This paper is the first overview of the treatment of haptic knowledges in geography, responding to bodily sensations and responses that arise through the embodied researcher. After Crang’s (2003) article on ‘touchy-feely’ methods identifies the dearth of actual touching and embodied feeling in research methods, this article does three things. First, it clarifies the terminology, which is derived from a number of disciplines. Second, it summarizes developments in sensuous ethnographies within cultural geography and anthropology. Third, it suggests pathways to new research on ‘sensuous dispositions’ and non-representational theory. We thereby see just how ‘touchy-feely’ qualitative methods have, or might, become.

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Haptic devices for computers and video-game consoles aim to reproduce touch and to engage the user with ‘force feedback’. Although physical touch is often associated with proximity and intimacy, technologies of touch can reproduce such sensations over a distance, allowing intricate and detailed operations to be conducted through a network such as the Internet. The ‘virtual handshake’ between Boston and London in 2002 is given as an example. This paper is therefore a critical investigation into some technologies of touch, leading to observations about the sociospatial framework in which this technological touching takes place. Haptic devices have now become routinely included with video-game consoles, and have started to be used in computer-aided design and manufacture, medical simulation, and even the cybersex industry. The implications of these new technologies are enormous, as they remould the human–computer interface from being primarily audiovisual to being more truly multisensory, and thereby enhance the sense of ‘presence’ or immersion. But the main thrust of this paper is the development of ideas of presence over a large distance, and how this is enhanced by the sense of touch. By using the results of empirical research, including interviews with key figures in haptics research and engineering and personal experience of some of the haptic technologies available, I build up a picture of how ‘presence’, ‘copresence’, and ‘immersion’, themselves paradoxically intangible properties, are guiding the design, marketing, and application of haptic devices, and the engendering and engineering of a set of feelings of interacting with virtual objects, across a range of distances.

Editors' introduction: haptic media studies We are grateful for the opportunity to share with you eight exceptional pieces that, we hope, help lay the groundwork for Haptic Media Studies (HMS). As co-editors, each of us has made touch the centerpiece of our research programs, exploring its manifestation in media, technology, philosophy, culture, and history. Paterson's The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects, and Technologies (Berg, 2007) remains an influential work that serves as a cornerstone for touch-related studies across a wide range of fields, and other publications explore haptics in terms of technology, media, and methodologies (e.g. Paterson 2006, 2009). His more recent Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision, and Touch after Descartes (Edinburgh University Press, 2016), by exploring the conceptual and technological histories of sensory substitution, traces the complex entanglement of vision and touch in communicative practice. Parisi's publications on tactility, including his forthcoming Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and his work on the tactile aspects of videogame interfaces (e.g. Parisi, 2008, 2014), situate contemporary haptic human-computer interfaces in a macrohistorical framework, linking them back to prior technological constructions of touch in medical electricity, psychophysics, and cybernetics. Archer's work investigates cultural processes of tactile education around digital media, where users are asked to acclimate themselves to new habits of touching and navigating digital interfaces.

The first engagement with blindness in modern philosophy, Descartes’ famous work ‘On Optics’ (1637)is introduced here. In his observation of a hypothetical blind man walking with a stick, Descartes makes the analogy between hands and eyes such that the blind are conceived as “seeing with their hands”. Descartes’ initial analogy therefore neatly solidifies an influential conceptualization of blindness for several centuries, initiating a philosophical relation between blindness, vision and touch.