Send message to Author

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.