Senses Matter: The Value of Sensory Approaches to the Domestic Sphere

Senses Matter examines the domestic sphere through sensory-led approaches in art, architectural, and design history. Addressing the senses, the conference seeks to explore methods for accessing domestic experiences, interpreting diverse sources, and challenging visually dominant narratives through interdisciplinary perspectives.

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The history of the senses remains a rapidly expanding area of research with new approaches continuing to emerge across a variety of disciplines. Recently edited volumes: Routledge History of the Senses (2025) and New sensory approaches to the past (2025) demonstrate the richness in this field. Yet, as Sue Hamilton has observed, the domestic sphere remains comparatively underexplored in sensory-led studies. This is striking, since the home is a central site in which sensory experience shapes everyday life; from the textures of household routines to the sounds and smells of domestic interiors. While vision has often dominated historical enquiry, other sensory dimensions, particularly sound, touch, and smell, frequently escape analysis, leaving key aspects of domestic experience only partially understood.

Senses Matter is conceived as a scoping conference that aims to create a space for exploratory, provisional and work-in-progress research. By shifting the focus to the often overlooked domestic sphere this conference seeks to ask pressing methodological questions, including:

• How can we access and interpret experiences that leave little material trace?
• How might visual sources be used to infer experiences of sound, touch, or smell?
• How do we avoid projecting present day assumptions onto past sensory worlds?

Rather than seeking definitive answers, the conference foregrounds uncertainty, experimentation, and methodological reflection. It aims to advance sensory-led research by encouraging dialogue across disciplines and by cutting through, rather than reproducing, established theoretical frameworks. In doing so, it also seeks to contribute to the recovery and foregrounding of absent or marginalised voices embedded within domestic histories.

The conference’s objectives are twofold: First, to outline current scholarship that addresses the senses within historical contexts with particular attention to work situated at disciplinary intersections and to studies of domestic environments broadly conceived. Second, it will ask what kinds of sensory domesticities we can meaningfully engage with and how these might be interpreted through a broad range of sources. While visual and material culture will remain central, we are equally interested in mediated forms such as magazines, catalogues, specifications, and any other ephemeral sources that capture sensory aspects of domestic life. This broader approach not only enriches our understanding of past domesticities but also encourages conversations beyond disciplinary boundaries of art, architectural and design history.

The event will culminate in a collective reflection on Mark Smith’s Sensory History Manifesto (2021). Shared beforehand, participants will be invited to assess its implications for their discipline and to consider whether its proposals adequately capture the complexities of domestic sensory experience.

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Programme

Panel 1: Designing Comfort? – 10.15– 11.30
Chair: Vanessa Vanden Berghe
Malyssa Tomkinson - From Sensory Mediation to Sensory Labour: How the Open Plan Became Neuro Exclusive
Daniel Stilwell – COMFORT-MAXXING: Frictions of Domestic Life
Charlotte Rottiers – Mobile Domesticities: Sensory Engineering and the CIWL Rolling Stock, 1880s-1940s

Panel 2: Sensing the Everyday – 11.45 - 13.00
Chair: Rosamund Lily West
Jakob d’Herde - Sound familiar? Questioning sensory research on home.
Liana Psarologaki - The Affective Space of Domestic Cleaning
Robert Hewis - If Walls Could Talk: The Spoken and Painted Word at David Parr House

Panel 3: Domestic Fragments and Traces – 14.00 – 15.15
Chair: Zoë Hendon
Rob Vinall – Fluid Protocols
Owain Caruana-Davies - Sensing Domestic Interiority Through Demolition: The Former HMP Holloway
Sarah Cremin - Making Sense of Air through Hand Drawing

Panel 4: Domestic practices approached through sound and smell - 15.30 – 16.45
Chair: TBC
David Isern - Olfactory Commons: Insurgent Collective Cooking and Domestic Space in Lima’s Ollas Comune
Jackie Leaver – Sensing a Place: How can Creative Sensory Methods be Used to Evoke a Past Domestic Milieu and Inform Discussion Around the Future Home?
Alice Naylor – The Kenwood Chef as Pluri-Sensory Object: Sound, Memory and Domestic Technologies

Download the Programme & Abstracts