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Dr Tatsuma Padoan presents his Seed-Funded Pilot Project at Future Humanities Institute event
Dr Tatsuma Padoan (Study of Religions Department, UCC), together with his team from the SENSA Lab (Laboratory of Semiotics, Ethnosemiotics, Nonfictional Studies and Audiovisuality), presented the Seed-Funded Pilot Project "Aesthetic Communication: The Role of Senses in Social Interaction, Across and Beyond the Human", during the Future Humanities Institute event "Methodologies that Motivate", held at UCC Granary Theatre on 15 January 2025 (16.00-19.30).
This project, sponsored by the FHI and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, aimed at investigating the role of bodily perception in social life, looking at verbal and nonverbal semiotic practices of communication. We proposed to analyse the aesthetics of communication in everyday practices, including but not limited to artistic expression, in order to find new ways to understand the social role of sensory and affective interaction in producing and interpreting meanings and identities at the individual and collective level, as well as across and beyond the human. By bringing together 16 scholars working on linguistic anthropology, interspecies ethnography, semiotics, STS, film&screen media, as well as video-makers, we opened up a methodological conversation not only about the possibility of using an interdisciplinary approach to discuss the role of senses in interactions with humans, deities, spirits, wolves, artefacts, etc. but also about how to use different multimedia approaches to convey the sensory experience of sociality.