Nic Nicosia

The Ethnography Studio presents SENSORIAL EXCESS

With Dr. Dawn Nafus (Intel Labs) and Dr. Patricia Alvarez-Astacio (Rice)

We want to invite you to join the Ethnography Studio for its next workshop: SENSORIAL EXCESS. We will spend the morning attending to sensoria around Rice University’s campus. The event will take place on March 10th, 2017, from 10am to 2pm (lunch will be provided). Undergraduate and graduate students are welcome to join.

The workshop will have three parts. We will begin with a provocation by Dr. Patricia Alvarez-Astacio (Rice) and Dr. Dawn Nafus (Intel Labs). During the second part of the workshop each participant will navig

ate our immediate environment at Rice by attending to a specific form of sensorial perception and data-making  (focusing on touch, sight, sound, smell, etc.). Participants will memorialize their experiences by gathering notes, pictures and artifacts. They will “create” data for further analysis. Finally, participants will convene over lunch to discuss their impressions and build sensorial maps of campus.

The workshop will encourage participants, especially those of us who engage in fieldwork, to hone their sense of perception, pushing it beyond familiar ways of seeing and writing down the spaces we inhabit. It will also query the meaning of data creation as an embodied practice. We will pay attention to how other senses beyond sight, and their interplay, can open up new worlds of inquiry. We will also remain aware of what is impossible to grasp through our senses as a way to not forget about the limits of bodies as sensing machines. We expect this workshop to be of use to anyone currently engaged in scholarly research, especially research that demands an ethnographic perspective.

To join us please RSVP at ethnographystudio@gmail.com by March 2nd so that we can have enough food and materials for all.