I’ll be in Lancaster PA with Mikey Georgeson for #SSASS: ANIMATIONS AND PROVOCATIONS Society for the Study of Affect Summer School July 29 to August 02, 2019.
Registration will open here on the 1st April as will details about the seminar programme.
Tag: affect theory
A&SM#4 Full Programme
We are very pleased to confirm the full programme (see below) for the fourth Affect and Social Media one day conference at UEL’s USS building in Stratford, east London on Nov 7th.
The 2018 event marks the publication of the first Affect and Social Media book (Rowman & Littlefield International).
Together with 7 panels, featuring cutting edge international research and curated sensorium performances, there is a special keynote by Patricia Ticineto Clough followed by a keynote panel and audience Q&A.
The event will culminate with the A&SM book launch, live music from The Indelicates and refreshments.
A&SM#4 is free, but advance online registration is essential to gain access to UEL’s USS campus building.
To register and see more information on the conference visit: https://viralcontagion.blog/affect-social-media4/
Affect and Social Media#4 Programme
University Square Stratford, east London, UK, 7th Nov 2018, 10am-10pm
| Time. Location
All Rooms TBC |
Actual Occasion | ||
| 10.00-11.10am Entrance to the University Stratford Square Campus Building | Registration
Please note that before entering the campus all attendees must register online: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/affect-social-media4-notifications-from-the-technological-nonconscious-tickets-46972453874 |
||
| 11.15-11.45
Room USG.17 Main Lecture Theatre |
Welcome to A&SM#4 by Tony D Sampson
plus Sensorium One |
||
| Break 15mins | |||
| 12-1pm
Parallel Sessions A Choice of three panels Panel 1: USG.17 Panel 2: USG19 or US2.30 Panel 3: USG20 or US2.31 |
Panel 1 Chaired by Greg Seigworth
Lisa Blackman (Goldsmiths, UK) Haunted Data
Camilla Møhring Reestorff (Aarhus University, Denmark) Affective Governmentalization: Backlashes again the #Metoo-movement in Denmark
Heather Radwan Jaber (University of Pennsylvania, USA) Sexual harassment and social media in Egypt: Reorienting the resonance machine |
Panel 2 Chaired by Darren Ellis
Vered Elishar-Malka & Yaron Ariel (Yezreel Valley College, Israel) Social media, Legacy media, and the public, in the Trump(ing) era
Suzanne van Geuns (University of Toronto, Canada) Rational Virtuosity and Religious Promise: Aspiring toward Jordan Peterson in Reddit Debates
Fadi Safieddine, (Queen Mary University, UK) Factors contributing to the continuing failure in combating the spread of fake news on Social Media |
Panel 3 Chaired by Ian Tucker
Maximilian Stobbe, (Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany) My Reaction Can Be Summed up by the Guy at 2:23!” – YouTube Reaction Videos as Affective Practices
Orsolya Bajusz (Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary) The affective dynamics of online shaming and liberal moral outrage
Fulla Abdul-Jabbar (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA) Why did you cry when you read that poem |
| Break 5mins | Find next panel | ||
| Parallel Session B
1.05-2.05pm Choice of two panels Panel 4 in USG. 19/20 or USG. 19 Panel 5 in USG.20 or US2.31
|
Panel 4 Chaired by Darren Ellis
Angie Voela (University of East London, UK) Fragile masculinities and contemporary psycho-power: The Case of InCel
Ali Lara (University of East London, UK) Affective Modulation in Positive Psychology’s Regime of Happiness
Trenton Lee (University of Westminster, UK) Feeling the Burn: Effect of Digital Capitalism on the Mental Health of Creators
|
Panel 5 Chaired by Stephen Maddison
Sarah Cefai (London College of Communication, UK) Stupid in the Moment: Excavating the Patriarchal Nonconscious of Humiliation
Christina Riley (George Mason University, Virginia), The Affective Flux of Feminist Digital Collectives or What Happened to the Women’s March of 2017
Annelot Prins (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) How Much Do You Want To Meet Taylor Swift? The Cruel Optimism of Online
|
|
| 2.05-3.05pm
In USG.19/20 and/or the Foyer |
The Sensorium 2
The Actual Occasion – a silent disco with Mikey B Georgeson
|
||
| Parallel Session C
3.05-4.05pm Choice of two panels Panel 6 in USG. 19/20 or USG. 19 Panel 7 in USG.20 or US2.31
|
Panel 6 Chaired by Ali Lara
Antonia Hernández (Concordia University, Canada) The Simple, the Compound, and the Spurious: Assemblages of Bots and Humans on a Sexcam Platform
Elena Pilipets (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria) Sleeping with Netflix: The (Dis)Connected Body of Serial Binge Viewer
Andreas Schellewald (University of Edinburgh, UK) Going down the algorithmic rabbit hole: approaching affective engagement in montage videos on social media platforms
|
Panel 7 Chaired by Stephen Maddison
Vered Elishar-Malka, Dana Weimann-Saks & Yaron Ariel (Yezreel Valley College, Israel) The Secret Online World of Women: Intimacy and Exposure among Women’s Closed Facebook Groups
Josie Barnard (Middlesex University, UK) The Multimodal Writer
|
|
| 4.05-4.15pm | 10min break | ||
| Session D
4.15-6.45.pm in Main Lecture Theatre USG.17 |
Keynote Session
Patricia Ticineto Clough: The User Unconscious: Embodiment and Thought Audience Q&A Keynote Panel Opening response by Gregory J. Seigworth (Millersville) Keynote Panel Jessica Ringrose (UCL), Amit Rai (Queen Mary), Rebecca Coleman (Goldsmiths), Darren Ellis and Ian Tucker (East London) Audience Q&A with panel Session D chaired by Tony D Sampson |
||
| 7-10pm
USG.19/20 and USS Foyer |
Affect and Social Media book launch & Sensorium Performance 3 including
Live performance by The Indelicates
|
||
Call for Papers for A&SM#4: Notifications from the Technological Nonconscious
Affect & Social Media#4: Notifications from the Technological Nonconscious
Conference date: Wednesday, November 7th 2018
Venue: University Square Stratford Building, East London, UK
Keynote: Patricia Ticineto Clough
Keynote Panel (tbc)
Conference Information Page: https://viralcontagion.wordpress.com/affect-social-media4/
To mark the publication of the first Affect and Social Media book (Rowman and Littlefield, July 2018) we are very pleased to announce a cfp for a special A&SM#4 one day (free registration) conference.
We welcome 250 word abstracts for 15min presentations from scholars working across disciplinary borders, theories, concepts and methodologies (arts & humanities, social sciences, psychology, computer and data science etc.).
We especially welcome contributions from postgraduate students and early career researchers.
Abstracts should ideally respond creatively (and flexibly) to one of the six conference themes set out below.
Deadline for submission of abstracts: Sept 15th 2018.
Send a 250 word abstract as an email (no attachments) including full name, affiliation and email contact address to t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk
Accepted abstracts will help to frame a series of subsequent discussion points/questions that will be addressed by our keynote panel (to be announced shortly).
Conference Themes
- Unthinking
The exponential rise of social media in the early twenty first century has drawn much critical attention in the humanities to a seemingly paradoxical human-computer relation. On one hand, human thought is both contemporaneous with, and frequently outperformed by, the uber-cognitions of corporate computational media technology. There is, indeed, much concern expressed about the possible absence of human consciousness from the computational world it created (Hayles, 2017; Hansen, 2015). On the other hand though, it would seem that the thoughts, feelings, behaviours and experiences of social media users, far from disappearing, are, often by design, captured and nudged from here to there by an expanding yet mostly imperceptible technological nonconscious (Clough, 2000, Thrift, 2007, Grusin, 2010). What, if anything, is disappearing in the human-computer relation?
- Addicting
Computational media can no longer simply be defined through the operations of narrowly defined cognitive machines implicated in clandestine data harvesting and the manipulation of individual users through e.g. psychographic profiling. Social media is a “social” machine of capture that works on relations and shared felt experiences (Sampson, Maddison and Ellis, 2018), triggering habitual tendencies (Chun, 2016) that seem to produce mass media addictions (Bartlett and Bowden-Jones, 2017). As a major component part of the propagation of the technological nonconscious, social media is less defined today by the familiar ease of connection discourses of Web 2.0 than it is by the difficulty of disconnection (Karppi, 2018). Like other media of addiction (drugs, gambling, sex), social media hooks users in the event of the habit refrain, triggering subsequent emotional anxieties and contagions. Is social media addiction a problem of personal compulsion or collective masochism?
- Feeling
Computational social media is a feeling machine. It feels, or prehends, the event (Ellis, 2018). But this does not mean that it has feelings, in the sense in which humans feel. There are limitations imposed on the potential of affective computing to actually feel (Shaviro, 2015). Social media is constrained to the mere reading of sentiment data, and like an actor, it can feign expressions of human emotion, but cannot feel them. However, the operational level of computational media can learn, algorithmically, from emotional experiences. It can pass on, or transmit, feelings. It can plant a behavioural hook in the user experience. Social media has an affective tone or atmosphere through which the human-computer relation strives. Feeling the event is a different matter.
- Sleeping
Always on social media never sleeps! “Prolonged awakening, work without the limit of time, excessive light, surplus information… links… attentional capture is the new Atopia” (Neyrat, 2017). But the users of social media are often positioned as vulnerable, sleepwalking user-subjects: the user unconscious (Clough, 2018), the network somnambulist (Sampson, 2012, 2016). Like Crary’s (1999) earlier rendition of attentive analogue media subjects, the users of social media are simultaneously attentive and inattentive, and attracted and distracted by the fascinations of notifications, posts, tweets, likes, shares… This technological nonconscious, or Unthought (Hayles, 2017) human-computer relation is not unconscious, as conventionally understood.
- Dreaming
In The User Unconscious: On Affect. Media, and Measure (2018), Patricia Ticineto Clough argues that computational media networks have fundamentally affected what it means to be human. “We are both human and other-than-human.” This luminous text explains what it means to live, think, and dream from this “other-than-human perspective.” Here Clough moves to answer questions concerning the extent to which human lives are now animated in the multiple layers of these vast computational networks and how these layers radically transform our sense of self, subjectivity, sociality, and unconscious processes. How can we probe what it means to live, think, and dream through this newly animated technological nonconscious?
- Trumping
Who is to blame for Trump? Trump on Twitter may seem like the unpredictable personal opinions of a racist, sexist, xenophobe that infects a population, but the technological nonconscious, or thing-self of the user unconscious, as Clough points out, “transgress[es] the separation of the personal and the networked.” It is the “affective tone” of social media itself that made Trump possible! Social media has given expressive support to a kind of microfascist populism or “population racism” that is currently spreading everywhere. What will it take to out trump the collective impulse that is Trump?
Top illustration by Francesco Tacchini, 2015
Final Call for Abstracts: “Neuroaffect” at Capacious
Final Call for Abstracts: “Neuroaffect” at Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space Conference: August 8 to 11, 2018
Final reminder – The final deadline for submissions is Thursday, March 15, 2018.
Call for 250-word paper abstracts for Stream 15: Neuroaffect
For Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space Conference: August 8 to 11, 2018 at Millersville University’s Ware Center, Lancaster, Pennsylvania: http://capaciousjournal.com/conference/
S15: “Neuroaffect”
Call for 250-word paper abstracts can now be submitted to
The final deadline for submissions is Thursday, March 15, 2018.
STREAM ORGANIZER
Tony D. Sampson
Tony D. Sampson
For the most part affect theory has enthusiastically welcomed the neurosciences into its fold. Through the work of Libet (1985), Damasio (1995), and LeDoux (2003), for example, affect theorists have challenged mainstream anthropocentricism in the humanities, upsetting the stability of a model of human cognition previously assumed to hold sway over the perceptible world. As follows, the brain sciences have helped to support an alternative perspective in which humans arrive late to consciousness since their brains take time to build a cognitive reaction. Immediate experience of consciousness is, as such, a backdated illusion and just one of many responses to the dynamics of the exteriority of experience. As Gibbs (2010) argues, there can be no “pure cognition… uncontaminated by the richness of sensate experience, including affective experience” (p. 200). Indeed, according to affect theory, thinking is not at all limited to the thought inside the brain. On one hand, somatic markers act as a kind of corporeal thinking in which emotion becomes a capture of affect in consciousness. On the other, a new materialist affect theory extends the image of thought to a wider remit of incorporeal sense making including nonhumans, self-organizing matter, assemblages and events. The analytical focus has thus shifted away from conventional cognitive processes (perception, memory, representation) to the significance of such things as imperceptibility (Grosz, 2003), precognition and nonrepresentation (Thrift, 2007), premediation (Grusin, 2010), processual incorporeality (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010) and discognition (Shaviro, 2015).
There has, nevertheless, been an inevitable backlash against affect theory’s cosying up to the brain sciences. Wetherall (2012), for example, argues that Thrift and Massumi take the wrong message from neuroscience (p. 61). Her work does not simply reject neuroscience, but instead uses it to (re)personalize affect and renegotiate it alongside discourse, representation and meaning. Similarly, Hayles (2017) has recently drawn on the same neuroscientific resources as affect theory (e.g. Damasio, Libet), but argues against the Spinoza-Deleuzian overtures of new materialism and returns the brain (and its fellow cognizers) to the cognitive theoretical frame.
The neuroaffect stream welcomes provocative, inventive and speculative interventions that engage with the wide-ranging influence of the neurosciences on affect theory and related areas. It asks for submissions that engage with neuro-concepts of affect, such as the nonconscious, somatic markers, lags, mirror neurons, neuro-typicality, assemblage brains, technological nonconscious and discognition, while also addressing the numerous challenges and reinventions of affect stemming from various interventions in the humanities and social sciences.
Possible topics for the stream are not limited to the following neuros:
Neuroaffect, somatic markers, lags, mirror neurons, neuro-typicality, cognition, noncognition, discognition, consciousness, nonconsciousness, technological nonconscious, brains, microbrains, assemblage brains, temporality and space, locationism, neuroevents, neuropolitics, neuropopulism, neuro-dystopia/utopia, neurocapitalism, neuromedia, ontology, nonhumans, Anthropocene, contagion, organic and inorganic matter, assemblages, antilocationism, neurophilosophy, neurophenomenology, neuroprocess philosophy, neurocomputing, neural nets, brain-computer interfaces, neurofiction, brain-art, neuroaesthetics, neurobleedin’ everything…
REFERENCES
Damasio, A. (1995). Descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Penguin.
Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens: body, emotion, and the making of consciousness. London: Vintage.
Gibbs, A. (2010). After affect sympathy, Synchrony, and mimetic communication. In Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.), The affective theory reader (pp. 186-205). Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. J. (2010). The affective theory reader. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Grosz, E. (2002). A politics of imperceptibility: A response to ‘anti-racism, multiculturalism and the ethics of identification’ Philosophy and Social Criticism. 28 (4) pp. 463-472.
Grusin, R. (2010). Premediation: affect and mediality after 9/11. New York, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hayles, K. N. (2006). Traumas in code. Critical Inquiry 33(1), 136-157.
Hayles, K. N. (2017). Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Karppi, T. Kahkonen, L. & Mannevuo, M. (Eds.) (2016). Affective capitalism. Ephemera (16)4 Ephemera.
LeDoux, J. (2003). The synaptic self: how our brains become who we are. New York: Penguin Books.
Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral Brain Sciences. (8)5, 29–566.
Rolls, E. T. (2012). Neuroculture: on the implications of brain science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shaviro, S. (2015). Discognition. New York: Repeater Books.
Sampson, T. D. (2016). The Assemblage brain: sense making in neuroculture. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Thrift, N. (2004). Remembering the technological unconscious by foregrounding knowledges of position. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 22(1), 175-190.
Thrift, N. (2007). Non-Representational theory: space, politics, affect. New York, London: Routledge.
Dr Tony D Sampson PhD, MA, BSc, FHEA
Reader in Digital Media Cultures and Communications
Reader in Digital Media Cultures and Communications
College of Arts, Technology and Innovation
UEL
UEL
Twitter: @TonyDSpamson
Profile: https://www.uel.ac.uk/Staff/s/tony-sampson
Profile: https://www.uel.ac.uk/Staff/s/tony-sampson
Latest publication: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-assemblage-brain
Club Critical Theory: https://clubcriticaltheory.wordpress.com/
Affect and Social Media out July 2018
In production now with Rowman & Littlefield
Affect and Social Media
Emotion, Mediation, Anxiety and Contagion
Affect and Social Media is an edited collection of twenty bite sized articles by leading scholars from across disciplinary boundaries. It is comprised of four distinct but related sections which are interspersed with artistic illustrations, depicting the affectivities that flow through social media. The term ‘affect’ denotes a rather slippery concept that is not as easily caught as for example ‘emotion’ or ‘feeling’. Quite often it denotes a more than or an excess to that which is felt in the human body or indexed through cultural grids of meaning. It can exist in ways which defy expectations, conventions, and representations. It is often understood as that which is vital to the emergence of the new and hence socio-cultural revolution. As life shifts ever more on-line, we find ourselves caught up in the affective flows of computer mediated practices into an ever expanding and indeterminate horizon. This compilation of articles that were initially presented at an international conference in East London, were selected on the basis of their ability to depict and conceptualise these radical movements of sociality.
Contents
Foreword by Gregory Seigworth
Introduction: On Affect and Social Media by Tony D. Sampson, Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison
Part One: Digital Emotion
Introduction by Helen Powell
Chapter One: Social media, emoticons and process by Darren Ellis
Chapter Two: Anticipating affect: trigger warnings in a mental health social media site by Lewis Goodings
Chapter Three: Digitally mediated emotion: Simondon, affectivity and individuation by Ian Tucker
Chapter Four: Visceral data by Luke Stark
Chapter Five: Psychophysiological measures associated with affective states while using social media by Maurizio Mauri
Part Two: Mediated Connectivities, Immediacies & Intensities
Introduction by Jussi Parikka
Chapter Six: Social media and the materialisation of the affective present by Rebecca Coleman
Chapter Seven: The education of feeling: Wearable technology & triggering pedagogies by Alyssa D. Niccolini
Chapter Eight: Mediated affect & feminist solidarity: Teens’ using Twitter to challenge ‘rape culture’ in and around school by Jessica Ringrose and Kaitlynn Mendes
Part Three: Insecurity and Anxiety
Introduction by Darren Ellis and Stephen Maddison
Chapter Nine: Wupocalypse Now: Supertrolls and other risk Anxieties in social media interactions by Greg Singh
Chapter Ten: Becoming user in popular culture by Zara Dinnen
Chapter Eleven: #YouTuberanxiety: Affect and anxiety performance in UK beauty vlogging by Sophie Bishop
Chapter Twelve: Chemsex: anatomy of a sex panic by Jamie Hakim
Chapter Thirteen: Designing life? Affect and gay porn by Stephen Maddison
Chapter Four: Contagion: Image, Work, Politics and Control
Introduction by Tony D Sampson
Chapter Fourteen: The mask of Ebola: Fear, contagion, and immunity by Yiğit Soncul
Chapter Fifteen: The newsroom is no longer a safe zone: Assessing the affective impact of graphic user-generated images on journalists working with social media by Stephen Jukes
Chapter Sixteen: Emotions, social media communication and TV debates by Morgane Kimmich
Chapter Seventeen: The Failed Utopias of Walden and Walden Two by Robert Wright
Acknowledgements
Index
978-1-78660-438-5 • Hardback • July 2018 • $105.00 • (£70.00)
978-1-78660-439-2 • Paperback • July 2018 • $34.95 • (£23.95)
978-1-78660-440-8 • eBook • July 2018 • $32.95 • (£22.95) (coming soon)
Call for Abstracts: “Neuroaffect” at Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space Conference: August 8 to 11, 2018
Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space Conference: August 8 to 11, 2018.
Millersville University’s Ware Center
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Stream 15 (please note change of title for S15)
S15: “Neuroaffect”
Call for 250-word paper abstracts can now be submitted to
The final deadline for submissions is Thursday, March 15, 2018.
STREAM ORGANIZER
Tony D. Sampson
For the most part affect theory has enthusiastically welcomed the neurosciences into its fold. Through the work of Libet (1985), Damasio (1995), and LeDoux (2003), for example, affect theorists have challenged mainstream anthropocentricism in the humanities, upsetting the stability of a model of human cognition previously assumed to hold sway over the perceptible world. As follows, the brain sciences have helped to support an alternative perspective in which humans arrive late to consciousness since their brains take time to build a cognitive reaction. Immediate experience of consciousness is, as such, a backdated illusion and just one of many responses to the dynamics of the exteriority of experience. As Gibbs (2010) argues, there can be no “pure cognition… uncontaminated by the richness of sensate experience, including affective experience” (p. 200). Indeed, according to affect theory, thinking is not at all limited to the thought inside the brain. On one hand, somatic markers act as a kind of corporeal thinking in which emotion becomes a capture of affect in consciousness. On the other, a new materialist affect theory extends the image of thought to a wider remit of incorporeal sense making including nonhumans, self-organizing matter, assemblages and events. The analytical focus has thus shifted away from conventional cognitive processes (perception, memory, representation) to the significance of such things as imperceptibility (Grosz, 2003), precognition and nonrepresentation (Thrift, 2007), premediation (Grusin, 2010), processual incorporeality (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010) and discognition (Shaviro, 2015).
There has, nevertheless, been an inevitable backlash against affect theory’s cosying up to the brain sciences. Wetherall (2012), for example, argues that Thrift and Massumi take the wrong message from neuroscience (p. 61). Her work does not simply reject neuroscience, but instead uses it to (re)personalize affect and renegotiate it alongside discourse, representation and meaning. Similarly, Hayles (2017) has recently drawn on the same neuroscientific resources as affect theory (e.g. Damasio, Libet), but argues against the Spinoza-Deleuzian overtures of new materialism and returns the brain (and its fellow cognizers) to the cognitive theoretical frame.
The neuroaffect stream welcomes provocative, inventive and speculative interventions that engage with the wide-ranging influence of the neurosciences on affect theory and related areas. It asks for submissions that engage with neuro-concepts of affect, such as the nonconscious, somatic markers, lags, mirror neurons, neuro-typicality, assemblage brains, technological nonconscious and discognition, while also addressing the numerous challenges and reinventions of affect stemming from various interventions in the humanities and social sciences.
Possible topics for the stream are not limited to the following neuros:
Neuroaffect, somatic markers, lags, mirror neurons, neuro-typicality, cognition, noncognition, discognition, consciousness, nonconsciousness, technological nonconscious, brains, microbrains, assemblage brains, temporality and space, locationism, neuroevents, neuropolitics, neuropopulism, neuro-dystopia/utopia, neurocapitalism, neuromedia, ontology, nonhumans, Anthropocene, contagion, organic and inorganic matter, assemblages, antilocationism, neurophilosophy, neurophenomenology, neuroprocess philosophy, neurocomputing, neural nets, brain-computer interfaces, neurofiction, brain-art, neuroaesthetics, neurobleedin’ everything…
REFERENCES
Damasio, A. (1995). Descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. New York: Penguin.
Damasio, A. (2000). The feeling of what happens: body, emotion, and the making of consciousness. London: Vintage.
Gibbs, A. (2010). After affect sympathy, Synchrony, and mimetic communication. In Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.), The affective theory reader (pp. 186-205). Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Gregg, M. & Seigworth, G. J. (2010). The affective theory reader. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
Grosz, E. (2002). A politics of imperceptibility: A response to ‘anti-racism, multiculturalism and the ethics of identification’ Philosophy and Social Criticism. 28 (4) pp. 463-472.
Grusin, R. (2010). Premediation: affect and mediality after 9/11. New York, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hayles, K. N. (2006). Traumas in code. Critical Inquiry 33(1), 136-157.
Hayles, K. N. (2017). Unthought: the power of the cognitive nonconscious. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
Karppi, T. Kahkonen, L. & Mannevuo, M. (Eds.) (2016). Affective capitalism. Ephemera (16)4 Ephemera.
LeDoux, J. (2003). The synaptic self: how our brains become who we are. New York: Penguin Books.
Libet, B. (1985). Unconscious cerebral initiative and the role of conscious will in voluntary action. Behavioral Brain Sciences. (8)5, 29–566.
Rolls, E. T. (2012). Neuroculture: on the implications of brain science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shaviro, S. (2015). Discognition. New York: Repeater Books.
Sampson, T. D. (2016). The Assemblage brain: sense making in neuroculture. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Thrift, N. (2004). Remembering the technological unconscious by foregrounding knowledges of position. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 22(1), 175-190.
Thrift, N. (2007). Non-Representational theory: space, politics, affect. New York, London: Routledge.
Wetheral, M. (2012). Affect and emotion: a new social science understanding. London: Sage.
Call for papers: Affect, Politics, Social Media
Call for papers: Affect, Politics, Social Media
In prolongation of Affect and Social Media #3 Conjunctions: Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation welcomes proposals that interpret and explore affective and emotional encounters with social media and the ways in which the interfaces of social media in return modulate affectivity. Fake news have come to be a highly debated framework to understand the consequences of the entanglements of affect, politics and social media. But theories on fake news often fail to grasp the consequences and significance of social media content that are not necessarily fake, but are merely intended to affectively intensify certain political positions.
It is in this context that it becomes crucial to understand the role of affect in relation to the ways in which social media interfaces function, how affective relations are altered on social media and not least how politics is transformed in the attempt to capitalize on the affective relations and intensities potentially fostered on social media.
This special issue invites empirical, theoretical and practical contributions that focus on recent (political) media events – such as Brexit, the US and French elections and the refugee crisis – and how these unfolded on, and are informed by, social media. Proposals might, for instance, address how the Trump campaign allows us to develop a new understanding of the relationship between social media and politics. As such the issue seeks papers that develop new understandings of affective politics and take into account shared experiences, affective intensities, emotional engagements and new entanglements with social media.
For more information, including author guidelines, please visit http://www.conjunctions-tjcp.com/
Deadline 28 November 2017
Articles must be submitted to conjunctions@cc.au.dk
All the best
Tony Sampson, Camilla Reestorff, Hannah Clemmensen, Jonas Fritsch and Jette Kofoed
Images from A&SM 3.0 May 25th 2017
Registration for Affect and Social Media 3.0 – deadline extended due to 404 error
Colleagues,
Apologies to anyone encountering a 404 error on the registration link for Affect and Social Media 3.0 in the last 24hours. This has now been fixed.
Please note, as a result we have extended registration to 20th May.
Join us on Thurs May 25th for a stimulating international and interdisciplinary programme of speakers, the sensorium art show plus drinks and nibbles.
Keynotes are Jessica Ringrose (UCL) and Emma Renold (Cardiff).
Full programme
Direct link to registration
External Students £3
Working £5
Free for UEL staff and students (must register).
Best wishes,
Tony
Digital atmospheres: affective practices of care in Elefriends
Fascinating article on care, affect and social media by Ian M Tucker and Lewis Goodings in Sociology of Health & Illness Vol. xx No. xx 2017 ISSN 0141-9889, pp. 1–14.
“We find that the caring relations developed through social media
often need to be cared for themselves.”
Ian will be doing a paper on Simondon at the Affect and Social Media Conference on May 25th at UEL.
Lewis and Ian are also contributing to the forthcoming A&SM edited book.
Abstract
This article develops the concept of digital atmosphere to analyse the affective power
of social media to shape practices of care and support for people living with mental
distress. Using contemporary accounts of affective atm ospheres, the article focuses
on feelings of distress, support and care that unfold through digital atmospheres. The
power of social media intersects with people’s support and care-seeking practices in
multiple ways and not in a straightforward model of ‘accessing or providing
support’. Indeed, we find that the caring relations developed through social media
often need to be cared for themselves. The article draws on online and interview data
from a larger project investigating how practices of care and support are
(re)configured in the mental health-related social media site Elefriends. Users have to
negotiate the disruption of moving support online, as well as the possibility of
becoming subject to a fragility in care, in which caring for oneself becomes bound up
in the ambiguities of caring for others. We argue that understanding how experiences
of distress are shaped by social media is essential for understanding the implications
of the increased digitisati on of mental healthcare.
Keywords: social media, mental distress, digital atmosphere, affect, Elefriends
Mental distress, social media and affect
The experience of mental distress is increasingly shaped by social media (Aboujaoude and Starcevic 2015, Bauman and Rivers 2015). The proliferation of social media in the digital age has led to the development of a range of mental health–focused social media, designed as tools for support for people suffering ongoing mental distress (see Hamm et al. 2013 for a useful review). This article focuses on the use of one social media site as a digital space that facilitates peer support. We aim to explore the affective experience of using the site Elefriends and the dilemmas and challenges that are produced in the act of co-constituting distress (and responses to distress) via an online platform. The concept of digital atmosphere is developed to analyse the individual and collective forms of affective experienc e emerging in and through social media. This builds on the growing literature on
atmospheres that has developed in affect studies (Anderson 2014, Brennan 2004). The use of the concept of atmosphere allows us to address experiences of distress through encounters between bodies and social media as technological objects, as well as digital spaces for interaction. Such encounters involve the transmission of affects that come to inform and produce individual feelings of distress.
