[ecrea] Ph.D. summer school in Hamburg: Sensing Collectivities—Rethinking the Haptic & Thermal Objects

Call for participants:

A five-day international Ph.D. summer school and international workshop 
organised by the Phd Program "Loose Connections" at Hamburg University

Dates: June 14-18 2017
Venues: Sociology Department University Hamburg
Submission Deadline for Abstract: April 25
Acceptance Notice: May 1
Full paper due: June 1
Interested in participating: Send an email to Michael Liegl: 
(michael.liegl /at/ wiso.uni-hamburg.de)



The 5th SSCT Ph.D. Summer School consists of two events:

Thermal Objects—Theorizing Temperatures and the Social
International Workshop Hamburg 14-15 June 2017, University of Hamburg

Sensing Collectivities—Rethinking the Haptic: Touch, Movement, and Surfaces
International PhD course, 16-18 June 2017, Hamburg University, Germany

PhD Students will have the opportunity to participate in both events and 
are able to gain 5 ECTS credits for the Summer School and an additional 
3 ECTS for participating in the workshop on “Thermal Objects”.


Part I: International Workshop Thermal Objects 14-15 June
Organisers
Prof. Dr. Urs Stäheli, Department of Sociology, University of Hamburg, 
(urs.staeheli /at/ wiso.uni-hamburg.de)
Elena Beregow, Department of Sociology, University of Hamburg 
(elena.beregow /at/ wiso.uni-hamburg.de)

Speakers
Nigel Clark (Lancaster)
John Hockey (Gloucestershire)
Helmut Lethen (Vienna)
Wolfgang Ernst (Berlin)
Esther Leslie (London)
Gunnar Schmidt (Trier)

Description
When heat and cold appear in the humanities and social sciences, they 
are often treated as metaphors. Since the very beginnings of sociology 
at the turn of the twentieth century, key theoretical concepts such as 
community and society have been described in hyperthermal terms: authors 
like Ferdinand Tönnies and Helmuth Plessner, from different normative 
perspectives, described the formation of the modern, urbanized society 
as a cooling process that freezes the warm, authentic community. Thermal 
metaphors turn out to be useful—perhaps even constitutive—tools that 
make abstract notions imaginable and tangible. However, the question of 
temperature was mostly overlooked by sociological theory, especially in 
its material relation to social phenomena.

The phenomenon of fire, for example, has been investigated from both 
scientific and cultural-historical perspectives and has been understood 
as crucial for the formation of the social. On the one hand, fire as one 
of the elements has been conceived of as a timeless force beyond 
society. On the other hand, the control of fire is seen as a 
precondition for culture—not only for basic cultural techniques like 
cooking, but also for language development and group formation. In a 
representational line of thinking, sociology tends to reduce the sensory 
qualities of heat and cold to mere metaphors for culture and the 
symbolic. The example of fire shows that the metaphoric and literal 
dimensions of heat are closely intertwined. Highlighting temperature 
leads us to a range of questions about the sensory materiality of the 
social, including the senses, the mediality of heat and cold, the 
conception of thermal objects, and thermopolitics.

Sensory studies have addressed sensory dimensions that are not 
explicitly listed in the classical five senses, such as the sense of 
motion and the sense of temperature. But is thermoception only an 
additional field for sensory studies, or does it also inflect our 
understanding of the social? In contrast to the sense of sight, which 
separates the seeing body from the object world, the thermal sense 
annihilates the subject/object divide. Thermal information always 
indicates directional effects: the perception of coldness, for example, 
presupposes that an object or the environment makes a body colder. From 
this perspective, affect theory has described heat as affect, as the 
“catalytic” and potentially emancipatory energy of becoming and involvement.

In this rather enthusiastic account, the question of the relation 
between the metaphoric dimension—for instance, in terms like “flow” and 
“energy”—and the sensory dimension of heat and coolness re-emerges. How 
can we take into account our own use of (thermal) metaphors in our 
arguments and recognize their productivity? And how can we theoretically 
account for more-than-human thermal objects and elements, such as 
clouds, dust, or fire, without idealizing and anthropomorphizing them?

Returning to our earlier example, fire has clear infrastructural and 
mediating functions. Fire generates a thermal environment that consists 
of specific objects, infrastructures, and media technologies. When we 
grasp thermal elements as media, their material characteristics and 
properties become visible: for instance, their rhythms and movements, 
and their capacity to store, transfer, and conduct, but also their 
relatively short half-life. Do we need an enlarged notion of media in 
order to theorize thermal objects? Which sensory effects and relations 
do they produce? When we move away from the human body as the point of 
reference, the thermal qualities themselves become crucial. Smoke, dust, 
and clouds are bodies that have no simple edges or borders; they are, 
rather, absolute surfaces turning on themselves. Drawing on the account 
of Michel Serres, who has described the skin (not only of human bodies) 
as a milieu or a place of minglings, we will address thermal objects and a!
 tmospheres as phenomena that are perceived by their heterogeneously 
configured surfaces. How do different thermal bodies and surfaces meet, 
and how are their minglings and detachments organized? How are the 
senses of touch and temperature related?

There seems to be something genuinely controlling and regulating about 
thermoception, as it helps to maintain a certain body temperature. The 
biologic notion of homeostasis, which was taken up by cybernetic 
thought, turns us to the important question of measurement, control, and 
regulation of temperature, for instance in new thermal technologies of 
sensory control used by public security systems, the military, and the 
police. The politics of temperature have received renewed attention in 
and due to the discussions on climate change and its political effects 
(e.g., climate refugees, environmental catastrophes). However, the 
question of thermopolitics should not be reduced to that of climate 
change: we need a broader social and media-theoretical account of 
thermoception and thermal objects.

1. Tempered senses: Cool sensations and warm atmospheres
·      Skin-topologies and thermal bodies
·      Haptic and visual surfaces
·      Architectural spaces and tempered atmospheres
·      Cultures of coolness and distance
·      The thermal configuration of high and low, close and distant senses

2. Tempered media: Infrastructure and media hot and cool
·       Media environments and ecologies
·       Temperature problems as infrastructural problems
·       Data storage, freezing, and cooking information
·       Heat as computing-power and engineering problem

3. Thermopolitics—between control and transgression
·       Thermodynamics and cybernetics
·       Thermal utopia and dystopia
·       History of the sciences: Historical discourses of temperature
·       New thermal technologies



Part II. Summer School Sensing Collectivities 16-18 June:
Organisers
Prof. Dr. Urs Stäheli, Department of Sociology, University of Hamburg, 
(urs.staeheli /at/ wiso.uni-hamburg.de)
Dr. Michael Liegl, Coordinator of the Ph.D.-program “Loose Connections”, 
University of Hamburg, (michael.liegl /at/ wiso.uni-hamburg.de)
Partners: Aarhus University, DK, Warwick University, UK, University of 
Southern Denmark, DK, Södertörn University, SE

Keynotes
Assistant Professor Nerea Calvillo, PhD – Centre for Interdisciplinary 
Methodologies, Warwick University, UK
Assistant Professor Anna Harris, MD, PhD – Technology & Society Studies, 
Maastricht University, NL
Post Doctoral Researcher Dr. Hanna Göbel – Human Movement Sciences / 
Performance Studies, University of Hamburg, Germany
Assistant Professor Mark W.D. Paterson, PhD - Sociology, University of 
Pittsburgh, USA

Lecturers / workshop organizers / discussants
Staff of the PhD program “Loose Connections” at Hamburg University and 
members of the SSCT network

Cost: Participation fee (30€). Each participant covers their own travel 
& accommodation

Description
This summer school explores human and nonhuman collectivities as 
sensory, haptic beings. Classically, collectivities have been conceived 
of as visual and (to a lesser degree) auditory entities, most famously 
with the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan. The visual promised an 
imaginary totalization whereby the elements of a collectivity merged 
into a whole; likewise, the auditory focused on the self-referential 
moment wherein a collectivity—for example, a cheering crowd—heard 
itself. In contrast to these well-established approaches, we want to ask 
how the haptic senses, such as touching and kinesthesia, figure in the 
construction and dissolution of collectivities (think, for example, of 
the handshake as social touch). The haptic is often overlooked but is a 
central dimension of modernity; one might even wonder, as Walter 
Benjamin did, whether the tactile sparks a new ordering of the modern 
sensorium. To inquire into sensing is to move beyond the distinctions 
between sub!
 ject and object or between self and other. Jean-Luc Nancy has put this 
paradox beautifully as “se toucher toi”: through its reflexive nature, 
touch blurs the boundaries of collectivities and points at new 
nonrepresentational analytical strategies for analyzing collective 
sensory processes.

“Sensing collectivities” addresses a double question: First, how do 
collectivities as a whole sense themselves and their environments? This 
question makes it necessary to regard sensing as a 
transindividual—perhaps even emergent—process, similar to viewing affect 
as transcending each separate body. It highlights the sensory capacities 
that collectivities possess and the role that sensing plays in such 
groups’ (dis)organization. How are collectivities able to sense 
themselves, and do modes of sensual reflexivity arise? What cultural 
techniques and media technologies organize collective sensing?

Second, how and where is it possible to sense collectivities? These 
questions have become even more pertinent with the advent of sensory 
technologies in urban environments (the “smart city”), the establishment 
of new technologies of control and surveillance, and the remote sensing 
of less accessible areas by satellite technology. In addition, 
understanding collectivities as moving and rhythmic entities (whose 
rhythm includes moments of stillness, quietness, and standby) makes it 
necessary to ask how these movements are observed, processed, and 
channeled. The question of how to sense collectivities is also a 
methodological challenge for the researcher: How do we account for the 
sensory processes of collectivities? How do we put our often very fixed 
and immobile methodologies in movement without losing ourselves?

“Sensing collectivities” also addresses the underside of collective 
sensory processes. Movements might accelerate and escalate; touch might 
produce too much closeness. In short, the feedback mechanisms of  touch 
and movement are fragile and precarious: it is no accident that early 
modern discourses about nervousness addressed questions of hectic and 
irregular movements; of electric shocks; of vertigo, contagion, and 
oversensitivity. The early twentieth-century diagnosis of 
“oversensitivity” arose simultaneously with the broad range of new, 
often machinic experiences of the haptic. Which practices and techniques 
have emerged for dealing with “oversensitivity”? What measures can 
counter these bodily-machinic stimulations and irritations? What new 
techniques can enable us to become distant, indifferent, and possibly 
even immune?

Highlighting the haptic in our discussion of “sensing collectivities” 
necessarily turns us to surfaces—notably, as Michel Serres suggested, to 
the skin (but also to media technological surfaces), as the contact 
zones that (dis)organize not only single bodies, but also 
collectivities. The surface is not limited to an aesthetic phenomenon in 
the narrow sense (as it were), or even to the broader idea of an 
interface with more depth. Thinking the haptic requires us to go beyond 
the old dichotomy between flat and deep— to account for how surfaces 
emerge not as passive backgrounds, but as active processes: as a doing 
of surfaces, as Tim Ingold has emphasized in his work on lines. When we 
begin to consider surfaces not simply as static givens, not simply as 
the passive medium for signs and meaning, it becomes essential to trace 
how surfaces move and fold. Drawing from sensory and affect studies, our 
investigation of surface processes may help us to account for the dynamics !
 of modern collectivities; for collective flows of energy; for 
collective endeavors in which surfaces are produced, controlled, and 
dissolved.

Topics related to this theme include:
·      Haptic metaphors and collectivities (e.g., from movement to new 
social movements) ·      Immunity and collectivity ·      Techniques for 
producing and dissolving surfaces ·      Tactile politics: From 
Untouchables to public political gatherings ·      Media-skin: What can 
surface studies contribute to the analysis of new media? · 
Mediality of sensing: From bodily sensing to remote sensing · 
Cultural anthropology and history of touch and movement · 
Discourses of oversensitivity as crisis diagnosis and cultural critique 
·      Surface as method? Methodological challenges ·      Collective 
haptic experiences in urban spaces ·      Haptic atmospheres and 
collectivity ·      Bringing affect and sensory studies into dialogue · 
    Haptic surveillance technologies ·      Sense and sensuality: The 
materiality and corporeality of collectives 


Exam: The examination will consist of three parts:
1. Full paper hand-in (deadline June 1);
2. Attending workshops and doing group assignments;
3. Paper presentation and discussion of papers. 

Deadline for submission: April 25 2017: Send an email to Michael Liegl: 
(michael.liegl /at/ wiso.uni-hamburg.de) Attach a description of your research 
topic and project (max. 300 words).



About the summer school network (SSCT) The network and summer schools 
focus on three academic fields: 1) Im/materiality (e.g. studies of 
affect and materiality), 2) digital media ecologies and 3) participation 
and new collectives. Each summer school can decide to focus on one of 
them or to investigate the relations between two or all three of 
them.The network and events aim at creating stronger connections and 
academic interaction between sociological, aesthetic and cultural 
studies departments in (Northern) Europe interested in the 
abovementioned academic areas. The network and events are furthermore 
especially interested in the relationship between theoretical 
developments and methodological challenges. See:
http://cc.au.dk/en/research/research-programmes/cultural-transformations/ssct-phd-summer-school-and-other-ct-phd-courses/ 



---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please
use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at
http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------