Summary

I am a Canadian researcher-practitioner and adjunct faculty with Toronto Metropolitan University Responsive Ecologies Lab (RELab) and founder of the Aroma Inquiry Lab. My research investigates material and temporal contingencies of physically embodied practices, with a focus on advanced practitioners whose practices are largely undertaken alone or in relative isolation or seclusion. Outside of my academic work I maintain several physically embodied practices, including the creation of mixed-media scents for scholarly knowledge mobilization, cultural heritage mediation, arts interpretation, and specialized training. My aroma practice departs from dominant preoccupations with sensory solipsism to focus, instead, on the very costly, time-consuming, and complicated material contingencies involved in obtaining, maintaining, and working with the ‘stuff’ that resides at the other end of the nose and that is often obscured by a discourse of scent that has focused almost entirely on consumption. 

My research

Drawing on many decades of teaching experience in both secondary and post-secondary educational contexts, I have directly observed the impacts of funding cuts to essential educational infrastructures and material resources on learning, learners, teaching. Increasingly, institutional education has become dependent on automated corporate technology products, which have disempowered learners and de-skilled teachers. These observations inspired the development of my research focus on non-institutional learning in contexts of independent, solitary, and small group practice that involve fine, high quality tools and materials in offline and non-digitally mediated environments.

While there is a considerable body of knowledge on the social, cultural, and cognitive dimensions of learning in the context of institutional education, these perspectives very often evade the material, environmental, embodied, and spatio-temporal contingencies of learning that have become inconvenient for fast credentialing. Among the most definitive examples of knowing-as-doing that have proven incompatible with these models are forms of traditionally skilled and deliberate physical practices that require specialized situated environments; equipment, tools, or materials; and customized workflows to safely learn, develop, and master that cannot be indirectly acquired. Moreover, these ways of knowing require significant commitment and long term practice  to develop and master. For example, you cannot develop skill at fine, hand tool woodworking without access to the specific tools, materials, expertise, and specialized environments required for the practice of fine, hand tool woodworking. Sadly, many forms of socio-culturally situated ways of knowing as doing are at risk of endangerment and extinction due to technological overreach. This extends to entire fields of practice (e.g., arts, trades, physical education, and even, some applied sciences), especially those that require materials, practices, and situated learning experiences to know and do.

Another consequence of today’s info-centric educational paradigms, is that learning itself is often “sold separately” as students, parents, and teachers are increasingly expected to pay out-of-pocket for materials, equipment, and, even the costs of maintaining educational infrastructures. This is also reflected in the elimination of resource-contingent programs, such as arts, trades, and physical education, from schools. As my colleagues and I argue in our publications, these materially contingent and physically embodied ways of knowing (as doing) are also at risk of endangerment and extinction thanks to today’s increasingly ‘hands off’ educational schemes.

My theoretical orientation

My theoretical orientation is grounded in anti cognitivist James Gibson‘s ecological view of perception as a relational activity that is contingent on the material and in-the-world affordances of environments, materials, and phenomena in contrast with still dominant notions of learning as a purely mental accrual of indirectly acquired (representational) knowledge transmitted through disembodied, didactic, and behaviorist paradigms of instruction and assessment. 

From this Gibsonian orientation, humans and animals alike cannot learn anything without the physical and tangible affordances of environments, materials, tools, and phenomena that constitute a philosophy of learning as an activity rather than the mere mental processing of transmitted information. From a pedagogical standpoint, this reflects the idea that we cannot understand the meaning of indirectly acquired (i.e., second-hand) representational and text-bound knowledge without the lived experiences to marry to the words. My emphasis on Gibson’s orientation to perceiving as an environmentally contingent activity similarly intervenes on the over-determination of cognitivist paradigms of perceptual learning that evade the role of external, material, and environmental contingencies that physically embodied and tacit ways of knowing entail. From this perspective, Gibson’s concept of affordances are not a ‘supplement’ to cognition (as his ideas are frequently framed) but its alternative (see Alan Costall’s work on the topic for further perspective).

Accordingly, my work calls attention to the limitations of (still) dominant mind-over-matter (i.e., representational and cognitivist) paradigms of educating that serve to reduce learning and teaching to a crude, mechanistic transmission of informational accrual, which Gibson similarly critiqued throughout his work on the limitations of cognitivist paradigms of perceptual learning. This same Gibsonian orientation, to the ecological and living contingencies of learning, teaching, communicating, and making, informs my research, teaching, and creative practices.

My knowledge mobilization activities

 As my colleagues and I explain in our recent publications, much of what is touted as ‘innovative’ educational technology merely affixes a new interface over outdated models of teaching-as-transmission and curriculum-as-content. To this end, my approach to knowledge mobilization as an experiential, physically embodied, environmentally situated activity extends my scholarly critique of indirectly-acquired, info-centric schemes of educating that myself and my colleagues refer to as ‘educational artifice.’ 

In contrast with educational (and algorithmic) artifice, my explicit emphasis on the material and authentically situated (i.e., site/location-specific) contingencies of tacitly applied learning with and through real materials, real tools, and the real environments in which real practices are actually undertaken in the real world extends the insights I developed during my doctoral field work and post-doctoral studies of the of high quality aromatic resources in contexts of cultural heritage mediation, perfumery, and wine education. 

In my current role as an adjunct post-doctoral researcher at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Responsive Ecologies lab, I contribute to broad-based trans-disciplinary research involving tacit, experiential, and practice-based learning and making with an emphasis on knowing as doing. My scholarly contributions are mobilized through standard, peer-reviewed academic publications, conference presentations, scholarly colloquia, guest lectures, and more informally through public workshops and creative collaborations with major cultural and arts institutions and trade (hospitality sector) partners.

My emphasis on emergent and experiential forms of knowledge mobilization also reflects my indirect and unconventional path into academia as a mature graduate student. Early into my graduate studies, I participated in and facilitated smell-walks and smell-mapping activities inspired by the work of my late colleague and first scent-specific mentor, Dr Victoria Henshaw, whose collection Design With Smell I contributed to as a very junior scholar. This led to my participation in a small pilot study of smell mapping activities led by artist Kate McLean in Marseille (France), who single-handedly formulated an accessible and creative approach smell mapping and smell walking practices that she has used all over the world. I later facilitated similar types of aroma-centric inquiries and workshops in Toronto and Vancouver (Canada) as a means of scaffolding multimodal literacy as a physically embodied and environmentally situated practice rather than a purely interior, affective, or intellectual exercise. 

As my doctoral research program evolved, I became more interested in the extra-social dimensions of scent beyond its over-determination as a kind of solipsistic ‘trigger’ for affect, memory, and subjectivity. I wanted to focus, instead, on the underlying material and environmental contingencies of sourcing and working with aromatic materials in deliberate and skilled practice, such as the time, cost, practices, and knowledge that are required to learn with and through aromatic materials rather than their sensorial effects or translation into symbolic or scholarly goods. While there is an enormous and ever-growing body of trans-disciplinary scholarship on smell and The Senses, much of this work has served to obscure the perspectives of non-academic practitioners who work with aromatic materials and understand them ‘from the inside out.’

To this end, my interest in sourcing/resourcing and creating aromatic learning resources contributed my conceptualization of the Aroma Inquiry Lab, which I founded in 2014 to extend the multimodal infrastructure of the Responsive Ecologies Lab (ReLab) at Toronto Metropolitan University based on insights developed in my doctoral and post-doctoral research and creative practices with scent. I have mobilized research insights involving aromatic materials for tangible technology prototypes, undergraduate and graduate events, arts exhibits, and industry partnerships.

This knowledge mobilization includes my facilitation of aromatic master classes for Brock University’s International Cool Climate Wine Symposium, where I led two hands-on workshops for sourcing and creating DIY aroma reference standards for odour characterization in wine, which I have also undertaken with The Independent Wine Education Guild (IWEG), the LCBO, the Canadian Association of Sommeliers (CAPS), George Brown’s Centre for Hospitality and Culinary Arts (CHCA), and independent workshops in collaboration with Canadian sommelier Veronique Rivest. In addition to these activities, I have created mixed-media scents for cultural heritage, arts interpretation, and exhibits and for academic workshops and developed proprietary non-invasive (i.e., passive, non-automated) scent delivery models for environmentally situated scent installations in built environments.

My practice

In addition to my academic work I create experimental scent applications for scholarly research and knowledge mobilization. My approach, which I call, ‘aroma inquiry,’ calls attention to aromatic (and other) materials as a missing modality of learning, teaching, communication, and making in practice. My emphasis on the materiality of learning with and through aromatic materials reflects my pedagogical focus on the contingencies of knowing in practice, in contrast with the preoccupation with sensory culture at the site of consumption. To this end, my work advocates for the voice of the practitioner rather than deferring to industrial, institutional, or disciplinary power bases continually vying to speak in their place.

My path to scent creation followed my founding of the Aroma Inquiry Lab in 2013, which began as a small archive of raw, processed, and manufactured aromatic materials I had collected for purposes of teaching and learning. The focus of the lab was further refined from insights drawn from doctoral field work studies of scent-themed environments, interactions, and uses of aromatic raw materials for cultural heritage mediation in Grasse, France and related explorations of the creation of DIY scents based on my smell walking and mapping activities. After I defended my doctorate, I became interested in learning some of the principles of traditional perfumery, which I studied with American natural perfumer Mandy Aftel in her in-studio courses at her home atelier in Berkeley, California, who gave me the foundation of my perfumery knowledge. I later expanded on these foundations through a combination of self-study, materials courses, and mentorship from perfumers working mixed-media (naturals and synthetics) scent applications. 

As an avid outdoors enthusiast since childhood and (very slow) long distance runner, my approach to aromatic inquiry also calls attention to the environmental sources of scent that reside at the other side of the nose and which encourages a more ecologically situated relation to scent that emphasizes source, rather than subjectivity (alone).

As a scent practitioner, I have developed original mixed media aromatic applications for scholarly knowledge mobilization, conference workshops, prototypes, training, and exhibits. My work includes rare, hard-to-find, and unusual ingredients that are as original and truly one-of-a-kind as the objects and artworks they accompany and as such provide an opportunity for people to smell something they would not otherwise have access to as my work involves costly materials and highly technical approaches to development, composition, and prototyping that do not scale for commercial fragrance. This is to say, my work provides a chance to interact with materials that are not present in commercial or low-budget/DIY scent applications.

In collaboration with curators from the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), I was commissioned to design, formulate, and compound four unique and historically themed scents for the epic Making Her Mark Exhibit, which you can read about in my interview with the AGO’s Foyer Magazine. I was later invited to re-develop five custom scents for the AGO’s multi-modal Art Cart, such as a whiff of Elvis for the gallery’s iconic Andy Warhol painting, ‘Elvis I & II,’ and four other scents inspired by the works of Mark Rothko, James Tissot, Tom Thomson, and Gustave Caillebotte that are featured in the gallery’s permanent collections. Most recently, I collaborated again with the AGO on two uniquely atmospheric scents for the exhibit David Blackwood: Myth & Legend. 

Media and press

Beyond my own publications, my perspectives and work are featured in scholarly books, television (ICI/CBC), radio (CBC’s Metro Morning), and print media (La Presse), interviews (Foyer Magazine), along with academic and trade blogs. Click the link below to listen to my (very fun!) visit with CBC Toronto’s Metro Morning crew: CBC Metro Morning: The scent of human desperation.

Prior experience 

After completing my undergraduate degree, I studied online writing and information design at Centennial College with an interest in interactive storytelling. For many years I worked as a freelance writer, editor, and content producer for independent and national digital media, including interactive fiction for Toronto’s Trapeze Media, digital heritage stories for CBC’s award-winning Digital Archives, educational content for Toronto’s Mystus Interactus Exhibits, digital training content for government clients, and consulting and talks for magazine and digital culture non-profits, such as Magazine’s Canada. These industry experiences led to my first instructional appointments teaching post-secondary and post-graduate courses in interactive writing, new media, digital reporting, and professional communications at Centennial College’s School of Communications, Media and Design. I have since taught courses at the secondary, post-secondary, graduate, and post-graduate level [my CCV is available upon request to academic hiring committees].

Education

I hold a B.A. (Honours/Specialist) degree in English literature from the University of Toronto, B.Ed. (Intermediate/Secondary) teaching degree from The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, and an M.A. and PhD from York University’s joint program in Communications and Culture. After completing my PhD, I was awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship from York University’s Faculty of Education that extended my doctoral research on aroma into the context of educational resources and reference standards used in the context of wine education and aroma training.

Qualifications

• PhD, Communications and Culture, York University. 
• M.A., Communication and Culture, York University.
• B.Ed., Bachelor of Education (Intermediate/Secondary), Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto.
• B.A. Hons., Bachelor of Arts, English Literature, University of Toronto.

Additional Training + Certifications

• Additional Teaching Qualifications (AQ): Media I and II, York University/Ontario College of Teachers.
• Post-Graduate Certificate in Online Writing and Information Design, Centennial College, School of Communications.
• Ontario College of Teachers (OCT), certified secondary school teacher (Ontario College of Teachers) – current status: Inactive/Non-Practising.
• Certificates in Natural Perfumery (Introductory and Intermediate). Between 2017 and 2019, I travelled to Berkeley, California, to undertake courses with American natural perfumer Mandy Aftel at her home studio.

Please use my Contact form for professional inquiries.