Call for Papers
BYU Humanities Center Annual Symposium, Fall 2026
“Touch: Sensation, Embodiment, Relation”
The sensation of touch is produced by one of the most complex systems in the human body. Current neuroscience research, for example, estimates that the human hand alone contains roughly 17,000 mechanoreceptors—bundles of cells, nerves, and sensory units—that relay myriad stimuli to the brain, allowing us to grasp, press, perceive texture, and navigate our environment with astonishing precision. Touch is thus biological and metaphysical—a sensation beyond the physical: an intricate interface through which we encounter the material world and register its significance in the mind.
Accordingly, touch is a fundamental concept for understanding human embodiment, human relationships, and the vulnerability and intimacy of human contact. Touch opens a conceptual space for thinking about how we come to know and be known through physical presence. Perhaps then it is unsurprising that touch is also central to our experience of the sacred and the way that God manifests in our lives. Gabriel Josipovici observes, “At least part of what enters into this apprehension [of others and of the world] is our common bodily and kinesthetic reaction to a physical world which we both inhabit. For we are embodied, and it is our bodies which give us common access to the physical world.” Touch grounds perception and binds us together in a shared world.
For the 2026 BYU Humanities Center annual symposium that will be held in late September 2026, we invite papers and presentations that explore touch and its central role in human experience. We welcome contributions from all disciplines—humanities, arts, social sciences, sciences, and interdisciplinary fields—that help us understand the importance of touch in modern society. Possible questions may include the following:
- How does touch shape our understanding of embodiment and human connection?
- In what ways do literature and art represent touch and tactile experience?
- What is the role of touch in both religious and spiritual experience?
- How does touch mediate our relationship to material culture and everyday objects? How do we construct meaning through physical handling, craft, and use?
- How might touch serve as a conceptual lens for thinking about the limits of AI and the boundaries of what is human? What does it mean to replicate, simulate, or approximate touch? What can machines never feel? What cannot be digitized? What can haptic technologies teach us about human sensation?
- How do religious, philosophical, or scriptural traditions conceptualize touch?
- What is the role of touch in blindness, disability studies, and sensory substitution?a
- How might touch function as a hermeneutic principle in close reading and interpretation?
We welcome proposals that expand, challenge, or reimagine these ideas.
Please send abstracts of 100-150 words to Brooke Browne (brooke_browne@byu.edu) by April 30.
