Migrant Sensoria (special issue, Senses and Society)
Migrant Sensoria–special issue of The Senses and Society
What are the sensory experiences of migration? How do migrants negotiate their movement not only between spaces and cultures, but between different configurations of sensory environments, habits, and values? How do traumatic contexts of migration register—or fail to register—in sensory experience, and in sensorially entangled memories? How do different sensory arrangements and pedagogies contribute to the erosion, maintenance, or resurgence of collective memories across individual and trans-generational time? How might sensory experiences and interventions contribute to migrant performance, stories, and media—and to articulating “migrant futures” (Bahng)?
Migrant Sensoria aims to make space for research that explores the generative and underexamined intersections between sensory studies and critical migration studies. Sensory studies has often focused on the sensoria of relatively stable communities, national cultures, and geographies, but recent work by scholars like Elena Vacchelli, Nicholas Bascunan-Wiley, Amandine Desille, Karolina Nikielska-Sekula, and Kelvin E.Y. Low has sought to understand migrants’ experiences and worldmaking through the embodied senses. How might we put such approaches to the sensory into conversation with the generative research about migration in fields like American studies, critical ethnic studies, queer-of-color theory, and postcolonial studies?
We seek scholarship that thinks about migration beyond regimes of visibility and is attuned to sensory modes of perception and meaning making. By this, we mean works that conjure touch, smell, sound, proprioception, thermoception, and other forms of embodied knowledge to interpret transnational migration flows and subjectivities. This special issue brings together humanities and social science approaches to Migrant Sensoria as an interdisciplinary disruption of how migrants and migration are conventionally imagined.
Abstracts of 150-250 words and brief bios should be sent to Ruben Zecena (rzecena@ucdavis.edu) and Hsuan L. Hsu (hsuanLhsu@gmail.com) by March 1, 2025. If the issue proposal is accepted, complete drafts (5-6,000 words) of invited essays would be due by Sep 2025, and would then go through the journal’s peer review process.