This workshop calls for projects that re-examine the formation of solidarities, animosities, and hierarchies through the attachment of affects. [1]
Emotions attach as power. The force of sticky, compulsive, and pleasurable affect binds things–feelings like shame might clump bodies together into fleeting partnerships or bond them into lasting solidarities. But emotions also get attached to bodies; affects are conditioned, projected, and translated by relations of power. Anti-Blackness might bind fear to racialized subjects or a settler colonial war machine may convert grief into power. How might attention to these and other affective attachments (see “Potential Forms of Attachment”) help us create more reparative knowledge about power? [2]
We learn about the attachment of affects through method. Forging critical methods for affect theory can clarify the specificities, historicities, and material stakes of affective attachment–including those of public discourse and scholarly inquiry. How specifically do we read emotions in our research? How do we feel affects in our fieldwork? How do we measure affect in our datasets? How do the specifics of our data—the situatedness of good feelings, the physiology of fear, or the context of intensity—reveal the entanglement of power with affects? [3]
Workshop presentations should focus on the details of power and method. We invite submissions to this workshop to consider:
The 2023 inaugural Comparing Affects Workshop invited 20 scholars to discuss methods for studying affect theory and the politics of comparing affects. The 2025 series invites scholars to consider approaches to the attachment of affects and their connections to power. This biennial workshop will take place virtually on February 22, 2025.
Applicants may submit a 300-word abstract, which describes your project, its method, and its relationship to affective attachments, to: bit.ly/attachingaffects. The application deadline has been extended to December 13, 2024. Your project should be suitable for a 15-minute presentation. Works-in-progress are welcome. Questions and other inquiries can be sent to comparing.affects@gmail.com.
[1]: Chen 2012; Gould 2009; Schaefer 2015, 2018, 2022; Sedgwick and Frank 1995; Seigworth and Pedwell 2023; Slaby and von Scheve 2019; Thomas 2010.
[2]: Ahmed 2004 and 2014; Berlant 2011; Chan-Malik 2018; Clarke 2019; Corrigan 2020; Deleuze and Guattari 1980; Elias 2018; Gould, 2009; Khoja-Moolji, 2021; Malatino 2022; Muñoz 2006; Ngai 2005; Palmer 2017; Pelkmans 2017; Pellegrini and Puar 2009; Winant 2023; Yao 2021.
[3]: Åhäll 2018; Cottingham 2024; Kahl 2019; Knudsen, Timm and Stage 2015; Stewart 2007.