Books
For my other publications, including journal
articles, book chapters, and
book reviews, see my profiles: academia.edu | OrchidID | Google
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Affective Touching: Neurobiology
and Technological Applications. ‘Histories
of Emotions and the Senses’, Cambridge University Press
(2025). Buy Cambridge
UP, Amazon UK | US
A short book (‘Element’, 75pp) which involves some
archival research and a survey of some technologies and
serves as a taster for my next substantial book project.
At the end of the twentieth century the discovery of
‘slow’, affective touch nerves in humans known as C
Tactile (CT) afferents, which are entirely separate from
the faster pathways for touching objects, had huge social
implications. The Swedish neuroscientists responsible
formulated an “affective touch hypothesis” or “social
touch hypothesis” to consider their purpose. Part I offers
a history of the science of social touch, from related
discoveries in mammals by physiologists in the 1930s, to
the recent rediscoveries of the CT nerves in humans. Part
II considers how these findings are being intentionally
folded into technologies for interaction. First, as
mediated social touch, communicating at a distance through
haptics. Second, with the increasing number of social and
service robots in health care and domestic settings, the
role of affective touch within human-robot interaction
design.
Consumption and Everyday Life.
Third Edition. London & New
York: Routledge (2023). Buy Routledge,
Amazon UK | US
With an emphasis on everyday life, this respected text
offers a lively and perceptive account of the key theories
and ideas which dominate the field of consumption and
consumer culture. This third revised and expanded edition
is a major update of the text of the second edition,
adding new chapters on youth culture and consumption,
retail psychology, gender and consumption, the
globalization of food, and digital consumption and
platform capitalism.
Theoretical perspectives are
introduced such as theories of practice, critical theory,
semiotics, and psychoanalysis. Examples from film,
literature, and television are used to illustrate concepts
and trends in consumption, and a wide range of engaging
and up-to-date case studies of consumption are employed
throughout. Historical context is provided to help the
reader understand how we became consumers in the first
place. Written by an experienced teacher, the book offers
an accessible and thought-provoking introduction to the
concept of consumption for students in sociology, cultural
studies, human geography, history, anthropology, and
social psychology.
“The third edition of Mark Paterson’s Consumption and Everyday Life offers an excellent introduction to the sociology of consumption. It is readable, interesting and well-grounded in both the everyday life of, and the academic literature on, consumption. Most of the key ideas and orientations in the field are covered in a very lively and accessible manner.” – George Ritzer, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Maryland
What I like most is the way that concepts are introduced so that the reader can immediately recognize their relevance and application. Once introduced, those concepts are allowed space to breathe and develop so that by the end of each chapter the reader feels reassured in their application to a broader spectrum of issues related to everyday life. – Dale Southerton, review of first edition in The Journal of Consumer Culture 8(3):428
How We Became
Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press (2021). Buy: Publisher,
Amazon UK | US
The years between 1833 and 1945 fundamentally transformed
science’s understanding of the body’s inner senses,
revolutionizing fields like philosophy, the social
sciences, and cognitive science. In How We Became
Sensorimotor, Mark Paterson provides a systematic
account of this transformative period, while also
demonstrating its substantial implications for current
explorations into phenomenology, embodied consciousness,
the extended mind, and theories of the sensorimotor, the
body, and embodiment.
Each chapter of How We Became
Sensorimotor takes a particular sense and
historicizes its formation by means of recent scientific
studies, case studies, or coverage in the media. Ranging
among a diverse array of sensations, including balance,
fatigue, pain, the “muscle sense,” and what Maurice
Merleau-Ponty termed “motricity,” Paterson’s analysis
moves outward from the familiar confines of the laboratory
to those of the industrial world and even to wild animals
and their habitats. He uncovers important stories, such as
how forgotten pain-measurement schemes transformed
criminology, or how Penfield’s outmoded concepts of the
sensory and motor homunculi of the brain still mar
psychology textbooks.
Reviewed in: Science and Technology Studies, Journal
of the History of Behavioural Sciences, The
Senses and Society, Emotion,
Space and Society, and Technology
and Culture.
[Paterson] interweaves the development of instruments of measure with shifting conceptual frameworks and an increasingly nuanced terminology that sought to capture the nature of sensory experience. Readers looking for a history of the invention and manufacture of scientific instruments will find much to delight them here, from Angelo Mosso’s desktop “ergograph” (214) measuring muscular work and thence fatigue, to the latest developments in neuroprostheses (2–7). Yet Paterson is always alert to the shifting picture of the body that scientific invention permits, both in terms of visualization, such as the “lines and curves” of the tracing of fatigue on paper (204), and in the wider sense of human self-conceptualization of the body, which might be shifted and re-mapped by such “interior” sensing that registers pain, fatigue, proprioception (the body’s sense of its orientation in space), and balance. – Professor Abbie Garrington, review in The Senses & Society 2024 https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2024.2304368.
Seeing With the Hands: Blindness,
Vision & Touch After Descartes. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press (2016). Buy Edinburgh
UP, Amazon UK | US
A literary, historical and philosophical exploration of
blindness, the possibilities of sensory substitution, and
the perennial fascination with what the blind ‘see’.
The
“man born blind restored to light” was one of two
foundational myths of the Enlightenment, according to
Foucault. With ophthalmic surgery in its infancy, the
fascination with blindness and what the blind ‘see’ once
their vision is restored remained largely hypothetical.
Was being blind, as Descartes once remarked, like ‘seeing
with the hands’? Did evidence from early ophthalmic
surgery resolve debates about the relationship between
vision and touch in the newly sighted? Has the standard
representation of blind figures in literature been
modified by recent autobiographical accounts of blind and
vision impaired writers and poets?
As this book shows, much interest in the philosophy and
psychology of blindness was prompted by the so-called
‘Molyneux Question’ which Irish scientist Molyneux asked
of English philosopher Locke in 1688. The question
concerns ‘sensory substitution’, the translation between
vision and touch, which would effect practical outcomes
for the blind, including the development of Braille, the
first school for the blind in Paris, and even present day
Tactile-Visual Sensory Substitution (TVSS) technologies.
Through an unfolding historical, philosophical, and
literary narrative that encompasses Locke, Molyneux, and
Berkeley in Britain, and Diderot, Voltaire, and Buffon in
France, this book explores how the Molyneux Question and
its aftermath has influenced attitudes towards blindness
by the sighted, and technologies for the blind and vision
impaired, to this day.
Paterson surveys the long and checkered history of the Hypothetical Blind Man from Enlightenment philosophy to contemporary cognitive science. Both lucid and comprehensive, his account takes the fresh approach to set these traditional representations against the testimony of actual blind people, creating a more nuanced and complex understanding of blindness. – Georgina Kleege, University of California, Berkeley.
Touching Space, Placing Touch.
Co-edited with Martin Dodge. London & New York:
Routledge (2013). Buy Routledge,
Amazon UK | US
Encouragingly, the neglect of touch is beginning to change
as part of wider conceptual developments in the social
sciences. Firstly, this involves a “return to the senses”
(Howes 2003) social theory, a recent wave of ‘sensuous
scholarship’ that consolidates work by anthropologists
such as Classen, Howes, and Stoller in the early 1990s
(exemplified in books by Law 2001; Geurts 2002; Bull and
Back 2003; Drobnick 2006; Paterson 2007). Secondly, there
is the more recent interest within the social sciences
with the affective aspects of everyday spaces and
performance, focusing on the sensual, the affective, and
the non-representational (e.g. Bennett 2001; Thrift 2007).
Much of this work moves beyond representational (visual
and textual) readings of place and environment to an
interpretative emphasis on emotive states and embodied
practices. However, the so-called ‘affective turn’ has so
far underplayed the socio-cultural complexity that
regulates touch in different places – the conventions of
when, where and with whom one can touch. How are these
conventions policed? To what degree are places of touch
gendered, and how does age, culture or ability become
associated with touch?
Edited collections, as we know, vary in quality and usefulness. However, this book has a uniformly high standard of scholarly excellence; each of the essays is well supported by an intellectual rigor and provides a key resource in recording the most important sources, giving us an intellectual history of touch, if you like… What makes this collection such a success is its creativity. In providing us with a fizzling encyclopedia of touch it reinvigorated my perception of what it is to research. – Sally Munt, review in The Senses & Society 8(3): 655-6.
The Senses of Touch: Haptics,
Affects and Technologies. London & New York:
Routledge (2007). Buy Routledge,
Amazon UK | US
Touch is the first sense to develop in the womb, yet often
it is overlooked. The Senses of Touch examines
the role of touching and feeling as part of the fabric of
everyday, embodied experience. How can we think about
touch? Problems of touch and tactility run as a continuous
thread in philosophy, psychology, medical writing and
representations in art, from Ancient Greece to the present
day. Picking through some of these threads, the book
‘feels’ its way towards writing and thinking about touch
as both sensory and affective experience. Taking a
broadly phenomenological framework that traces the
tactility from Aristotle through the Enlightenment to the
present day, it examines the role of touch across a range
of experiences including aesthetics, digital design,
visual impairment and touch therapies. The Senses
of Touch thereby demonstrates the varieties of
sensory experience, and explores the diverse range of our
‘senses’ of touch. These debates are augmented by
original empirical work within the new, emerging
technologies of touch, such as the human-computer
interface (HCI), digital design, and even controllers for
computers and videogame consoles. Thus tactility is
increasingly ubiquitous, and haptics can be seen as the
engineering of feelings and sensations – for design,
entertainment or industry alike.
Paterson’s pluralizing of The Senses of Touch in the title of the book is significant in indicating the author’s approach to these senses as both multiple and varied, and the book excels in considering these different areas. – Carrie Purcell, review in The Senses & Society 4(3): 364.