Contemplative Commons
Free for the UVA community
Open to the public
This event has passed. To see a list of our current events, see our events page.
Hosted by the Contemplative Sciences Center, University of Virginia
A CIRCL, Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab Incubator
View the program
Post-event Recap: View photos and a written overview of the symposium.
Join us for SENSEmaking, a two-day public symposium exploring contemplative practices, immersive technology, and the senses. The symposium is an incubator of ideas and experiences designed to catalyze cutting-edge research on how contemplative practices and immersive technologies can revitalize the human capacity for sensemaking.
The symposium brings together a diverse transdisciplinary community, including:
- Scholars of religion, philosophy, and history
- Scientists in psychology, medicine, and neuroscience
- Artists, technologists, and makers
- Contemplative practitioners from a range of traditions
Human beings are sense-makers. We navigate our social, cultural, ecological, and psychological worlds through the senses—by which the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations around us are organized and rendered intelligible. Global contemplative traditions have long understood the senses as vital instruments for empiricism, insight, and transformation. Yet contemporary academic discourses have under-theorized the role of sensory experiences in knowledge production. In an age of accelerating technological development, our sensory lives are increasingly overstimulated by digital inputs and yet impoverished of shared, embodied, communal sensory experiences.
This symposium asks: How can contemplative practices and emerging technologies be coupled to revitalize the human capacity for sensemaking? What new paradigms for human flourishing might emerge from this encounter? In response to these questions, the Contemplative Sciences Center is convening a two-day public symposium on contemplative technologies of light and sound. This phrase refers to meditative, artistic, and interactive tools — including historical practices, immersive installations, sonic environments, and Virtual Reality — that are designed to guide attention, deepen perception, and evoke embodied insight.
Contemplative sensemaking practices have been integral to global religious traditions and mind-body lifeway practices for millennia, informing cultural epistemologies of ecological belonging, relational care, attentional cultivation, and emotional regulation. Yet popular perceptions of contemplation often reduce these practices to matters of the brain and cognition, overlooking the critical role of the body and senses in how we make meaning and interpret our world. As part of a broader academic and cultural turn toward understanding embodied and sensory experiences, this symposium redirects scholarly attention to the human sensorium to assert the central role of embodiment in knowledge-making, transformation, and flourishing. Understanding how sensory practices generate meaning and knowledge—how they transform human experience—requires transdisciplinary collaboration that reaches beyond conventional academic boundaries.
This symposium centers transdisciplinary approaches of research and practice to uncover insights about human contemplative sensemaking that remain obscured within siloed disciplinary paradigms. We seek to enrich scholarly conversations about the importance of the senses across the liberal arts while generating practical implications for the design of high-impact interventions that enhance wellbeing. The symposium will bring together a transdisciplinary group of participants: scholars from religion, philosophy, and history; scientists in psychology, medicine, and neuroscience; artists, makers, and technologists; and contemplative practitioners from multiple traditions. Together, we will explore how sensory experiences shape and transform lives across disciplines and cultures.
Designed to foster collaborative inquiry and public scholarship, the symposium will feature presentations and discussion panels, immersive art exhibitions, and facilitated contemplative experiences in simulated and physical environments. Students, faculty, and the public are invited to participate in these events.
The symposium is generously sponsored by the Hemera Foundation, Diane and Tim Naughton, and the UVA Page-Barbour Workshops with support from multiple departments and institutes at UVA.
