Given that touch and touching is so central to everyday embodied existence, why has it been largely ignored by social scientists for so long? What is the place of touch in our mixed spaces of sociality, work, domesticity, recreation, creativity or care? What conceptual resources and academic languages can we reach towards when approaching tactile activities and somatic experiences through the body? How is this tactile landscape gendered? How is touch becoming revisited and revalidated in late capitalism through animal encounters, tourism, massage, beauty treatments, professional medicine, everyday spiritualities or the aseptic touch-free spaces of automated toilets? How is touch placed and valued within scholarly fieldwork and research itself, integral as it is to the production of embodied epistemologies? How is touch involved in such aesthetic experiences as shaping objects in sand, or encountering fleshly bodies within a painting? The goal of this edited collection, Touching Space, Placing Touch is twofold: 1. To further advance theoretical and empirical understanding of touch in social science scholarship by focussing on the differential social and cultural meanings of touching and the places of touch. 2. To develop a multi-faceted and interdisciplinary explanations of touch in terms of individual and social life, personal experiences and tasks, and their related cultural contexts. The twelve essays in this volume provide a rich combination of theoretical resources, methodological approaches and empirical investigation. Each chapter takes a distinct aspect of touch within a particular spatial context, exploring this through a mixture of sustained empirical work, critical theories of embodiment, philosophical and psychoanalytic approaches to gendered touch and touching, or the relationship between visual and non-visual culture, to articulate something of the variety and variability of touching experiences. The contributors are a mixture of established and emerging researchers within a growing interdisciplinary field of scholarship, yet the volume has a strong thematic identity and therefore represents the formative collection concerning the multiple senses of touch within social science scholarship at this time.

Project Manhigh took humans to the threshold of space using balloons. In the 1950s, a small band of Air Force doctors were on the cutting edge of the United States' space research programs. Working at the Aeromedical Field Laboratory at Holloman Air Force Base in southern New Mexico, they used balloons to carry laboratory animals followed by human pilots above 99% of the atmosphere. Drawing upon flight reports and technical data, this book documents Project Manhigh and the high altitude flights that preceded it. The Manhigh flights were, in many ways, prototypes for future space missions. On each of the three flights, the Air Force placed a lone pilot in a sealed capsule nineteen miles above the ground. At such extreme altitudes, the pilots were well within the functional equivalent of outer space and needed the sealed capsule to survive. Manhigh existed prior to the creation of NASA and helped pave the way for human space exploration.

A collection of essays and short stories about space travel and religion. Touching the Face of the Cosmos explores the desire, essentially spiritual, to understand more about our place in the universe, how our lives on Earth are inextricably part of that bigger picture. Drawing on scientists, religious thinkers, and science fiction writers, Paul Levinson and Michael Waltemathe have assembled a volume that combines space travel and religion for anyone interested in outer space, theology, and philosophy.

Touch is a fundamental element of dance. The (time) forms and contact zones of touch are means of expression both of self-reflexivity and the interaction of the dancers. Liberties and limits, creative possibilities and taboos of touch convey insights into the ‘aisthesis’ of the different forms of dance: into their dynamics and communicative structure, as well as into the production and regulation of affects. Touching and Being Touched assembles seventeen interdisciplinary papers focusing on the question of how forms and practices of touch are connected with the evocation of feelings. Are these feelings evoked in different ways in tango, Contact improvisation, European and Japanese contemporary dance? The contributors to this volume (dance, literature, and film scholars as well as philosophers and neuroscientists) provide in-depth discussions of the modes of transfer between touch and being touched. Drawing on the assumptions of various theories of body, emotion, and senses, how can we interpret the processes of tactile touch and of being touched emotionally? Is there a specific spectrum of emotions activated during these processes (within both the spectator and the dancer)? How can the relationship of movement, touch, and emotion be analyzed in relation to kinesthesia and empathy?

Who isn't seduced by the idea of an affinity between aging and aesthetics? Yet, when does aging truly begin? What attributes does the aesthetic embrace? Looking into startling photographic art of the past three decades, this book is prompted by such questions and turns them into a meditation on how aesthetics mediates our relation to time. The photographic approach of the corporeal is at the center of the book. Within a phenomenological framework, Cristofovici brings into focus the physical and the psychic body to read aging as a process of change and becoming over time. Her understanding of aging sees beyond difference into larger patterns of perceptions that we share. Offering valuable insights into aging as a process of subject construction, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of visual culture, photography, art history, age studies, and theories of knowledge. This cross-disciplinary study that puts theory to the test of life's and art's paradoxes in an evocative style will also appeal to a wider readership interested in how photography and aging illuminate each other.

Jan Aevankmajer wrote this remarkable book on tactile art when he stopped directing films after censorship by the Czechoslovakian government and experimented intensively with tactile phenomena and the creative imagination. Illustrated with over 100 images, the book is organised around many reproductions of Aevankmajer's wondrous tactile art objects, tactile poems, experiments and games. It also includes dialogues with, and artworks by, other collaborating artists from the Group of Czech and Slovak Surrealists. Aevankmajer also gathers together as contributors such notable exponents of tactual experience as Edgar Allen Poe, Guillaume Apollinaire, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Meret Oppenheim, Ay-O, and F.T. Marinetti. Michael Havas, producer of some of Aevankmajer's films, says of the book: 'it is typically Aevankmajer: erudite and very consequential. Sometimes also very funny and erotic. Totally unique.'