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.

A social and sensory history of life with megaprojects that reveals how humans make sense of their world when they no longer recognize the environment around them.

About the Author
Joy Parr is a professor and Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Risk in the Geography Department at the University of Western Ontario.

Reviews

The New Media component of Sensing Changes is a wonderful illustration of how we can and should engage our students in multi-sensory ways and how we, as historians, must move beyond privileging the written word.

-- Lisa Rumiel, McMaster University * Left History, 15.1 *

Historian and geographer Joy Parr has written an extraordinary book...Sensing Changes will make important contributions to the field of sensory studies and that other readers, approaching their own topics in diverse locations and from various disciplinary backgrounds, will, like this reviewer, find edification and inspiration in the pages of this remarkable book.

-- Deborah Davis Jackson, Earlham College * Senses and Society, Vol 6, Issue 2 *


Awards
Winner of Canada Prize in the Social Sciences, Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences 2011 (Canada) and Sidney Edelstein Prize, Society for the History of Technology 2011 (United States). Short-listed for Sir John A. Macdonald Book Prize, Canadian Historical Association 2011 (Canada) and The Francois-Xavier Garneau Medal, Canadian Historical Association 2015 (Canada).



Book Information
ISBN 9780774817240
Author Joy Parr
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint University of British Columbia Press
Publisher University of British Columbia Press
Weight(grams) 460g