Haptic Trouble

The nostalgia for lost touch, like the utopian hopes for assistive touch, responds to haptic scenarios of comfort and consolation. What happens, however, when touch does not just alleviate but generate trouble? Can we complicate these curative narratives of touch by engaging with the frictions, failures and disputes of tactile experience? Drawing on the polysemy of trouble in critical theory, this conference proposes to interrogate haptic trouble as a site of sensory and social subversion, urging us to acknowledge the unresolved discontents of the haptic, to embrace its critical disturbances, and to test its emancipatory potentialities.