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Paper short abstract

This paper examines assaults on the senses across terrains of conflict and emergency in Vietnam. Moving from sensory weaponization to navigation, it argues that the senses emerge as embodied sites of both coercion and care, resonating as sensory memory in the afterlife of hostile acoustics.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how violence operates through sound and the senses across shifting terrains of conflict and emergency. Drawing on scholarship on sonic warfare and the weaponization of the sensorium, it traces how acoustic assaults—from mass bombing campaigns to the amplified directives of public health crises—shape perception and bodily vulnerability. Based on sensory (auto)ethnography conducted in Vietnam, the paper adopts an intersensory approach attentive to sound, smell, touch, and atmosphere, arguing that violence is enacted and mediated through the senses not only by direct military force but also through infrastructural regimes that manage sensation and sensory life.

The paper unfolds in three parts. The first section examines how the senses are weaponized and governed, highlighting how infrastructures and environments become vectors of sensory violence. Yet sensory experience under conditions of crisis is not reducible to passive perception. The second section turns to the relational and adaptive capacities of the senses, showing how humans and nonhumans cultivate sensory attunement to navigate threat and duress. These sensing practices do not end with the event itself. The final section focuses on sensory memory, exploring how these experiences persist as resonant afterlives that materialize in curated soundscapes.

Taken together, the paper demonstrates how crises converge at the level of the senses, producing not only harm but also forms of collective care. By foregrounding hostile acoustics while remaining intersensory, it rethinks violence as sensory process through which crisis is lived, navigated, and remembered through embodied relational perception.

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Through an examination of engineered wetland systems in Canada's oil sands extraction region, this paper argues that sonic sensory explorations allow us to better understand continual environmental contamination as well as the role of the sonic in the settler colonial process of land dispossession.

Paper long abstract

Extraction in Canada's oil sands depends on the separation of oil from the sand and clay that bind it in the form of bitumen. Bitumen's processing produces liquid byproducts which are managed in engineered dam and dyke systems called tailings ponds. The accidental release of tailings into water systems area continual threat and consistent reality for the people, animals and plants of the province of Alberta. While tailings ponds' toxicity is often well known, less attention has been paid to the heavily designed and managed technoecologies that corporations have put in place over the past 5 years to keep humans and animals away from tailings, and isolate the tailings pond structures from the surrounding environment, specifically through the creation of new audio and visual environments. In this presentation, I suggest that the "bird's eye view", which has been prioritized in the scalar representation of oil sands impact, must be joined by the sonic plane. Through a series of audio recordings and installations, I argue that oil corporations must be understood not only as contributing to environmental damage, but also creating entirely new technoecologies, part of our altered planetary technosphere. The tailings pond of today is not solely a dam and dyke system designed to hold pollution (in perpetuity). Instead, we must understand tailings ponds as part of an extractive sensory regime that uses novel technological-animal hybrids to create and restrict access to wetland environments, while simultaneously resisting remediation.

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This talk draws on sonic witnessing research, combining mixed ethnographic methods with sound studies, to explore how experiences of sonic violence generate knowledges of and responses to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Paper long abstract

This talk draws on sonic witnessing research, combining mixed ethnographic methods with sound studies, to explore how experiences of sonic violence generate knowledges of and responses to Russia’s ongoing invasion in its multidimensionality, encompassing acoustic terror and acoustic territoriality as modes of violence and instruments of control over space and populations. I study ways of knowing the war through the invisibility of its sonic and sensory traces, which inscribe sites of harm and environments of terror. War is defined both as an experience of human and nonhuman destruction and as an assault on the sensing body in which the body (not just its life) is taken hostage to operations of power. The right to kill and the right to assault are exercised together as characteristics of an organized war, extending itself to colonial passions of control, discipline, and punishment, which instrumentalize sound as a tool of violence and/or exploit it as a medium through which violence is transmitted, felt, and enacted.

As a researcher and ethnographer or sonic violence in Ukraine, I ask how to navigate spaces of terror and experiences of sonic violence that Ukrainians are living and how to perform the work of knowing, and “labour of witnessing” (Bazdyrieva & Matviyenko) it entails, as an act of ethical engagement. I also ask what it means to know the war as a sensory condition and what Ukrainians do to register, document, and share it as a justice-seeking practice that transforms embodied knowledge into evidence, testimony and political (activist) demand.

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This paper examines how war and post-conflict are lived simultaneously in Colombia through sensory experience. Drawing on ethnography at Casa de la Paz, it shows how sound, touch, and atmosphere mediate violence, memory, reconciliation and everyday forms of resistance.

Paper long abstract

Despite the signing of the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla, violence persists. Everyday life unfolds under a profound ambiguity: Colombia is simultaneously narrated as a post-conflict society and lived as a territory where war endures. Drawing on the sensory turn in anthropology (Pink, 2015; Howes & Classen, 2014), this paper examines how this simultaneity is sensed and embodied through everyday sensory experience.

I explore how sensory practices mediate the contradictions of the transitional context, based on ongoing ethnography at Casa de la Paz, a community organization and cultural center committed to reconciliation and led by former FARC combatants. Central to the analysis is the Hall of Butterflies, a memorial room at Casa de la Paz, where fabric butterflies hang, each representing an ex-combatant killed since the peace deal. The room’s atmosphere (Bille, Bjerregaard & Sørensen, 2015) operates as a site of mourning, remembrance, and resistance, a sensorial assemblage (Navaro-Yashin, 2012) where political affect is condensed.

Through attention to sound, touch, and materiality, this paper argues that sensory knowledge is key to understanding how people inhabit this troubled reality as these registers unlock the ineffable dimensions of political violence that exceed verbal narration (Das, 2007) and shape how loss and endurance are lived.

By foregrounding sensory ethnography in a context of ongoing armed violence framed as post-conflict, this paper contributes to debates on how bodies and environments of violence remain entangled, and how sensory practices become forms of everyday resistance in zones of unresolved war.

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This paper explores the sensory dimensions of humanitarian response at the Polish–Ukrainian border (2022–2023). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how soundscapes constituted crisis as a state of exception, shaping how displaced people navigated and remembered emergency spaces.

Paper long abstract

This talk examines the sensory dimension of humanitarian response at the Polish–Ukrainian border (2022–2023). Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork across border crossings, temporary shelters, and transport hubs, I consider how everyday sounds—public announcements, engines and brakes, rolling suitcases, babies crying, dogs barking, volunteer instructions, prayers, songs, music, and purposeful silence—create a distinct sensory environment of the border that rapidly became “humanitarian” in Spring 2022. These acoustic and haptic environments illustrate the particularity of “state of exemption”, and crisis, established on the border 2022 where the ordinary rules are suspended.

I argue that although these environments often helped people to navigate uncertainty, they could also feel tiring or overwhelming. The border’s liminal setting makes these effects more noticeable, amplifying one voices and silencing other.

Methodologically, I present soundscaping as part of participant observation that can be seen as potentially more sensible and less traumatic approach to sensible inquiry: it captures the environment without requiring participants to engage with the researcher directly, while still offering insight into how people and humanitarians navigate transit and uncertainty.

By listening to how humanitarian spaces sound, the talk offers a grounded way to understand how emergency infrastructures are felt, used, and remembered by displaced Ukrainians and those assisting them.

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Invisible borders delineating territories controlled by armed groups shape daily life in many of Medellín’s peripheral neighbourhoods. Through mobile interviews and sensory mapping, this paper examines embodied cartographies of these borders that shape residents' experiences of armed violence.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how residents of peripheral neighbourhoods in Medellín, Colombia perceive and navigate territorial control by illegal armed groups through embodied forms of knowledge. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2018–2019, combining mobile interviews with sensory mapping. While Medellín has experienced a significant decline in homicide rates and is now known for innovative urban planning rather than extreme levels of urban violence, armed actors linked to paramilitary and narcotrafficking structures continue to regulate everyday life in many marginalised areas. One key feature of this control is the existence of “invisible borders” that delimit territories and govern movement.

These borders are “invisible” because they are not marked and can shift in location and permeability depending on the state of relations between neighbouring armed groups. Residents develop mental maps that allow them to avoid the heightened danger they associate with certain areas, or with crossing these boundaries.

Focusing on the experience of crossing or avoiding invisible borders, the paper examines how insecurity is corporeally experienced. During mobile interviews, fear and vigilance were enacted through subtle bodily adjustments such as changes in walking pace, posture, tone of voice, or heightened attention to their surroundings. By foregrounding how bodies attune to shifting sensescapes of threat and protection, the paper shows how residents develop practical and corporal forms of knowledge and expertise that enable them to negotiate everyday life in spaces shaped by chronic yet uneven violence.

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The paper examines how the violent sensory conditions of the sea crossing shape West African migrants’ bodily experience at sea. Grounded in theories of embodied space, it shows how the sea’s physical impacts produce bodily knowledge of life and death.

Paper long abstract

The sea is an environment that acts directly on the human body, and the vessel used for its crossing shapes the entire sensory experience. In this paper, I examine how the sensory encounter with the violent maritime environment affects West African migrants during their journey to Spain and continues to influence them after arrival.

The paper is grounded in the theories of embodied space, which offer a framework for understanding how place is made through bodily experience and perception (Low 2009; 2017). Experience is embedded in space and place, emerging through sensorial and phenomenological engagement and through “the creation of place through the body’s spatial orientation and movement” (Low & Lawrence‑Zúñiga 2003).

Migrants navigate and live through the violence of the sea through sensory extremes: the smell of the deceased, the screams and cries of others, bodily stiffness, sleeplessness, and the sight of a horizon devoid of land. Conflicting physiological stimuli leads to seasickness, as the instability of the visual horizon and overstimulation of the inner ear produce nausea and vomiting (Golden & Tipton 2002). Scarcity of food and water, and eventually drinking seawater, intensifies seasickness, and the bodily impact of the sea makes survival on the boat extremely difficult.

The paper concludes that a sensory perspective on the sea crossing shows that the life‑threatening journey at sea is a bodily experience that can constitute knowledge of one’s own mortality as well as of the deaths of others.

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This paper explores practices of civilian engagement with war debris in wartime Ukraine. Cleanup, transformation, and reuse of fragments of weaponry, I argue, constitute sensory labor through which material remains of violence are absorbed and damaged environments made livable under prolonged war.

Paper long abstract

In wartime Ukraine, the environmental imprint of military violence is manifested, among other harms, in the widespread presence of military debris - shell casings, missile fragments, ammunition crates, etc. This paper examines how civilians handle and rework these material remnants of violence as part of everyday effort to restore order and livability in militarized environments. Based on year-long ethnographic fieldwork (2024–2025) in Kyiv and its suburbs, I trace the trajectories of war debris as they move from sites of destruction into domestic, civic, and economic spaces.

I argue that these practices constitute a form of tactile and atmospheric infrastructure through which violence is “domesticated” and transformed. First, civilians participate in rapid cleanup efforts, treating war debris as “matter out of place” that disrupts the functioning and moral order of lived environments. Second, through what I call metabolization, people wash, handle, repurpose, and decorate fragments of weaponry, folding hostile materials back into everyday life through improvised artistic practice and embodied care. Third, these transformed objects acquire social biographies as they circulate within moral and monetary economies, particularly through grassroots fundraising networks that support military units and humanitarian needs.

Attending to touch, weight, residue, and fatigue, the paper shows violence is registered in bodies and environments, and how sensory labor becomes a mundane yet consequential practice of repair in the context of prolonged war.