Exiled from Our Bodies: How to Come Back to Our Senses by Tereza Stehlíková was published on 30 September 2025 by Routledge, as part of the acclaimed Sensory Studies series, edited by David Howes. The book examines how digital technologies and visually dominant media distance us from embodied, multi-sensory ways of knowing, and argues for the role of the arts in restoring our connection to the body, the environment, and one another.
““Effortlessly synthesizing the most interesting research currently underway in the study of sensory perception, while exploring the blunting influence of various technologies, Stehlíková uses her own life and artistic practice as a throughline connecting a splendid panoply of embodied insights. An intersensory and interdisciplinary feast, the book will likely induce a fine derangement of the reader’s senses.”
— David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal
🔗 Read book review by Angelica Kaufmann for Seisma magazine
About the Book
In an era where digital devices increasingly mediate our perception of reality, Exiled from Our Bodies explores the tension between the richness of direct sensory experience and the allure of the screen. It examines how our dependence on virtual spaces and visually dominant media has led to a profound disconnect from our bodies and environments, contributing to a sense of alienation—both personal and ecological.
Drawing on an autoethnographic approach, artistic research methods, and ethnographic interviews with experts across numerous disciplines, the book argues for the continuing importance of lived, embodied, multi-sensory experience. Rather than simply reinforcing technological mediation, the arts can actively subvert the passivity imposed on us by screens—offering creative strategies to re-engage with the world through all our senses.
By using artistic processes to navigate the tension between the virtual and the real, Exiled from Our Bodies shows how creative practice can generate new ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding. At its core, the book suggests that to begin addressing the current environmental crisis, we must first return to our bodies and come back to our senses—literally and figuratively. Through artistic experimentation, philosophical inquiry, and sensory exploration, it proposes a reawakening to the reciprocity between body, technology, and environment, offering a pathway toward a more conscious, engaged, and aesth-ethical way of inhabiting the world.
🔗 Explore chapter content HERE
“This book represents a fascinating account of the artist’s sensuous journey. It is intriguing to see how the author incorporates concepts such as embodied cognition, sensory dominance, synaesthesia and so on as part of her own very personal journey as a film-maker. There is plenty of food for thought, quite literally in her discussion of the Icelandic Journey experiential multisensory dining event, for the interdisciplinary sensory scientist to come away enriched by.”
— Charles Spence, University of Oxford
“Exiled from Our Bodies is a strongly and clearly argued reminder that the arts continue to be grounded in our deep sense of being and the activation and interplay of all our senses. All arts express and mediate our relations with the world and the critical views of this writer apply in the entire realm of the arts. The argumentation is rooted in the author’s personal convictions in the cultural and human values of art, wide reading of relevant literature and her personal exchange through years with thinkers, scholars, and artists in the cultural and human meanings of art.”
— Juhani Pallasmaa, architect and former professor, Helsinki University of Technology
Author: Tereza Stehlíková
Publisher: Routledge
Publication date: 30 September 2025
Format/pages: Hardcover, 224 pp
ISBN-13: 9781032864044
Tereza Stehlíková 