Sensing the pandemic: revealing and re-ordering the senses

(Ab)scent aromas: Mapping the smell texture of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Will the current transformations to our sensory environment be long-lasting and ‘promote a concomitant shift in our perceptual habits and sensory attention’? (Tullett and McCann, 2022: 9). In response to these questions Smith (2020) proposes the pandemic has produced a ‘sensory revolution’.…”

“…Missing from these depictions is a sense of what it actually feels like at an embodied and daily level, to live through this period in history. This paper forms part of a wider project undertaken by a myriad of scholars from diverse disciplines, to capture the sensory texture of the pandemic (Elswit, 2021; Fowkes, 2022; Green and Moran, 2021; Liebelt, 2020a; Lupton and Willis, 2021; Smith, 2020; Tullett and McCann, 2022; Vannini, 2020; Young, 2021). The sense focused on here is smell.…”

“…Amongst sensory researchers currently documenting the pandemic, there is ongoing conjecture about its enduring effects on our sensory perception (Smith, 2020; Tullett and McCann, 2022). Sensory issues such as loss of touch in isolation (Green and Moran, 2021) and predications about the ‘death-of-the-handshake’ (Cerf, 2021) have caught media and researcher attention.…”

“…For example, the relegation of ‘smell’ in the sensory hierarchy occurred ‘very slowly’ and was ‘…measured in decades and centuries, not in mere weeks or months’ (Smith, 2020, n.p.). Characterising these changes, Tullett and McCann (2022) observe that while there have been many shifts in our sensory environment, these have varied geographically and have often been subtle and potentially-short lived (p. 9). This paper joins this conversation with a specific focus on smell and asks, ‘Has the pandemic produced a smell revolution’?…”

On losing the “dispensable” sense: TikTok imitation publics and COVID-19 smell loss challenges

“… 1. There has been some recent scholarship on COVID-19 and smell. For one, Tullett and McCann (2022) survey the multi-sensory implications of COVID-19 and acknowledge smell-loss as a part of the pandemic smell-scape. Their research in part brings attention to the unequal treatment of environmentally induced smell-loss but focuses more on the social and cultural axes of perceivable smells not those that are altered or altogether missing. …”