Erin Lynch is an interdisciplinary scholar and Senior Fellow at the Centre for Sensory Studies who works at the intersection of space, mediation, culture, and the senses. She was recently awarded a PhD in Social and Cultural Analysis from Concordia University. Her doctoral research explores how city-sanctioned mobile tourism apps impact users’ experience of urban spaces and attractions. Erin used multi-sited sensory ethnography to investigate how these “extensions of the senses” mediate the dynamic site of the tour – where narratives about the city are conjured on a shifting stage – and consider what kinds of histories, meanings, and experiences are privileged by these emergent tourism practices.
Erin holds both a Bachelor of Social Science and a Masters degree in Criminology from the University of Ottawa, where she studied how popular imaginaries about geographies of crime take shape on film, and how the maps of meaning we layer over the world are constructed somewhere between the “real” and the “reel.”
As she continues to explore how our cultural understandings and experiences of space are mediated, Erin is currently co-authoring research on the sensory ambiance of the casino.