Humanities Symposium: Thinking with our Senses

Thinking with our Senses

Program

We are embodied, sensorial beings. Our most basic experiences in life bring us into direct physical contact with each other and with the environment - be it natural or built. We interpret those encounters (often subconsciously) through sensory perception. The 2026 Humanities Symposium at Vanier College (2 – 6 Feb) will explore bodily experience as fundamental to knowledge making and to social connection, and it will tease out some of the contrasts with theoretical, disembodied aspects of our lives. In a variety of presentations and experiential sessions, we will think together about how we see, hear, taste, smell, touch, and move through the world and thereby construct our relationships.

All sessions are in the Auditorium unless otherwise indicated

Monday, February 2

10:00 – 11:30am: Sophie Donelson (former editor-in-chief of House Beautiful)
Designing the Feeling Home
When we aim to improve our living space, we tend to focus on delighting the eye — a fresh paint colour, a new decorative accessory. But our homes nourish us with how they feel, not just how they look. A living environment that's restful, rewarding, and memorable, relies on far more than visual beauty — it must engage the senses, offering pleasant things touch and pleasurable ways to move around.

12:00 – 2:00pm: Irene Feher (Music, Concordia) (Auditorium Stage)
What does it mean to “Live your Music”?
We are wired to make music, but we don’t always know where to start to express the sound world within us. Starting from the point of creative play, this will be a participatory workshop for 60-80 people that invites students to engage in a creative exploration of sound and movement. No music experience necessary.

2:30p – 4:00pm: Maxime Doyon (Philosophy, U. of Montreal)
Beyond the Five Senses: Rethinking the Map of Perception
We usually learn an Aristotelian picture of the “five senses,” but Prof. Doyon will argue that these neat divisions start to fall apart once we ask what a sense is. We end by asking whether there are more than five senses, and why this matters for how we understand mind and body.

Tuesday, February 3

10:00 – 11:30am: Dame Evelyn Glennie (via Zoom from the U.K.) KEYNOTE 1
The Importance of Listening
Hearing is the sense, listening is the action. Our sense of hearing is constantly stimulated by the world around us, but it is in giving our attention to the sounds around us, to the voicing of ideas, and to our own inner voice that helps us to evaluate and navigate our relationships and build communities. Dame Evelyn Glennie will address the role of listening in knowing what is important to ourselves, having the vision and perseverance to pursue our goals, and developing the skills and resilience to accomplish them.  

Dame Evelyn Glennie is the world’s premier solo percussionist. Her solo recordings exceed 40 CDs. A double GRAMMY award winner and BAFTA nominee, Evelyn composes for film, theatre and television. The Evelyn Glennie Podcast was launched in 2020. Evelyn was awarded an OBE in 1993 and has over 100 international awards to date, including the Polar Music Prize, the Léonie Sonning Music Prize and the Companion of Honour. Evelyn is Curator for The Evelyn Glennie Collection. Her iconic film Touch the Sound, TED Talk and charity The Evelyn Glennie Foundation embody her life-long mission to Teach the World to Listen.  

2:30 – 4:00pm: Prof. Erin Manning (Concordia U; 3Ecologies: Research chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art and Pedagogy) KEYNOTE 2
Thresholds of Experience
"A thousand other things sing to me," writes DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark. Qualities of experience overlap. There is no distance. Everything has an effect. Everything makes a difference. A body is this quality of multisense overlap in incipient contact with an infinity of sense potentials. These sense potentials are not located in a discrete sense, or in an object. They cannot be distilled to an ear or an eye, and cannot be located in a table or a marigold. They are always between, amodal, operating as thresholds of sensation that carry intensities themselves carried in the feeling. 

My focus will be on what sings on the thresholds of experience, against the assumptions that come with neurotypicality, steeped in what John Lee Clark calls distantism: that a body is an enclosure; that the world is at arm’s length from the body; that certain bodies have more value than others (white bodies, able bodies); that there is a baseline of sensation that is “normal”; that there are five senses that can be delineated from one another; that life without any of those senses is a truncated life. 

Erin Manning’s books include The Being of Relation (Intellect 2025), Unsettled (minor compositions 2025), Out of the Clear (minor compositions 2022), and For a Pragmatics of the Useless (2020). She works at the intersection of the three ecologies - the environmental, the conceptual and the social - with an emphasis on alter-economies, in the refusal of private property (3ecologies.org). Her artistic practice explores this transversality - a recent exhibition is entitled 100 Acres (Richard Saltoun Gallery, London, 2024. 

Wednesday, February 4

10:30 – Noon: Dr. Minna Re Shin (Music Dept, Vanier College)
Revisiting and Reimagining Classical Music Performance: Reflections on the Relationship among Composer, Performer, and Audience
Through the comparison of two classical music presentation scenarios, pianist Minna Re Shin will help us to explore how the dynamic interplay among the composer, performer, and audience--along with the significant impact of “extramusical” elements of the performance-- creates a collaborative sensory experience coloured by artistic and cultural context and shapes the overall musical experience and meaning.

1:30p - 3:30pm: Oana Suteu Khintirian, Filmmaker / PhD Candidate (Concordia U.)
Revisiting the idea of the library as a repository of Sense and Memory
Join Ms. Khintirian for a discussion of sense and memory, and how people have engaged in different ways to record our individual and societal memories over time through oral histories, pen, paper, and digital media. She will discuss the changing role of libraries as personal and public spaces of memory through excerpts from her 2022 film, and she will address the role of filmmaker as a recorder of memory.. This talk draws upon and extends her research for her NFB/ONF produced film, Beyond Paper / Au dela du paper (2022).

Friday, February 6

10:00am – 12:30pm: FILM SCREENING Au dela du paper / Beyond Paper (2022) -
Oana Suteu Khintirian (approx. 2h15m)
From the ONF / NFB site: “At a critical moment in the history of the written word, as humanity’s archives migrate to the cloud, one filmmaker goes on a journey around the globe to better understand how she can preserve her own Romanian and Armenian heritage, as well as our collective memory. Blending the intellectual with the poetic, she embarks on a personal quest with universal resonance, navigating the continuum between paper and digital—and reminding us that human knowledge is above all an affair of the soul and the spirit.” Khintirian’s subjects and locations include the efforts to preserve one of the oldest existing libraries in Mauritania, the Internet Archive, the library of Jorge Luis Borges, and the university library in Bucharest, Romania.

2:00 – 4:00pm: Mr. Louis “Tewenhni’tatshon’ Delisle, Kahnawake Survival School
Gyms A, B, and C
Lacrosse and community (an interactive workshop)
Mr. Delisle will share some of the history of Lacrosse in the Mohawk community and in Canada, and its importance for indigenous people. He will be joined by 4 KSS lacrosse players to demonstrate aspects of Lacrosse game and practice. This session will have an interactive aspect to it: Vanier students will be invited to learn the basics of Lacrosse and there is the possibility to play a mini game. Equipment and instruction will be provided by Mr. Delisle.