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
16 Oct 2024 at 12:30 to 15:00, BST
Dr. Hannah Drayson
Professor dr. Michael Punt
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.
Theo Humphries - A Case for Humour-Centred Design: (Mis)Understanding Humour and Laughter as Responses to Design and Design Innovation.
5th Feb 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, GMT
Steven Doughty – Sensing Others and Identifying Presence : Examining how media shape participants.
Laura Welsman – A philosophy of sensation in dichotomies between digital and analogue paintings
Respondent: Guy Edmonds.
5th Mar 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, GMT
Nick Peres – The Sensory Conditions for Innovation: Frugal Thinking, Fertile Ground in Healthcare
Johara Bellali – Sensing conciousness in the ecology of the birthing room.
2nd Apr 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, BST
James Sweeting – Sensing the difference between the original and remake in videogames.
Zinnia Wang– The Sensory Turn in Visual Culture: Immersive Exhibitions
Transtech in person meet up. Walk followed by supper
Scheduled: 23 Apr 2025 at 14:00 to 20:00, BST
Location: Plymouth
30th Apr 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, BST
Sarah Turton – Sensory letters in Transcendent experiences and alien encounters.
Troy De La Fosse – OOO, 3D digital objects, and other insensible things.
28th May 2025 at 12:30 to 15:00, BST
Linan Zhang – Title TBC
Nadia Krasteva – Sensory Modalities for Festival Visitors with Disability.
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