University of British Columbia Press Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 (Nature | History | Society)

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. Review 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. Author: Deborah Davis Jackson, Earlham College Source: Senses and Society, Vol 6, Issue 2 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. Author: Lisa Rumiel, McMaster University Source: Left History, 15.1 Review Joy Parr is a wonderful storyteller, and the tales in this book are as harrowing – dealing, as they do, with displacement, danger and death – as they are engaging and edifying. I was riveted by her descriptions of the disruption visited on the social and sensory lives of the people affected by these mega-projects, and by the resiliency they manifested in the face of radical environmental changes. Author: David Howes, Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University and author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory Book Description 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. From the Author Joy Parr is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Risk in the Geography Department at the University of Western Ontario. From the Inside Flap Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge that shape how we understand the world. This book considers how government mega-projects -- dams, power plants, canals, military bases have forced such radical changes that local people no longer recognize their home and workplace--or who they are. It offers a prescient perspective on how humans make sense of a rapidly changing world. From the Back Cover Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge that shape how we understand the world. This book considers how government mega-projects -- dams, power plants, canals, military bases have forced such radical changes that local people no longer recognize their home and workplace--or who they are. It offers a prescient perspective on how humans make sense of a rapidly changing world. About the Author Joy Parr is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Risk in the Geography Department at the University of Western Ontario.