The Smell Culture Reader

Publisher Description

Design is part of ordinary, everyday life, to be found in every room in every building in the world. While we may tend to think of design in terms of highly desirable objects, this book encourages us to think about design as ubiquitous (from plumbing to television) and as an agent of social change (from telephones to weapon systems). The Design Culture Reader brings together an international array of writers whose work is of central importance for thinking about design culture in the past, present and future. Essays from philosophers, media and cultural theorists, historians of design, anthropologists, cultural historians, artists and literary critics all demonstrate the enormous potential of design studies for understanding the modern world. Organised in thematic sections, The Design Culture Reader explores the social role of design by looking at the impact it has in a number of areas - especially globalisation, ecology, and the changing experiences of modern life. Particular essays focus on topics such as design and the senses, design and war and design and technology, while the editor's introduction to the collection provides a compelling argument for situating design studies at the very forefront of contemporary thought.

With groundbreaking contributions by Marshall McLuhan, Oliver Sacks, Italo Calvino and Alain Corbin, among others, Empire of the Senses overturns linguistic and textual models of interpretation and places sensory experience at the forefront of cultural analysis. The senses are gateways of knowledge, instruments of power, sources of pleasure and pain - and they are subject to dramatically different constructions in different societies and periods. Empire of the Senses charts the new terrains opened up by the sensual revolution in scholarship, as it takes the reader into the sensory worlds of the medieval witch and the postmodern mall, a Japanese tea ceremony and a Boston shelter for the homeless. This compelling revisioning of history and cultural studies sparkles with wit and insight and is destined to become a landmark in the field.

Smell is a social phenomenon, given particular meanings and values by different cultures. Odours form the building blocks of cosmologies, class hierarchies, and political odours. They can enforce social structures or transgress them, unite people or divide them, empower or disempower. The authors argue that the sociology of smell is repressed in the modern West, and its social history ignored. This book breaks the "olfactory silence" of modernity. It offers the first comprehensive exploration of the cultural role of odours in Western history - from antiquity to the present. It also covers a wide variey of non-Western societies. Its topics range from the medieval concept of the "odour of sanctity", to the aromatherapies of South America, and from olfactory stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in the modern West to the role of smell in postmodernity. Its subject matter will fascinate anyone who likes to nose around in the inner workings of culture.

Identity, Culture, and the Science Performance, Volume 1: From the Lab to the Streets is the first of two volumes dedicated to the diverse sociocultural work of science-oriented performance. A dynamic volume of scholarly essays, interviews with scientists and artists, and creative entries, it examines explicitly public-facing science performances that operate within and for specialist and non-specialist populations. The book's chapters trace the theatrical and ethical contours of live science events, re-enact historical stagings of scientific expertise, and demonstrate the pedagogical and activist potentials in performing science in community settings. Alongside the scholarly chapters, From the Lab to the Streets features creative work by contemporary science-integrative artists and interviews with popular science communicators Sahana Srinivasan (host of Netflix's Brainchild) and Raven Baxter (“Raven the Science Maven”) and artists from performance ensembles The Olimpias and Superhero Clubhouse. In exploring the science performance as a vital but flawed method of public engagement, it offers a critique of the racist, ableist, sexist, and heteronormative ideologies prevalent across the history of science, as well as highlighting science performances that challenge and redress these ideologies. Along with its complementary volume From the Curious to the Quantum, this book documents the varied ways in which identity categories and cultural constructs are formed and reformed through science performances.

The first edition of The Auditory Culture Reader offered an introduction to both classical and recent work on auditory culture, laying the foundations for new academic research in sound studies. Today, interest and research on sound thrives across disciplines such as music, anthropology, geography, sociology and cultural studies as well as within the new interdisciplinary sphere of sound studies itself. This second edition reflects on the changes to the field since the first edition and offers a vast amount of new content, a user-friendly organization which highlights key themes and concepts, and a methodologies section which addresses practical questions for students setting out on auditory explorations. All essays are accessible to non-experts and encompass scholarship from leading figures in the field, discussing issues relating to sound and listening from the broadest set of interdisciplinary perspectives. Inspiring students and researchers attentive to sound in their work, newly-commissioned and classical excerpts bring urban research and ethnography alive with sensory case studies that open up a world beyond the visual. This book is core reading for all courses that cover the role of sound in culture, within sound studies, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history, media studies and urban geography.

Designing with Smell aims to inspire readers to actively consider smell in their work through the inclusion of case studies from around the world, highlighting the current use of smell in different cutting-edge design and artistic practices. This book provides practical guidance regarding different equipment, techniques, stages and challenges which might be encountered as part of this process. Throughout the text there is an emphasis on spatial design in numerous forms and interpretations – in the street, the studio, the theatre or exhibition space, as well as the representation of spatial relationships with smell. Contributions, originate across different geographical areas, academic disciplines and professions. This is crucial reading for students, academics and practitioners working in olfactory design.

When we talk of 'seeing' a film, we do not refer to a purely visual experience. Rather, to understand what we see on screen, we rely as much on non-visual senses as we do on sight. This new book rethinks the body in the cinema seat, charting the emergence of embodied film theory and drawing on developments in philosophy, neuroscience, body politics and film theory. Through the prism of Alfred Hitchcock's films, we explore how our bodies and sensual memory enable us to quite literally 'flesh out' what we see on screen: the trope of nausea in "Frenzy", pollution and smell in "Shadow of a Doubt", physical sound reception in the "Psycho" shower scene and the importance of corporeality and closeness in "Rear Window". We see how the body's sensations have a vital place in cinematic reception and the study of film.