September 12, 2023
Sharpening Your Senses
What do doctors, biologists, business experts, museum and art specialists have in common? They are expert observers. Their work involves attuning and developing their skills of observation, sharpening their senses. This interdisciplinary elective attends to training this core skill, a skill that is central to these fields and yet which often gets taken for granted and not given specific attention. Training the senses means understanding sensory knowledge and its historical and cultural context more broadly. How have the senses been perceived historically in society? How do they impact on current socio-cultural codes and professional practices? What does it do to bring domains such as medicine, art, museum studies, globalization studies, marketing and law together, and examine the intersections and cross-overs at the borders? How can students improve their sensory abilities of noticing and apply it in their future practice? This cross-Faculty elective, a collaboration with Marres House for Contemporary Culture, is designed to precisely address these questions, by bringing medical students and arts students together. In this course students will be trained to become more aware of embodied knowledge’ and practice and train their sensory skills. They will also be introduced to the theories behind ‘senses-based learning’, the socio-historical context that drives our current use of the senses in various professional fields. For that, students are encouraged to step out into conscious observation and use different kinds of senses from different perspectives. Students will learn from each other, as well as the tutors and invited experts they listen to and observe. This elective aims to help students engage critically with how to train their senses to experience/ perceive more fully and collect information relevant to their fields, with how to describe and communicate this information clearly and precisely, and understand how to analyse it using various disciplinary protocols.