So if screaming and looking don't work...what happens when we attend to other more novel types of sensational experience? I think that's part of this year's dfmi premise. No? I also wonder here about the idea of audience. Our broader missive as academics may be to re-think our dedication to a more general audience rather than our propensity to talk amongst ourselves. This is not a new, or radical claim, of course, but if we want to resist the corporatization of our institutions (a system to which we are bound and co-create/constitute), we can start there. I don't mean this as a self-righteous move, but it may be that our survival as both academics and in a more 'gaian' sense may depend on it.

Relates to Barad's notion of a diffractive methodology. Yes?

Agreed.

Also true of a creative process when one is in flow.

Invitational rhetoric not agonistic...

Indeed. This also speaks with our initial campus foray and attempt to attune to one sense perception and consider the affordances and constraints of such a venture.

Yes.

I don't think we've moved beyond the need to discuss "social diacritics," but I do think we can do both and Haraway and TallBear provide ways to think about the why/how/what of this work, perhaps.

This gets to my earlier question about a sensus communis, perhaps. Cool.

Reminds me of "nasal rangers" in MN near CAFOs.

Key question for rhetoricians to address.

I want to understand and do this better, which I assume we'll be doing next week!

Yes. Connects to my earlier point on environmental injustices.

Interesting!

And olfactory--hello! Reference Victoria Henshaw on urban design and sense of smell. Sensory hierarchy strikes again. Just sayin' ;)

Connections to Kate McLean's work on smell mapping?

Chthulucene also - not posthuman - but compost-its; "make kin not babies" (p. 161). One wonders here about a Western propensity toward the eschatological.

Really a haptic thing...also our skin is effected. The ocularcentric focus in this is interesting to me because it reinforces a hierarchy of sensation that's common in Western culture, and it's one I'd like us to disrupt a bit. I think Hawhee and others also help us to do this work.

Ta-da! There we go. :)

I'm struck by the lack of complexity regarding city/rural connections. 15-20% of air pollution comes from large-scale agricultural production (massive animal feeding ops, etc.). The distributed nature of the pollution seems to make it invisible. Maybe the author will talk about this later. I hope we do as well as an ethical issue we can take up, particularly for those interested in environmental injustice issues.

Adam Mack's Sensing Chicago (U of Illinois P 2015) addresses a lot of this--good cross pollination of ideas to consider.

Though I agree with the premise, this statement assumes that a citizen will have access to an air pollution sensor, which also assumes a certain degree of privilege that many in the worst of environmental injustice zones simply don't have. I hope we talk about that.

This relates to Hawhee's explication of the sensorium, which extends to both human and non-human senses that work in collaboration. I also wonder here about a "sensus communis," a unifying concept that works toward a "common" sense developed through combined group sensations, ethical discernment, digital tech, and interpretation that's not bent on Kantian or Cartesian authoritarian injunction or dualism, but on a valuing of common ground (e.g., Earth). To be sure, I don't mean to suggest that individuals don't matter or to suggest that there is a "universal." It's more a matter for statis perhaps and wayfinding.

A disturbingly kairotic example: [](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/03/how-rare-plant-could-cost-two-professors-their-careers?fbclid=IwAR0ns_9bwrR95AvaK-rS5qzkGiBQC9_AW97Db7y-6jg6QiuDanmoJ8Y4Gxg

)

Good point and addresses aspects of power relations I needed to see.

Ok.

The section here is quite combative. I wonder about complexity here. Interesting that he appears to push back against political correctness in some ways. No?

I fail to see any discussion of power relations in Thrift's work here. Am I missing something, or is this just a masculinist approach that ignores how power relations effect "expression" and "imagination," and more? The omission is key in terms of how one might respond to the work and how it can manifest in fieldwork scenarios.

Relates to Haraway's notion of "located accountability" perhaps.

The idea of "mental life" contradicts Spinoza's non-dualistic focus. The next passage reinforces the mind/body split as well.

Perhaps, but who is authorized to "explore" is imbued with power and privilege, which feminist critique would notice. "Common" ground and "freedom" are fraught terms, imho.

These are always already cultural and ideological though.

This resonates with my research interests in scent events at intersection with environmental condition. Cool.

I think connections to Nancy Tuana's "viscous porosity"-- provides a feminist approach to relational materiality that some of our group's readers may appreciate.

Good connection here with Vannini's concept of "style" in non-representational research.

Note to self: share this article with 5362 grad students in SP20 and 5371 this fall!

The "event" section here is exceptionally helpful for my own research into what I call scent events. Cool connection. Thanks for providing the reading! Useful!

It's weird to me that Thrift focused (according to Vannini) on Freud when D. W. Winnicott's work on object relations and play make so much more sense for the type of theory proposed. I guess it's just a pet peeve of mine that Lacan and Freud get so much print-space. To be fair though, I read a lot more Winnicott in my MA program, which was in Visual Culture in a School of Art.

Jane Bennett's work on vibrant matter fits here, too.

I'm curious here about the connections to rhetoric in a nondiscursive sense. The idea of "no meaning at all" makes strange the notion of rhetoric as a disciplinary field. No? Granted the author isn't addressing rhetoric as a field, but I do wonder how rhetoricians might complicate this in interesting ways. Thinking on the screen here...

How unfortunate. jkjk

Yes, and not only race, also able-bodied experiences, etc.

As I read the methodology the authors outline here, I can't help but ask where is the "so what"? I get that it's a different way to think through a place/space or an orientation maybe, but I don't see ethical connections that I need to see to place value on the work. It's a social justice thing...maybe it will show up later.

These ideas harken back to Guy Debord's "derives" and other artistic "happenings"--also 60s era movements. What's up with the back to the past thing? Also, I checked out the WalkingLab.org website and found the projects, events, and publications interesting. It all feels overly ableist to me, but I didn't delve deeply.

The two don't seem distinct to me. Gathering is always already an embodied, entangled act of relationality.