Progressive Geographies

Transnational Affects – Queen Mary, University of London, Wednesday 21^st May 2014, 9:30-18:00

Mile End campus, Arts One building, Arts Lecture Theatre

An AHRC International Symposium co-hosted by the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London and the Gender Research Group, Newcastle University

Keynote: Jasbir Puar (Rutgers) 

Speakers: Joan Anim-Addo (Goldsmiths); Ben Anderson (Durham); Lilie Chouliaraki (LSE); Denise deCaires Narain (Sussex); Alison Donnell (Reading); Caleb Johnston (Edinburgh); Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck); Amit Rai (Queen Mary); Carolyn Pedwell (Newcastle and Queen Mary)

This one-day AHRC international symposium explores what it might mean to offer a transnational perspective on the ‘turn to affect’, focusing on interdisciplinary feminist, postcolonial, queer and other critical perspectives.  The event brings together a range of scholarly fields and geo-political sites to examine how affects, emotions and feelings are produced through transnational relations of power and, in turn, how transnational politics work via the circulation of affect.  Paying particular attention to shifting gendered, racialised, sexualised and classed dynamics, speakers will address the complex ways in which affects are generated within, circulated through, and productive of transnational processes of empire, colonialism, slavery, diaspora, migration, globalisation, neoliberalism, biopolitics, development, global media, international security, and other phenomena.  

Drawing on and extending important work within the fields of affect theory, the history of emotions, transnational studies, international geo-politics, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, postcolonial and critical race studies, and media, cultural and literary theory, among other fields, the event considers the implications of transnational analysis of affective politics for: our understandings of temporality and spatiality; the non- and more-than-human; constitutive entanglements of ‘the discursive’ and ‘the material’, ‘the personal’ and ‘the impersonal’, ‘the biological’ and ‘the cultural’ and ‘the structural’ and ‘the ephemeral’; and critical projects of gendering, queering and decolonizing affect theory.  We will examine how emotions and affects are understood, produced and felt differently across different cultural and geo-political contexts and circuits and asks what role feeling plays in wider transnational processes of translation, mediation, imagination and attunement.  From different angles, the symposium addresses the central question of how we can attend to the affective hierarchies and exclusions that contemporary transnational relations (re)produce while nonetheless keeping our senses open to the unpredictable futures of affective politics.

This is a free event; however, places are limited.  For further information about the event and to reserve your place please visit the site.

Convener: Carolyn Pedwell (Newcastle and Queen Mary): Carolyn.Pedwell@ncl.ac.uk