Society for the Study of Affect (SSA)
#MAKE: Methods, Atmospheres, Knowledges, Energies
Vancouver, BC, October 23 to 25, 2026

Abstracts due May 29, 2026
Submit here: https://affectsociety.com/make/conference/?submit=paper&stream_id=30 

Amidst planetary precarities, lives lived continue to make worlds. Faced with blooms disrupted by climate change, bumblebees maintain synchrony with floral partners by biting leaves to stimulate flowering (Pashalidou et al., 2020); itinerant mushroom pickers roam abandoned industrial forests in Oregon, gleaning livelihoods from ephemeral fungal partnerships (Tsing, 2015); elephants seeking states of intoxication raid distilleries in postcolonial Sundarpar, generating affective animus amongst local communities (Barua, 2024). Practitioners studying multispecies relations take these worlds seriously, expanding terrains of sociality and interpretation. Multispecies affects are concerned with severed, fragmented, durable, and novel associations between and across species; they comprise the energies, atmospheres, and forms of ecological attunement and discordance that inhere in the making and unmaking of more-than-human worlds.

On a planet terraformed by colonial capitalism, how might attending to multispecies affects give insight into the ways lives are lived, and, the conditions that impress upon these forms of life? This stream invites panelists whose work attends to this question by bringing affect theory and multispecies studies into conversation. Participants are encouraged to submit research, methodological explorations and/or creative and aesthetic engagements.

Questions to consider:

What methods, tactics, practices make multispecies affects sensible?
How do distributions of the sensible inform politics of inhabitation, coexistence, or animus?
How might atmospheres inform relationships between humans and other than humans?
In multispecies worlds, who knows?
Can multispecies affects energize political transformations?
Potential topics include:

Lively capital (Haraway, 2008; Barua, 2023; Collard, 2020)
Attunement, listening, and sensorial methods (Durand and Sundberg, 2026)
Affective approaches to wild life politics and abundant futures (Collard, 2020; Collard, Dempsey, and Sundberg, 2015)
Affect, biopolitics, animality (Rutherford, 2022)
Multispecies rhythms (Despret, 2021; Van Patter, 2023)
Animals’ geographies, mobilities, and atmospheres (Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2020; Lorimer, Hodgetts, and Barua, 2019)
Affect, ethologies, and geography (Barua and Sinha, 2019; Lorimer 2011)
Affective ecologies and multispecies encounters (Myers and Hustak 2012)
Vegetal affects (Subramaniam 2024)
More-than-human contact zones (Isaacs and Otruba, 2019)
Postcolonial fauna and flora (Barua 2024)
Disabled ecologies (Taylor, 2024)
More-than-human making practices (Andreyev, 2021)