#MAKE: Methods, Atmospheres, Knowledges, Energies

Friday, October 23 to Sunday, October 25, 2026
Vancouver, Canada

After three consecutive international affect theory conferences in downtown Lancaster Pennsylvania (#WTF 2015, #AIMS 2018, and #PITS 2024), the Society for the Study of Affect (SSA) is relocating to Vancouver for our 2026 conference MAKE: Methods, Atmospheres, Knowledges, Energies. Vancouver will provide an indelible vibe-and-scene shift for our gathering, a redistribution of the senses, and ample opportunities to discover (and recover) collective capacities to connect and persist in the face of existential-fascist challenges multiplying in ways too rapid and numerous to count.

In the midst of so much worldly unmaking, what is it that affect and its study can do?

• To MAKE a substantial difference to how ongoing modes of relationality are fostered and sustained,
• To create or contribute to visceral potentials-in-the-MAKING for more (to) life while also interrupting the relentless drives of sadness, terror, and death,
• To look within the everyday, the ordinary, the minor, the micro-, the outside, the margins, and the interstices for tools and techniques being MADE that can pry open capacious alter-worlds and glimpses of hope against hope for today

We encourage your direct participation in the creation and flow of our conference's conversations around Methods/​Atmospheres/​Knowledges/​Energies through the submission of stream proposals: a submission from a single person, duo, or trio (no more than three) that identifies and expands on a specific theme related to affect in conjunction with the MAKE theme. Your stream will, ideally, become a set of two to four conference panels (with three to four panelists each). The issues and engagements that serve as a stream's central concerns should be clearly framed and conceived in a way that encourages—as much as possible—potential participation from a wide variety of academic disciplines. Please include a list of topics and sub-topics.

SEE EXAMPLE STREAMS:
https://affectsociety.com/make/pdf/Example%20Streams.pdf

Stream proposals should be no more than 500 words in length and must be submitted no later than Tuesday, March 31, 2026.

SUBMIT A STREAM:
https://affectsociety.com/make/conference/

Methods

Affect theory is rather notoriously non-receptive—if not downright resistant or hostile—to the spelling out of its methods (too) prescriptively or procedurally. Still, there are various ways of parsing and prompting process that affect studies/affect theory undertakes in its MAKING that can be helpfully illustrative and generative for (extra-/trans-) disciplinary conversations and progressive political aims that desire to move beyond the rote and readily replicable. So, how should affect theory approach the question of methods but, more so, how should such 'processual and affective' methods be shared, communicated, passed along?

Atmospheres

This is where so much affect theory dwells! Atmospheres from intimate (often interiorized) to immense (world climate), ranging from unacknowledged or barely perceptible to so damned heavy that you work to maneuver its shifting or find a means of escape. Never just a metaphor, an atmosphere is felt, real, lived, shared (if often unequally), contaminating/contaminated (for good and for bad), a density/dispersity in perpetual oscillation, etc. The very minute you ask about 'capacities to affect or be affected,' you also enter into the matter of atmospheres and atmospherics. 'What can an atmosphere do?' sidles up to 'what can a body do?'—a mutually-imbricated ongoingness that never closes. How do atmospheres figure into your work?

Knowledges

Perhaps it happens almost inevitably when 'knowledge' is spelled with a capital 'K.' Knowledge = Western. Enlightenment. Rationality. Measure and measured. Instrumentalized. White. Normative. Subtractive of feeling. Eliminative of affect. But knowledges (with an 's') adds the necessary pluralization of a knowing-otherwise excess that swarms and unsettles Knowledge as transcendent and all-seeing. Hence, knowledges that embrace the mess, the curiosity, the wonder, and the reality of experiment and experience: indigenous, esoteric, black, brown, eastern, aesthetic, ecologic, etc. What can reason do (intertwined with affect, with a body, with an atmosphere) when it recognizes its emplacement, its singularity, the capacities and incapacities of its own truth-affects? What's the doing of knowledge in affect theory?

Energies

Energies course through affect studies as diffuse and material forces. Intimate and infrastructural, they register as charges, currents, frictions, accretions, and leakages that move through (and across) bodies, ecologies, and technologies. In the 1986 Public Image Ltd song 'Rise' John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) repeats over and over again 'anger is an energy.' He admits 'I could be wrong. I could be right.' Forty years later, in 2026, we know he's always been right. While affect studies maintains that emotion and affect are not synonyms, when it comes to the feeling-passage of the energies of a body and between bodies, anger is a common currency in the contemporary economy of affect. Rise/fall. Escalating, de-escalating, modulating. There are furious energies (anger, yes but not only) in circulation right now that foreground affect studies—with its attunements to the passage of intensities—as something more than another interpretive practice but also a transactor of energy conversions that directly confronts the rising fascisms of our age. What energies are needed to grow collective capacities to make life otherwise?