Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian

Assistant Professor of Journalism Sushma Subramanian penned an article entitled “Why some people are touchy-feeling, while others hate it” that ran on LiveMint.com. Subramanian recently published a book, How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch. 

I start at a place that’s highly personal for me: my fear of touching other people.

At the beginning of ‘Western Massage 1’, my teacher, Al Turner, a wiry man with glittering eyes who used to be a professional dancer, asks us to line up. He bends his knees, sinks his weight into his heels and sashays from side to side, a movement he calls “horse dance” and asks us to follow along. This is the kind of large, sweeping motion we’ll use when we’re giving a massage, he says. It gets us to engage our whole bodies, including the strong muscles of our legs and our core, so we make fluid strokes and protect the smaller, more fragile bones in our fingers when we’re massaging. Read more. 

Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian

Assistant Professor of Journalism Sushma Subramanian penned an article in The Guardian entitled, “U.S. cities are suffocating in the heat. Now they want retribution.”

For years, an elderly man stood as a regular fixture around his East Baltimore neighborhood for the way he would wander the streets in the summer, trying to stay outside his sweltering home until nightfall.

This man, who suffers from dementia, lived in a row house that shared side walls with its neighboring homes. With windows only in the front and back, there was little air flow, which trapped the heat inside. It’s not unusual for the upper floors in such homes to be several degrees hotter than the temperature outdoors.

During a nearly two-week heat wave that swept through the city in July 2019, Cynthia Brooks, executive director of the Bea Gaddy Family Center, a local non-profit that provides food and other services for the poor and homeless, noticed she hadn’t seen the man for a while. Finally, on one of the “code red” days – when the forecasted heat index is expected to be at 105F (40.56C) or higher – he stumbled out of his house, looking disoriented. No one knows how long he had been sitting inside, alone, without a fan or air conditioning.

This man had no one to call – no family was around, and alerting emergency responders could have led to a hefty medical bill. Brooks dropped everything and took him to nearby Johns Hopkins hospital, where he was diagnosed with heatstroke and given treatment. After that incident, Brooks became his legal custodian. He currently lives in a senior home nearby, and she makes his treatment decisions.

This man represents the population in Baltimore most likely to face the personal impacts of the climate crisis. Around the country, global heating is increasing the frequency, intensity and duration of summer heat waves. The recent triple-digit temperatures across the Pacific north-west, where air conditioning in homes isn’t common, highlight the real-world hardships caused by extreme heat exposure and how the elderly and homeless suffer disproportionately from physical discomfort and worse health outcomes. Read more. 

Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian

Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian recently appeared on “Rising Up with Sonali,” discussing her new book How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch with the podcast host. Listen here.

Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian

Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian recently released a new book, How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch, and was interviewed in Discover Magazine.

As Subramanian explains in her book, How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch, it was a moment when she began to consider how little she knew about this multifaceted sense — “a capacity,” she writes, “that never shuts off.” The questions kept forming, eventually leading Subramanian, a professor of journalism at the University of Mary Washington, to write an article for Discover in 2015 about the development of tactile touch screens — which use haptic technology, such as vibrations in handheld devices.

In her latest work, she dives deeper into that world, but also explores the limits of our sense of touch and what makes it so versatile. Discover caught up with Subramanian to talk about touch in the age of COVID-19, the future of tactile research and how we experience the sense differently across personal and cultural barriers. Read more.

Assistant Professor of Communication Sushma Subramanian

Assistant Professor of Journalism Sushma Subramanian’s book “How to Feel: The Science and Meaning of Touch” will be released by Columbia University Press in February 2021.

We are out of touch. Many people fear that we are trapped inside our screens, becoming less in tune with our bodies and losing our connection to the physical world. But the sense of touch has been undervalued since long before the days of digital isolation. Because of deeply rooted beliefs that favor the cerebral over the corporeal, touch is maligned as dirty or sentimental, in contrast with supposedly more elevated modes of perceiving the world.

How to Feel explores the scientific, physical, emotional, and cultural aspects of touch, reconnecting us to what is arguably our most important sense. Sushma Subramanian introduces readers to the scientists whose groundbreaking research is underscoring the role of touch in our lives. Through vivid individual stories—a man who lost his sense of touch in his late teens, a woman who experiences touch-emotion synesthesia, her own efforts to become less touch averse—Subramanian explains the science of the somatosensory system and our philosophical beliefs about it. She visits labs that are shaping the textures of objects we use every day, from cereal to synthetic fabrics. The book highlights the growing field of haptics, which is trying to incorporate tactile interactions into devices such as phones that touch us back and prosthetic limbs that can feel. How to Feeloffers a new appreciation for a vital but misunderstood sense and how we can use it to live more fully. Learn more.