[W]e need to contest this understanding of emotion as ‘the unthought’, just as we need to contest the assumption that ‘rational thought’ is unemotional…
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion

[Negative] emotions [are] unusually knotted or condensed ‚interpretations of predicaments’ — that is, signs that not only render visible different registers of a problem (formal, ideological, sociohistorical) but conjoin these problems in a distinctive manner.
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings

The early 21st century has been described as a time of the affective turn in the humanities. Alongside studying trauma and memory, research into affect represents a particularly significant critical intervention. Sara Ahmed describes emotions as “mediat[ing] the relationship between the psychic and the social, and between the individual and the collective” (“Affective economies” 119): affect studies brings together the body and the mind, bridging the divide between feelings and actions, and offering an alternative to both materialist and disembodied approaches to studying culture. This perspective has become particularly relevant in recent years, when it has been brought to bear on political and social phenomena. Whether discussing migration, climate change, ongoing wars, or the pandemic, affect studies contributes to the conversation and sheds light on global cultures.

Our conference aims to be interdisciplinary, combining approaches rooted in cultural and literary studies, game and media studies, psychology, sociology and others, which will allow for a broad and vivid debate across different panels. We are interested in discussing recent developments in affect studies and their impact on other areas of research, including the study of literature, art, drama, popular culture, games, journalism, and music. We wish to explore the connections between affect studies and ethics, trauma and memory studies, ecocriticism, postcolonial and race studies, posthumanism, game studies, and gender research. By making affect studies our point of departure, we want to examine how the shift in focus may (productively) transform our ways of thinking about representation, the politics of cultural texts, embodiment, rationality, materiality, exploitation, the global and the local, and the more-than-human world.

Suggested themes include but are not limited to:

• affect and experimental literature, art and music
• affect in popular culture
• drama and affect
• emotions in works of art
• affect in game studies
• affect in media and journalism
• gender and affect / gendering affect
• affect and marginalization
• ethics and affect studies
• interdisciplinary approaches to affect
• anxiety, paranoia and rage in cultural texts
• joy, affinity and hope in cultural texts
• climate and feelings (solastalgia, climate anxiety, pre-traumatic stress disorder)
• politicization of negative and positive affects
• affects and disability studies and art
• affect and intersectionality
• memory, trauma and witnessing
• posthumanist perspectives on affect
• new directions in affect studies

200-word abstracts with the title, the author’s name and affiliation accompanied by a short biographical note should be sent to the following address: feelingcultures@gmail.com by 30 November 2024

Notification of acceptance:15 December 2024

Conference fee: 130 euro (in person) / 60 euro (online)

Conference website: https://feelingculturesconference.wordpress.com/