Sensing Changes
Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003
A social and sensory history of life with megaprojects that reveals how humans make sense of their world when they no longer recognize the environment around them.
Description
Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge that shape how we understand the world. If our environment changes at an unsettling pace, how will we make sense of a world that is no longer familiar? One of Canada's premier historians tackles this question by exploring situations in the recent past where state-driven megaprojects and regulatory and technological changes forced ordinary people to cope with transformations that were so radical that they no longer recognized their home and workplaces or, by implication, who they were. In concert with a ground-breaking, creative, and analytical website, megaprojects.uwo.ca, this timely study offers a prescient perspective on how humans make sense of a rapidly changing world.
Awards
- Short-listed, The François-Xavier Garneau Medal, Canadian Historical Association 2015
- Winner, Canada Prize in the Social Sciences, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences 2011
- Short-listed, Sir John A. Macdonald Book Prize, Canadian Historical Association 2011
- Winner, Sidney Edelstein Prize, Society for the History of Technology 2011
Reviews
The New Media component of Sensing Changes is a wonderful illustration of how we can and should engage our students in multi-sensory ways and how we, as historians, must move beyond privileging the written word.
- Lisa Rumiel, McMaster University
Historian and geographer Joy Parr has written an extraordinary book…Sensing Changes will make important contributions to the field of sensory studies and that other readers, approaching their own topics in diverse locations and from various disciplinary backgrounds, will, like this reviewer, find edification and inspiration in the pages of this remarkable book.
- Deborah Davis Jackson, Earlham College