Sensing the NordForsk Network Meeting in Stockholm

Lunch-to-lunch

Sticky fingers from eating a tangerine

Cold feet

Excitement turns into sensory overload

Breathe in, breath out.

Community

Day one. It is time for dinner. I am talking to my table neighbour whom I just met this afternoon. She tells me about her former interest in Alfred Hitchcock and Merleau Ponty. About the concept and technique of the “suspense”, which, as I understand it, Hitchcock used to create interest, anticipation, and alertness. I am excited and think about our project on sensing energy infrastructures while my table neighbour talks about how the concept of suspense is based on the understanding that the body senses things before the mind can make sense of the body’s sensory input. Without the cognitive sense-making following a sensory input or a feeling, a moment of tension is created.

As I am writing this, I am thinking about the process of “sense-making”. Is sense-making the cognitive process that creates meaning from the bodily senses? Could one say then that sensing is a dual process, first a bodily perception, and a possible second step of sensemaking that takes place in the mind?

While much can be gleaned from looking at the schedule of the meeting – like the different names and project titles – much of the meeting was sensed. Automatically, without focusing on it. The first day I could sense the coldness of the room in my freezing feet. I could see other people feeling the same, moving their bodies in their chairs to create energy and warmth. A feeling of tension in the body when the room temperature is too cold. On day two, a tiny heater was brought into the room, and one of us from the EL! project noticed how the feeling of “warming up” to each other was reflected in the additional heat brought into the room. A tiny little black object that probably did not make a difference to the room temperature but nonetheless served as a nice gesture – our eyes could see that warmth was brought in. This makes me think back to a conversation I had with a colleague at the office on how energy studies got interested in sensing cold and heat - “sensing coldness” as an empirical piece of information for the lack of energy or energy poverty. In our case there was surely no energy poverty, as we were convening in a vast conference centre in the heart of Stockholm. But the temperature nonetheless made a difference for our bodies. While I was moving my body and feet sitting in the conference venue to warm it up, the warm café area during the break upstairs in the atrium made me feel relaxed and open during the longer coffee break.

After the first afternoon of intense listening and processing, some of us found ourselves talking about strategies for sensory overload: disassociation from the body. Someone said that it is a good skill to be able to disassociate. I was wondering if it is? Is it needed to survive sometimes? Taking into consideration what one EL! member said, namely that “the amount of sensing was insane today”, I guess disassociation from the body and therefore from sensing and taking in is a viable strategy to avoid “sensory overload”. Someone else said that the first day focused a lot on one sense. As in, a focus on the mind - as opposed to on the body. I guess a focus on cognitive processes is common in academia, and a symptom of modernity with its aim for “mind over matter”. But the matter - the body - is still always present.

At the second and also last day, I asked the group about their experiences of the meeting. We experienced different but also similar feelings. Someone shared that there were both, feelings of hesitation, a feeling of “tentativeness” (Swedish: trevande), and anticipation – a trying in the dark as someone said. A feeling of participants not yet knowing what they were going to do. “We haven’t really started the project yet” and “we don’t really know what to do yet” was something I heard several times. In the early career scholar group discussion on day two, scholars left with excitement and a feeling of “it’s going to be fun, but we all don’t know what is going to happen”. A shared feeling that created community, a togetherness in the not-knowing-yet. Someone shared that there was a feeling of coherence in the sense of people working on different topics but all having the same worries and experiences. A common experience of trial and error. And that it is good to never be afraid to be bold (Norwegian: frimodig) and courageous. 

Someone pointed out that one word to summarise the meeting would be “conversations”. We had a lot of room for dialogue indeed, even though the first day was primarily focused on presenting the different Green Transition projects that NordForsk had funded (including ours) to each other. Three meals shared, that is, two lunches and one dinner, gave plenty of opportunity to talk to other people and get to know each other. It was said that conversations are more important than the structure of the meeting.

In the end, and while the meeting was very well organised and structured, I left the meeting with a feeling of chaos – too much uncategorised and unprocessed information in my mind. Maybe I was stuck in the sensing with my mind not having caught up. It made me think about whether the modernist claim of mind over matter really holds, taking into account what also others shared: someone mentioned the word “headache” when asking for a sensory statement. Caused by a lack of sleep in the hotel room that was too warm at night, an experience several chimed in on, a common experience of fatigue from traveling (some of us already during very early hours), or having to get work done despite the meeting. Another participant said on the second day, “I feel much better now after this coffee, I felt terrible this morning”; a sentiment that I heard from others in our project group too, the relief from the kick of coffee in order to overcome the feeling of a bodily rut.

In the face of this sensory account, is the notion of modernity of “mind over matter” at all sensible? Meaning, can we really go beyond the body and think reality through the mind only? Or does it make sense to include and integrate sensory input to create a more comprehensive description of reality? I want to think that the latter is what the affective turn in the social sciences aims to do. To extend the description of reality beyond the mind, linguistics, and meaning-making by integrating bodily felt sensory input, emotions, embodied, and place-based information. I am excited to see what our project will contribute to this field of studies.

This text is based on shared experiences from participating members of the project group that were collected during the network meeting connected to NordForsk’s projects funded through the Green Transitions scheme held in Stockholm, 4-5 March 2025. Nathalie Bergame