Technology, Bodily Limits, and Ways of Knowing: Joy Parr Sensing Changes

This analysis of Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes (2010) connects the central themes of her historical and ethnographic accounts of megaprojects in Canada to broader arguments about the relationship between historically situated bodies and technologies. Much of what is being traced in her case studies is a very local reckoning of how bodies create, employ, and transmit expertise about landscape, be it natural or cultural or both. Her emphasis on the local and her use of ethnography draws the theoretical field of vision downward, challenging both the academic view from nowhere. Agents “on the ground” engaging in everyday activity provide vital clues to the way our bodies function as instruments of knowledge; how the points of contact between sentience and material limit yield social boundaries that are flexible and morally responsive offers an instructive contrast to systems that challenge or transcend such points of contact and threaten sustainability.