Short Abstract

As the sensory experiences of laypeople become increasingly relevant in public health, environmental management, and toxicity assessment, this panel explores when and how private sensory experiences can be transformed into public evidence of changes occurring within the shared world.

Long Abstract

The sensorial experiences of lay persons are becoming increasingly relevant in the fields of public health, environmental management, and toxicity evaluation (Nichter 2008, Stein and Luna 2021, Nixon 2011, Shapiro 2015, Taylor 2025). Human encounters with nonhuman organisms or molecular entities can be important sources of knowledge about life on a damaged planet. These experiences call for experimentation with citizen science methods along the lines proposed by Liza Grandia (2021), whose concept of “canary science” draws attention to the experiences of chemically sensitive individuals, and by Jörg Niewöhner, whose idea of “public science” (2025) suggests “to incorporate the widest possible ecologies of expertise”. This panel raises the question of how and when everyday sensory experiences can be considered not only matters of concern but also matters of fact (Latour 2004) - without falling into one of two fallacies: the overestimation of individual experience on the one hand, and the subsumption of lay testimonies under dominant expert evaluation on the other. It is when private experiences become shared that they become vulnerable to the polarizing forces. This panel aims to reconsider the act of sharing as both powerful and vulnerable by asking the following questions: What is the threshold at which sharing of the sensory experiences becomes necessary and powerful? When does it require the attention, and reactions of others? When and how can private sensory experiences become public evidence of transformation occurring within the shared world?

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