Sensing Changes

Historian and geographer Joy Parr has written an extraordinary book…Sensing Changes will make important contributions to the field of sensory studies and that other readers, approaching their own topics in diverse locations and from various disciplinary backgrounds, will, like this reviewer, find edification and inspiration in the pages of this remarkable book.

Lisa Rumiel, McMaster University:

The New Media component of Sensing Changes is a wonderful illustration of how we can and should engage our students in multi-sensory ways and how we, as historians, must move beyond privileging the written word.

Conevery Bolton Valencius, author of The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land:
In this stunningly creative book, Joy Parr asks how twentieth-century “mega-projects” – dams, power plants, canals, military bases – have transformed local people’s most intimate experience of themselves and their environments. The examples are Canadian but the insights are global. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how our modern technology builds our very bodies.

David Howes, Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University and author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory:
Joy Parr is a wonderful storyteller, and the tales in this book are as harrowing – dealing, as they do, with displacement, danger and death – as they are engaging and edifying. I was riveted by her descriptions of the disruption visited on the social and sensory lives of the people affected by these mega-projects, and by the resiliency they manifested in the face of radical environmental changes.

Graeme Wynn:

Sensing Changes stands as a pioneering contribution to Canadian historical writing. Through half-a-dozen carefully chosen, closely textured case studies, Parr reveals the “gritty specificity” of history as she unfolds an argument for the importance of understanding how bodies adapt(ed) to changing times, places, and practices.