stages before submission. The aim is to bring further attention to the Luddite movement from the early 1800s and consider how it can help consider the changing industrial landscape that may or may not be impacted by the development of AI services, particularly how these are being misappropriated by corporations and what could be done to resist these.
I will also be considering how the marketing hype around AI represents a lack of imagination from the large technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc; examined via my concept of Hauntological Form as a difficulty of imagining something different, and in this instance an inability to meaningfully utilise the past.
Complementing this will be an examination via the lens of the Cyberpunk genre, one that I argue is a memory of the future. This false memory is an element that is contributing to the misappropriation of AI services and its subsequent wider damaging effects on society. This is driven by a misinterpretation of fictional texts that were created as warnings but instead have been viewed as guides towards a future that was not intended to become a reality.
30th Apr 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, BST
Troy de la Fosse. Material Misbehaviour: Sensory Impressions of 3D Printed Mistakes
An exploration of 3D printed mistakes through the development of a material and sensory taxonomy. Drawing on my experience of 3D printing in an educational setting, I have compiled and categorised a wide range of printing errors, not to correct or discard them, but to study their affective and aesthetic qualities. These misprints are treated as sensorially rich artefacts that challenge traditional notions of technical failure and open alternative forms of material knowledge.
Rather than viewing these objects as defective, I approach them as examples of material misbehaviour. Through close observation and tactile engagement, I have begun to map how each object behaves, resists, and transforms through its failed state. This taxonomy serves as a method for identifying patterns of sensory resistance, asking what kinds of affective responses these forms provoke and how they might be understood as expressive or performative.
The theoretical framework draws on thinkers such as Tim Ingold and Karen Barad, whose ideas about material agency, intra-action, and reflection-in-action inform my understanding of the dynamic relationship between maker and material. The work is also situated alongside the practices of artists like Eva Hesse and Helen Chadwick, whose sculptural approaches embrace instability, impermanence, and bodily sensation.
Through this lens, the taxonomy becomes more than a classificatory system; it becomes a way of listening to matter. Each entry is both a technical trace and a sensory event, inviting us to reconsider how we categorise mistakes and how those mistakes might offer insights into material experience.
Johara Bellali – Sensing consciousness in the ecology of the birthing room.
I start with the premise that childbirth is not a simple linear configuration of extracting a baby from reproductive organs but a constantly changing reconfiguration of multiple webs of intra-acting actors. In this seminar, I explore the role of senses in childbirth.
Research in Birth Consciousness (Dahan, 2021, 2023; Picard, 2023; Azmy, 2024) describes characteristics of an altered state of consciousness with particular feelings, senses and sensations experienced by the parturient during birth. Departing from David Howes’s statement that “The individual subject is […] a product of the intersection of social forces that shape how the senses are used and understood”(2023, p.154), I present the role of senses and sensations during childbirth from the perspective of a world-sense (Oyewumi, 2016) – as opposed to a worldview.
I then give an example of sensing the shift in consciousness described during a microphenomenological interview and conclude by asking how would reinstating the sense of awe impact a technocentric society’s sensory model (Howes, 2023, p. 182).
Azmy, J. (2024) ‘“Labor, You Can Now Come Upon Me”: Reimagining Birth Through Women’s Embodied Wisdom’, Journal of Folklore Research, 61(3), pp. 81–117. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2979/jfr.00012.
Dahan, O. (2021) ‘Birthing consciousness: A lacuna in evolutionary psychological science’, New Ideas in Psychology, 60, p. 100822. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2020.100822.
Dahan, O. (2023) ‘Navigating intensive altered states of consciousness: How can the set and setting key parameters promote the science of human birth?’, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 14, p. 1072047. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1072047.
David Howes, 2023. Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law. Penn State University Press.
Oyewumi, O. (2016) African Gender Studies: a Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US.
Picard, C. (2023) ‘Thinking Childbirth from an Emancipatory Perspective? Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis 1’, Journal of Analytical Psychology, 68(5), pp. 849–868. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5922.12950.
28th May 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, BST
Linan Zhang – Relationally Produced: Exploring the Making of Commonsense Assumptions
Nadia Krasteva – Sensory Modalities for Festival Visitors with Disability.
Laura Welsman – A philosophy of sensation in dichotomies between digital and analogue paintings. Date TBC.
Transtechnology Research Group Business Meeting
25 Jun 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, BST
Transtech Reader Writing Workshop – In person session.
Scheduled: 1 Jul 2025 to 3 Jul 2025
Location: Plymouth/South Brent