SENSES
The senses are where worlds become real.
Before experience becomes a statistic or an argument, it is felt. A room is entered through light, temperature, distance, texture, movement, smell, sound and expectation. A person learns what is safe, beautiful, respectable, familiar or forbidden through repeated sensory encounters. SENSELAX begins here: with sensing as a meeting point between body and society.
BEYOND THE FAMILIAR FIVE
Sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell are only a starting point. Balance, pain, heat, cold, pressure, hunger, fatigue, rhythm, orientation and the awareness of one’s own body all shape everyday life. So do memory, anticipation and atmosphere. We distinguish bodily perception from metaphor while studying how they influence each other. A “cold” institution, a “loud” identity or an “invisible” community are figures of speech, but they are also clues to real arrangements of space, attention and power.
Language matters here. Sensory vocabularies are uneven: some experiences are richly named, while others remain difficult to communicate. We study description itself – who has words for an experience, whose account is believed, and how translation changes what can be shared.
THE SENSES ARE SOCIAL
What people are able or required to sense is never distributed equally. Some work in heat, vibration or chemical odour while others inhabit filtered, quiet and climate-controlled environments. Some accents are heard as authoritative; others are dismissed before their meaning is considered. Certain bodies are touched, watched, searched or measured more than others. Public signs, schoolrooms, transport systems, digital interfaces and healthcare settings assume particular eyes, ears, hands, languages, speeds and thresholds. Sensory access is therefore a question of dignity, participation and justice.
We study sensory life through ethnography, interviews, oral histories, sensory walks, sound and smell mapping, material culture, visual analysis, archival research, diary studies, interface observation and participatory workshops. We may ask people to describe a route without relying on sight, map where a neighbourhood becomes welcoming or hostile, trace the sound of authority inside an institution, or compare how one object is handled across generations. These methods do not simply collect impressions. They reveal patterns, exclusions and forms of knowledge that conventional data can miss.
SENSING THROUGH TECHNOLOGY
Contemporary sensing is increasingly mediated. Cameras rank faces, platforms organise attention, headphones build private sound worlds, sensors translate bodies into data, and automated systems decide which signals count. We examine both the opportunities and the risks of these translations. What is gained when an experience becomes measurable? What disappears? Who designs the threshold between normal and exceptional? Whose sensory difference is treated as error rather than expertise?
FROM PERCEPTION TO PUBLIC VALUE
To study the senses is to study the first politics of everyday life: what can be noticed, what must be endured, what is allowed to matter, and what a society has not yet learned to feel.