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Sino-Sensorial Working Group
Timeline
Project status: Active Cluster
Description
Coordinating faculty:
About the cluster:
The Sino-Sensorial Research Cluster is an interdisciplinary exploration of the senses as a technology of the bodymind vis-a-vis the social, historical, and aesthetic contexts of the Sinocultural spheres. We take seriously that in Mandarin, keen ears and sharp eyes amount to intelligence (聰明): sight, sound, smell, taste, haptics, and kinesthetics are all culturally situated frameworks through which we render the body’s sensations and experiences legible and meaningful. Sensory acuity is thus as much about the ability to perceive fine-grained details as it is a sign of cultural fluency.
Scholars in sensory studies have long argued that the inter-relations between individual senses are anything but universal. Rather, the organization of the sensorium (the multiple senses together as a whole) is always constructed, cultivated, and sustained, which is also to say that the sensorium is socio-historically contingent. In this line of thinking, how a person senses has as much to do with their physical environment as with their embodied patterns that make sense of the experience in relation to their visual, aural, olfactory, and kinesthetic faculties. The senses, in other words, constitute an embodied archive of how individuals have learned to inhabit and move across environs.
Our Sino-Senoriality Research Cluster aims to develop the Chinese sensorium as an analytic through which to consider the making (and unmaking and remaking) of the (putative though not actual) Chinese body, its relationship to the world around it, as well as its connection to social and cultural memories. An attention to the senses as a technology of the bodymind sheds light on a wide range of topics including, but not limited to, the history of medicine, heterogeneous environmentalisms, aesthetic and digital mediations, the practice and performance of everyday life, and many more. The four co-signed faculty conveners bring together multiple methodologies and analytical orientations (archival, ethnographic, theoretical, artistic) from history, ethnomusicology, dance, and visual studies, along with diverse expertise on Sino-cultural contexts across East Asia and North American diasporas. We will devote the Fall of 2024 to collectively establishing a research framework and to articulating key conceptual questions on the Sino-sensible through shared readings and discussion. In the Fall semester we will also host one work-in-progress workshop on related projects by graduate students and faculty. Graduate students with research interests that align with this research cluster include APSI MA students, Critical Asian Humanities MA students, and PhD students in History, Cultural Anthropology, and Ethnomusicology. We therefore conceive of the cluster as a means of building community among and mentoring graduate students as well as promoting faculty research.
In Spring 2025 we will host two events that involve talks by guest speakers, a film screening, a movement workshop, or a multi-sensorial gathering that engage in the exploration of the senses as a rich site of knowledge production for investigating histories and cultures in the broader Sino-context. International guests will be invited to present via Zoom to reduce financial and climate burdens. Domestic guests will be invited to come to campus and meet with faculty and students in person.