Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 (Nature | History | Society) - Hardcover

Parr, Joy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0774817232 ISBN 13: 9780774817233

Publisher: UBC Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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 Back Cover:

“Sensing Changes stands as a pioneering contribution to Canadian historical writing. Through half-a-dozen carefully chosen, closely textured case studies, Parr reveals the ‘gritty specificity’ of history as she unfolds an argument for the importance of understanding how bodies adapt(ed) to changing times, places, and practices.”
– from the Foreword by Graeme Wynn

“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.”
– David Howes, Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University

“In this stunningly creative book, Joy Parr asks how twentieth-century ‘megaprojects’ – dams, power plants, canals, military bases – have transformed local people’s most intimate experience of themselves and their environments. The examples are Canadian but the insights are global. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how our modern technology builds our very bodies.”
– Conevery Bolton Valencius, author of the prize-winning book, The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land

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 http://megaprojects.uwo.ca, this timely study offers a prescient perspective on how humans make sense of a rapidly changing world.

Joy Parr is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Risk in the Geography Department at the University of Western Ontario, London.

About this edition

• Publisher: UBC Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0774817232
• ISBN 13: 9780774817233
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304