Touch is the first sense to develop in the womb, yet often it is overlooked. The Senses of Touch examines the role of touching and feeling as part of the fabric of everyday, embodied experience. -/- How can we think about touch? Problems of touch and tactility run as a continuous thread in philosophy, psychology, medical writing and representations in art, from Ancient Greece to the present day. Picking through some of these threads, the book ‘feels’ its way towards writing (...) and thinking about touch as both sensory and affective experience. -/- Taking a broadly phenomenological framework that traces the tactility from Aristotle through the Enlightenment to the present day, it examines the role of touch across a range of experiences including aesthetics, digital design, visual impairment and touch therapies. The Senses of Touch thereby demonstrates the varieties of sensory experience, and explores the diverse range of our ‘senses’ of touch. (shrink)

Using C. Wright Mills' book The Sociological Imagination as a touchstone for its discussion, this article addresses the relations between the sociological problem, relevance and experience as they are and could potentially be understood within sociology. Beginning with the historical relation between sociology, science and literature — a relation which has been productively but differently complicated by poststructuralist and postconstructivist theories — this article asks: to what extent does the empirical offer a referent for the sociological problem? To what is (...) sociology obliged to be relevant? Arguing for the continued relevance of relevance, particularly in the light of recent reforms in higher education in the UK and the USA, the article explores how the sociological problem might be transformed — and perhaps, more importantly, might be transformative — if the basic commitments of a research project were not to historical social structures but to virtual structures. (shrink)

Norman K Denzin ponders the prospects, problems and forms of ethnographic interpretive writing in the twenty-first century. He argues that postmodern ethnography is the moral discourse of the contemporary world, and that ethnographers can and should explore new types of experimental texts to form a new ethics of inquiry.

Heinrich Schenker: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and theorist.