Senses and Sense-ability

Resonance, the conference’s central theme, refers to our ability to form deep, meaningful connections that provoke thoughts, evoke emotions, and stimulate the senses through personal images and memories, often drawing on an individual or community’s lived experiences” (“Call For Proposals | Interactive Film & Media Journal”). Communication of these individual and community experiences requires a medium, usually a common language. One common language that transcends linguistic, socio-political, and even species-specific boundaries is the language of care. This paper explores the role care has in the process of resonance formation and demonstrates that care is a language and a medium with universal elements. It further discusses how this repositioning of care as a medium can help us use resonance in a socially responsible manner with regard to solidarity and collective formation. Even when communicating through personal images and memories, the significance of these moments is not only derived from their visual or verbal representations but also the emotional resonance they create. To gain further insights into this phenomenon, this paper establishes the theoretical framework by intersecting linguistics, education, and media studies to establish that care can be viewed as a language and medium, which makes it central to the discussion of resonance. In addition, feminist studies and ethics of care will be central to further exploration of resonance to examine the latter’s role with regard to creating solidarity and collective. These frameworks are then applied to an analysis of interspecies relationships with companion animals to disentangle the verbal competent from the complex structure of care communication to explore the relevance of care as a language in the context of resonance and meaning-making. This discussion further references materials relating to animal studies. Insights gained from interspecies relationships with companion animals, which rely predominantly on nonverbal communications of care, demonstrate how the interpersonal nature of this type of communication foregrounds practices of deep listening/observation, interpretation, and simulation. Resonance remains integral to these relationships in the absence of verbal communication. This disentanglement of the verbal component from care language provides key findings that are then used to investigate the non-verbal elements of resonance in human-to-human relationships. The findings from the analysis of interspecies relationships aids the analysis of human-to-human relationships, where examples of communication between speakers of different languages and the same languages are scrutinized to examine the role of care as a non-verbal language and its relevance to resonance. The discussion furthermore explores this role within the contexts of creating solidarity and collectives. Using these analyses, the paper argues that the language of care in its interpersonal form is integral to creating solidarities and collectives based on a sense of belonging that derives from the resonance care as a language establishes. Key Hypotheses: Considering care as a language and a medium repositions it as a form of communication rather than an activity. Disentangling verbal and non-verbal communication of care allows for a more in-depth understanding of resonance.

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