The nostalgia for lost touch, like the utopian hopes for assistive touch, responds to haptic scenarios of comfort and consolation. What happens, however, when touch does not just alleviate but generate trouble? Can we complicate these curative narratives of touch by engaging with the frictions, failures and disputes of tactile experience? Drawing on the polysemy of trouble in critical theory, this conference proposes to interrogate haptic trouble as a site of sensory and social subversion, urging us to acknowledge the unresolved discontents of the haptic, to embrace its critical disturbances, and to test its emancipatory potentialities.

Presentation

Drawing on the polysemy of trouble in critical theory, this conference proposes to interrogate haptic trouble as a site of sensory and social subversion, urging us to acknowledge the unresolved discontents of the haptic, to embrace its critical disturbances, and to test its emancipatory potentialities.  

The nostalgia for lost touch, like the utopian hopes for assistive touch, responds to haptic scenarios of comfort and consolation. What happens, however, when touch does not just alleviate but generate trouble? Can we complicate these curative narratives of touch by engaging with the frictions, failures and disputes of tactile experience? For Hortense Spillers, touch entangles the promises of healing with the violence of coercion. As such, it constitutes a “formidable paradox, which unfolds a troubled intersubjective legacy–and, perhaps, troubled to the extent that one of these valences of touch is not walled off from the other, but haunts it, shadows it, as its own twin possibility” (2018, quoted in Rizvana Bradley 2020). Taking its cue from Spillers’s insight into the affective contradictions of touch, this conference proposes to interrogate haptic trouble as a site of sensory and social subversion, urging us to acknowledge the unresolved discontents of the haptic, to embrace its critical disturbances, and to test its emancipatory potentialities.  

Program

Friday, 10 October 2025

9 am: Registration

9.30 am: Introduction Rae Aumiller (Radboud) and Caroline Pollentier (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Haptic Trouble”

10 am-11.30 am: Out of Touch

Chair: Rae Aumiller (Radboud) and Caroline Pollentier (Sorbonne Nouvelle)

• Stephen Hughes (UCL): “The Lonely Dreams of Touch Without a Body”
• Anna Ciaunica (UCL): “Losing Touch with Oneself: Depersonalisation Experiences Modulate Vicarious Affective Touch and Self Touch”
• Vivienne Matthies-Boone (Radboud): “Out of Touch? A Critical Disability Perspective on Long Covid”

11.30 am-12 pm: Coffee Break

12pm-1pm: Technological Troubles

Chair: Carole Maigné (Lausanne)

• Neda Zanetti (Lausanne): “Viscous and Vibrant World – Tactile and Metastable Knowledge with Gilbert Simondon”
• Julien Dehut (University of Rouen Normandie): “Some Haptic Rhetorical Aspects with Touchscreen: Touch and Technological Trouble”

1 pm-2.30 pm: Lunch buffet

2 pm-3pm: Black Affects

Chair: Thomas Constantinesco (Sorbonne)

• Erica Fretwell (Albany): “Black/out Power”
• Omari Weekes (CUNY Queens College): “Touch My Body: The Haptics of Bodily Attunement in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters”

3pm-3.30pm: Coffee Break

3.30 pm-5 pm: Vulnerability/Resistance

Chair: Alexandra Poulain (Sorbonne Nouvelle)

• Sam Dolbear (London): “Distant Gestures, Moving Lives: On Healing and Proximity”
• James Garrison (UMass Lowell): “Reconsidering the Life of Power: Touch and the Aesthetics of Vulnerability”
• Alan Palacios (Leiden University) : “Carnal Disruptions in the Aesthesis of Abya Yala (Latin America): Tactical Strategies of ‘Tantear’”

5pm-5.30pm: Coffee Break

5:30 pm-6.30 pm: Keynote Amber Musser (CUNY): “Hapticality and the Sphinx: Simone Leigh’s Fugitive Sphinxes”

Chair: Rae Aumiller (Radboud)

7pm: Conference dinner at Bouillon Racine, 3 rue Racine, Paris 6th, for speakers and chairs.

Saturday, 11 October 2025

10 am-11 am: Skin Ethics

Chair: Rae Aumiller (Radboud) and Caroline Pollentier (Sorbonne Nouvelle)

• Rebekka Klein (Goethe University Frankfurt): “‘From Skin to Skin’ – Jean-Luc Nancy’s Post-deconstructive Materialist Understanding of Touch”
• Gwendolyn Bolderink (Leiden): “‘I Want Your Hands On Me’: How to Be a Sex Object”

11am-11.30am: Coffee Break

11.30am-12.30pm: Haptic Fictions

Chair: Yasna Bozhkova (Paris Nanterre) and Jaine Chemmachery (Sorbonne)

• Katja Haustein (Kent): “Alone with Others: Tact & Contact in Henry James”
• Sreedevi D (Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur): “Memories of Untouchability: A Study of Senses, Memory and Writing”

12:30-2pm: Lunch buffet

2.30 pm-3.30 pm: Haptic Materials

Chair: Marie Laniel (Amiens)

• Marit Grøtta (Oslo): “Light as a Haptic Medium: On the Atmospheric Turn in Art and Aesthetic Theory”
• María José Vizcaino (Montclair State): “Raising Tactile Awareness in Henry Moore’s Sculptures”

3.30 pm-4 pm: Coffee Break

4pm-5pm: Sensing Disability

Chair: Àger Pérez Casanovas (Barcelona)

• Sarah Neelsen (Sorbonne Nouvelle): “Touching Disability? From Pity to Sensorial Diversity in Early German Disability Studies”
• Kathleen Sitter (Calgary): “Crip Haptics and the Politics of Touch: Tactile Resistance in Disability Arts Installation”

Coffee Break: 5pm-5.30pm

5.30 pm-6.30 pm: Keynote Georgina Kleege (Berkeley): “Dancing with Sculptures: A Touch Docent Makes Haptic Trouble”

Chair: Caroline Pollentier (Sorbonne Nouvelle)

6.30 pm: Closing Words

Organisers

• Caroline Pollentier (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
• Rachel Aumiller (Radboud)

Contact: caroline.pollentier@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr