What does the way you perceive the world say about yourself? While one might be tempted to treat perception as a passive reception of external stimuli, contemporary approaches conceive it as a form of activity. In other words, when we open our eyes, the way the world unfolds in front of us is not a mere matter of physiology or receptors. The activity of perception is an activity of interpretation that is soaked in our history, culture, and personal preferences. As such, perception is not anonymous: it displays a certain style.

This idea of the style of perception has been supported by phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Fanon, 1952), the social sciences (Bourdieu, 1979; Classen, 1993), and the history of art (Wollheim, 1987). In more recent years, the study of the style of perception has taken various directions. For instance, it has been translated into the question of whether we perceive the world in a biased fashion or whether past cultures perceptually engaged with the world in fundamentally different ways.

Today, the matter of the style of perception is even more pressing. We live in a social world where technology is deeply enmeshed in everyday activity. From a perceptual level, we are witnessing a radical change in the contents of our perception: while algorithms curate our visual fields, AI influences the production of images and sound. On a social level, instead, social groups reinforce their identities within digital echo-chambers. What are the consequences of such social and technological shifts for our style of perception? How do media impact our capacity to see? And how does the shift in perceptual activity impact our sense of being individuals with a certain identity?

The postgraduate conference Styles of Perception. From Historical Perspectives to the Digital Age aims to explore these latter interrogatives. The conference is divided into two parts. In the first part, we seek to investigate the concept of the style of perception more broadly. We will explore how perceptual experiences are never passive, but rather an ongoing activity of making sense that cannot be dissociated from the subject's identity, and how one’s culture and sense of belonging might influence such perceptual activity. In the second part, we will put an emphasis on how the contemporary material and technological landscapes influence the way we perceive the world and ourselves. 

As the goal of this project is to bring together scholars from various disciplines to dialogue on the bidirectional relationship between the sense of identity and the activity of perception, keynote speakers will have different backgrounds and methods.

Confirmed keynote speakers: 

• Dr Ludmila Lupinacci (University of Leeds)

• Prof Clare Mac Cumhaill (Durham University)

• Dr William Tullett (University of York)

• Dr Pablo Fernandez Velasco (University of Stirling)

For more information: stylesperception@outlook.com.