Our bodies are archives of sensory knowledge that shape how we understand the world. But if global environmental changes continue at their present unsettling pace, how will we make sense of time and place when the air, land, and water around us are no longer familiar?
Joy Parr, one of Canada's premier historians, tackles this question by exploring situations in the recent past when state-driven megaprojects such as chemical plants, dams, nuclear reactors, transportation corridors, and new regulatory regimes forced people to cope with radical transformations in their work and home environments. In each case, the familiar was transformed so thoroughly that residents no longer recognized where they lived or, by implication, who they were.
Sensing Changes and its associated website, http://megaprojects.uwo.ca, make a key contribution to environmental history and the emerging field of sensory history. This study offers a timely, prescient perspective on how humans make sense of the world in the face of rapid environmental change.
Table of Contents:
Foreword: "Now I am Ready to Tell How Bodies are Changed Into Different Bodies" / Graeme Wynn
The Megaprojects New Media Series / Jon van der Veen
1 Introduction – Embodied Histories
2 Place and Citizenship – Woodlands, Meadows, and a Military Training Ground: The NATO Base at Gagetown
3 Safety and Sight – Working Knowledge of the Insensible: Radiation Protection in Nuclear Power Plants, 1962-92
4 Movement and Sound – A Walking Village Remade: Iroquois and the St. Lawrence Seaway
5 Time and Scale – A River Becomes a Reservoir: The Arrow Lakes and the Damming of the Columbia
6 Smell and Risk – Uncertainty along a Great Lakes Shoreline: Hydrogen Sulphide and the Production of Heavy Water
7 Taste and Expertise – Local Water Diversely Known: The E. coli Contamination in Walkerton 2000 and After
8 Conclusion: Historically Specific Bodies
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
