Books

For my other publications, including journal articles,  book chapters, and book reviews, see my profiles: academia.edu | OrchidID | Google Scholar | Mendeley

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