Mark Paterson, PhD
- Professor
- Affiliate Faculty in College of General Studies (CGS), Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies (GSWS), Urban Studies, and Center for Bioethics and Health Law
For over twenty years I've been conducting interdisciplinary research on the body, senses, affects, and sensory technologies. From my doctoral research I wrote one the most cited books on the subject of touch and technology, The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Routledge, 2007). My books have been endorsed by major figures in the social sciences, including George Ritzer and Roberta Sassetelli for the third edition of Consumption and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2023), David Howes and Erica Fretwell for How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), and the University of California, Berkeley disability scholar Georgina Kleege for my book Seeing With the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (Edinburgh UP, 2016). I am on the editorial boards of three journals: The Senses and Society (since 2008), Emotion Space and Society (since 2014), and Multimodality and Society (since 2020).
Since 2023 I've been President of the ISA (International Sociological Association) Thematic Group 07 Senses and Society, after being elected Vice-President and Newsletter Editor in 2018, and am a member of the ‘Science, Knowledge and Technology’ section of the American Sociological Association. My research website is sensory-motor.com.
Research Interests
- The body, senses, and technology in history and theory
- Haptic technologies, accessibility, and assisted living
- Robotics and the mixed spaces of human-robot interactions
- Sociology of the body and embodiment
- Sociology of Science, knowledge, and technology
- Sociology of consumers and consumption
Education & Training
- PhD, University of Bristol
- MA, University of Warwick
- BA (Hons), University of Reading
Representative Publications
Books
Affective Touching: Neurobiology and Technological Applications. ‘Elements’ Series. Cambridge University Press (Contracted)
Consumption and Everyday Life, 3rd Edition. Routledge, 2023.
How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
Consumption and Everyday Life, 2nd Edition. Routledge, 2017.
Seeing With the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch after Descartes. Edinburgh University Press, 2016
Touching Space, Placing Touch (Co-editor, with Martin Dodge). Routledge, 2012
The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies. Routledge, 2007
Articles (Selected)
Paterson, M. (2023) ‘Fatigue as a physiological problem: experiments in the observation and quantification of movement and industrial labor, 1873-1947’, History and Technology 39(1): 65-90. DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2023.2226288
Paterson, M. (2023) ‘Social Robots and the Futures of Affective Touch’, The Senses and Society 18(2), 110-125. Special Issue ‘Affective Technotouch’, Eds. Luna Dolezal & Amelia DeFalco. DOI: 10.1080/17458927.2023.2179231
Paterson, M., Hoffman, G., and Yan Zheng, C. (2023) ‘Introduction to the Special Issue on “Designing the Robot Body: Critical Perspectives on Affective Embodied Interaction”’, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, Vol. 12(2), Article 14, 1-9. DOI: 10.1145/3594713
Paterson, M. (2022) ‘Inviting Robot Touch (By Design)’, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction 12(2), Article 16. In Special Issue edited by M. Paterson, G. Hoffman & C. Yeng. DOI: 10.1145/3549533
Pykett, J. & Paterson, M. (2022) ‘Stressing the ‘body electric’: history and psychology of the techno-ecologies of work stress’, History of the Human Sciences DOI: 10.1177/09526951221081754
Paterson, M. (2021) ‘The Birth of Motion Capture: Transcribing the Phenomena of Bodily Movement Through the ‘Graphic Method’’, Multimodality and Society 1(2): 195-215. DOI: 10.1177/26349795211040323
Paterson, M. (2021) ‘Hearing gloves and seeing tongues? Disability, sensory substitution, and the birth of neuroplastic subjectivity’, invited contribution to Special Issue ‘Symmetries of Touch’ Eds. H. Schmidgen & R. Ladewig, Body and Society. DOI: 10.1177/1357034X211008235
Paterson, M. & Glass, M. (2020) ‘Seeing, feeling and showing “bodies-in-place”: Exploring reflexivity and the multisensory body through videography’, Social and Cultural Geography 21(1): 1-24. DOI: 10.1080/14649365.2018.1433866
Paterson, M. (2019) ‘On pain as a distinct sensation: mapping intensities, affects, and difference in “interior states”’, Special Issue: ‘The Body in Pain: A Re-engagement’, Eds. L. Dawney & T. Huzar, Body and Society 25(3): 100-135. DOI: 10.1177/1357034X19834631
Paterson, M. (2018) ‘The Biopolitics of Sensation, Techniques of Quantification, and the Production of a ‘New’ Sensorium’, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Special Issue: ‘Common Senses and Critical Sensibilities’ 5(3): 67-95. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/702675.
Paterson, M. (2017) ‘On haptics, tactile interactions, and the possibility of a distinctly “haptic media”’, New Media and Society 19(10): 1541–1562. Special Issue: ‘Haptic Media Studies’, Edited by D. Parisi, M. Paterson, & J. Archer. DOI: 10.1177/1461444817717513
Paterson, M. (2017) ‘Architecture of Sensation: Affect, Motility, and the Oculomotor’, Body & Society 23(1): 3-35. DOI: 10.1177/1357034X16662324
Paterson, M. & Glass, M. (2015) ‘The World Through Glass: Developing Novel Methods with Wearable Computing for Urban Videographic Research’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education 39(2): 275–287. DOI: 10.1080/03098265.2015.1010143
Research Interests
- The body, senses, and technology in history and theory
- Haptic technologies, accessibility, and assisted living
- Disability Studies, especially critical histories of blindness
- Robotics and the mixed spaces of human-robot interactions
- Sociology of the body and embodiment
- Science, knowledge, and technology
- Sociology of consumption
Research Grants
2022. IASH-SSPS Visiting Research Fellow. Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities – School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh. Science, Technology and Innovations Studies (STIS), 1 September to 31 December 2022.
Dietrich School Humanities and Social Science Research Fund, University of Pittsburgh, to support two ‘Disability and Experience’ events in 2019-2020, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (Emory) in October 2019 and Shaun Gallagher (Memphis) in April 2020
Work Forces: Mobilizing the Visual and Material Cultures of Labor, Andrew W. Mellon funded collection-based week-long workshop hosted by History of Art and Architecture Department at the University of Pittsburgh
Humanities Center Collaborative Faculty Research Award, University of Pittsburgh. Medical Humanities speaker series ‘Writing About Illness, Thinking About Health’
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences ‘Year of Healthy U’ Award, University of Pittsburgh
Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences ‘Year of Diversity’ Award, University of Pittsburgh
Arts and Sciences Award, University of Pittsburgh. ‘Developing Novel Methods with Wearable Computing for Urban Ethnographic Research’
Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, Spring 2017
Special Initiative to Promote Scholarly Activity in the Humanities, University of Pittsburgh (with Dr. M. Chirimuuta, History and Philosophy of Science). ‘Evolving concepts of body sensation and motor control in the neuroscience of movement’, 2015
Scholar in Residence, McAnulty College, Duquesne University, 2011-2012
Royal Geographical Society (RGS) Small Research Grant. ‘In the Footsteps of the Blind Traveller: An historical geography of non-visual exploration’
AHRC and EPSRC Science and Heritage Research Cluster. ‘Touching the untouchable: increasing access to archaeological artefacts through virtual handling’
GWR Studentship Award. £55,600 for three-year PhD project student to work with OC Robotics Ltd. ‘Enhancing social presence within human-robot interaction through the snake- skinned robot arm’, co-funded with Great Western Research consortium (GWR).
AHRC Research Leave Award. Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), £14,000 to complete monograph ‘The Senses of Touch’, including matched funding from Faculty Research Leave scheme, University of the West of England (UWE).