During the past two decades or so, the emergence and ever-accelerating development of digital media have sparked scholarly interest, debates, and complex challenges across many disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Within this diverse scholarship, the research on digitality, gender, sexuality, and embodiment has contributed substantially to many academic fields, such as media studies, sociology, religion, philosophy, and education studies. As a part of the special issue “Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Digital Spheres: Connecting Intersectionality and Digitality,” this (...) roundtable consists of a conversation between five researchers from different (inter)disciplinary locations, all addressing matters of methodology, intersectionality, positionality, and theory in relation to the topics of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres. Said roundtable begins with a critical self-positioning of the participants’ (inter)disciplinary and embodied locations using examples from their own research. The conversation then progresses to how these researchers have employed contemporary theories, conceptual vocabularies, methods, and analyses of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in digital spheres to then conclude with some ethico-political notes about collaborations between scholars and (digital) activists. (shrink)

In the early modern period costume books and albums participated in the shaping of a new visual culture that displayed the diversity of the people of the known world on a variety of media including maps, atlases, screens, and scrolls. At the crossroads of early anthropology, geography, and travel literature, this textual and visual production blurred the lines between art and science. Costume books and albums were not a unique European production: in the Ottoman Empire and the Far East artists (...) and geographers also pictured the dress of men and women of their own and faraway lands hybridizing the Renaissance western tradition. Acknowledging this circulation of knowledge and people through migration, travel, missionary and diplomatic encounters, this Element contributes to the expanding field of early modern cultural studies in a global perspective. (shrink)

In this paper, we outline and defend a view on which in olfactory experience we can, and often do, smell ordinary things of various kinds—for instance, cookies, coffee, and cake burnings—and the olfactory properties they have. A challenge to this view are cases of smelling in the absence of the source of a smell, such as when a fishy smell lingers after the fish is gone. Such cases, many philosophers argue, show that what we perceive in olfactory experience are odour (...) objects, and not ordinary things. On behalf of our opponent, we articulate a screening-off argument based on cases of lingering smells for the thesis that we do not smell ordinary things. We then develop an alternative account of these cases that is consistent with our view. In doing so, we call into question two claims that are typically built into the notion of an odour object. (shrink)