18th ESSE Conference (European Society for the Study of English)
31st August – 4th September 2026
Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Call for Contributions to the ESSE Panel "Infrastructures of Feeling: The European City in Contemporary Literature and Visual Media"

Whether in London, Madrid or Berlin, urban life has been shaped by latent and manifest infrastructures. Visible and invisible borders constrain not only physical movement but also emotional expression and access to historical knowledge. Contemporary literature and visual media explore these infrastructural coordinates, showcasing how representations of urban space shed light on the limits and affordances of, for instance, traumatic memories, everyday anxieties, and nostalgic attachments that play out in the city. Focusing on the intersections of affect theory, spatial theory and infrastructure studies, this interdisciplinary seminar investigates how contemporary literature, film, photography, street art, digital media, and other cultural texts portray the ways in which urban space both enhances and delimits the formation of affective responses and cosmopolitan attitudes. The affective turn (Massumi, Ahmed, Thrift, Seigworth and Pedwell) and cultural trauma studies (Alexander, Craps) inform our reading of atmospheres and unresolved emotions in the urban environment, alongside foundational theories of space (Lefebvre, Massey, Soja) and new research on urban infrastructure (Boehmer and Davies, Pinnix et al.) to explore how power and boundaries are inscribed in place. Posthumanist perspectives (Haraway, Bennett) and affective ecocritical approaches (Bladow, Mossner) are also key fields this seminar draws upon since these engage with the impact of non-human agencies (architecture, climate, animals, technology) on city life. We are also particularly interested in diaspora studies (Gilroy, Hall), postcolonial lenses (Mbembe) and decolonial conceptualisations of cosmopolitanism (Mignolo and Walsh, Santos), which shed light on the affective impact of colonial legacies and the emergence of new diasporic identities in European cityscapes.

 Key topics include, but are not limited to:

• migration and the European city

• cultural heritage and emotion

• public monuments as contested sites of affective memory

• the “right to the city”

• cultural trauma and affective atmospheres

• affirmative affect and the urban

• cosmopolitan emotions

• religion, spirituality and the urban environment

• urban violence and its representations

• translocal connectedness and emotional detachment

• gentrification and its limits

• affective ecocriticism and the urban

• digital technologies and city life

References:

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. 2nd ed., Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Alexander, Jeffrey et al. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. University of California Press, 2004.

Ameel, Lieven. Literary Urban Studies: An Introduction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

Bladow, Kyle and Jennifer Ladino, eds. Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment. University of Nebraska Press, 2018.

Boehmer, Elleke and Dominic Davies, eds. Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture. Palgrave, 2018.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.

Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. Palgrave, 2013.

Davies, Dominic. The Broken Promise of Infrastructure: On the Geopolitics of Feeling. Lawrence Wishart, 2023.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press, 1993.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1993, pp. 392-403.

Massey, Doreen. For Space. Sage Publications, 2005.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, 2002.

Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois, Duke University Press, 2017.

Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Duke University Press, 2018.

Mossner, Alexa Weik von- Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. Ohio State University Press, 2017.

Pinnix, Aaron, Axel Volmar, Fernando Esposito and Nora Binder, eds. Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. Transcript, 2023.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Duke University Press, 2018.

Seigworth, Geoffrey J. and Carolyn Pedwell. The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures. Duke University Press, 2023.

Soja, Edward. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Blackwell, 1996.

Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Routledge, 2008.

CONVENORS:

• Ana Cristina Mendes (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
anafmendes@edu.ulisboa.pt

• Ágnes Györke (Károli Gáspár University, Hungary)
gyorke.agnes@kre.hu

Scholars are invited to submit a 300-word abstract (excluding bibliographical references) to the convenors by 31st January 2026.