January 2026 ongoing at Online
Sensory experience is often regarded as anti-anthropocentric, insofar as it attributes agency to (natural) things and challenges the hegemony of modernist rationalism. However, historians of emotions and the senses have highlighted the interrelationship between the Enlightenment, emotions and the senses, thereby questioning the identification of modernity with mere rationalism. Additionally, scholars have begun to interrogate the notion of the ‘sensory Anthropocene’, suggesting that the current environmental crisis has its origins, at least in part, in a transformed Western sensorium. The reading group brings these two contrasting perspectives into dialogue to reconsider concepts such as architectural experience, atmosphere and embodiment afresh. We also hope to explore how the history of emotions and the senses might inform the study of the Anthropocene more broadly and to develop the reading group into a working group.
* The reading group draws on our respective research concerning architecture, experience and dis-ease of Anthropocene. Sara’s research is supported by the British Academy’s International Fellowships Programme.
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October 1, 2025 at Street Gallery, IAIS, University of Exeter
The Virtual Shepherd: Love and Screen Addiction at the End of the World is a photographic and video exploration of Ali, a young shepherd in Iran’s remote 70 Peaks Valley. In the 2010s, he managed a Telegram chat with over 5,000 members, sustaining a vibrant online life he called majazi — “the virtual.” The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the surreal intersection of rural life and digital connectivity, where the smartphone becomes a site of desire, longing, and endless scrolling. Even as platforms change, the experience of being online remains strikingly familiar
12th June 2024 at Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter
The Middle East is a laboratory to unthink the disruptive order of the world. With indiscriminate wars, depopulation, famine, erasure of the living environment, environmental catastrophe, and the pursuit of techno-populist solutions led by local hydrocarbon capitalists and global financiers, the region is today condensing world crises on a local level. Nowhere more than in the Middle East, the contradictions of global modernity and capitalism manifest themselves more brutally and synergistically.
16-17 November 2023 at Ibrahim Ahmed Room, Reed Hall, the University of Exeter
What happens to the notion of internationalism when we rethink it through the prism of architecture and experience? The workshop brings together a group of outstanding researchers and intellectuals at the cross-disciplinary encounter of environmental and architectural humanities and social sciences, to extend the existing boundaries in debates and thinking about the multi-faceted history of internationalism and architecture.
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26 - 27 July 2023 at Ibrahim Ahmed Room, Reed Hall, University of Exeter
On 26-27 July 2023, the Healthscapes Lab launched with an international workshop, which took place in the Ibrahim Ahmed room at Reed Hall, University of Exeter.
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26-27 July 2023 Workshop Schedule