[csaa-forum] Affect in cultural studies

[Anna Gibbs]

Dear All,

reading the CSAA newsletter, I was surprised to see that Greg Noble 
has decided that affect is something Cultural Studies is 'crap at', 
although at least he seems to make an exception for Elspeth's work. 
Perhaps he is unaware of the work which has actually been happening 
in this area since the late nineties, including by colleagues at his 
own institution, who have long been working with theories of the 
discrete affects, as well as on wider theories of affectivity.

With my UWS colleagues Virginia Nightingale and Maria Angel, I am a 
member of the Affect-image-Media Research Group at UWS which we set 
up  after I started a clinical training in 1998 in which affect 
theory played a large part and it became clear that it could be used 
in empirical as well as theoretical projects in media and cultural 
studies.

Our major, internally funded, project is on Horror Images and 
Negative Affects. Virginia Nightingale and I gave a joint paper on 
this research at the Internet, Media and Mental Health Conference in 
Brisbane in May this year. I presented another paper that grew out of 
this work at the Gender Studies seminar at Sydney University in 
August. An earlier paper of mine - 'Disaffected' - speaking to the 
group's program was presented to the CSAA conference in Tasmania as 
part of our group's symposium on affect and was subsequently 
published in Continuum.

Maria and I were members of the Interinstitutional Silvan (not 
'Sylvan') Tomkins' Research Group which included academics from UWS, 
Sydney University, UTS and Macquarie. It was an interdisciplinary 
group: Melissa Hardie was the  other member who worked in Cultural 
Studies. We organised a symposium ('Between the Clinical and the 
Cultural') on the different understandings of affect in different 
fields. This group also presented a symposium on Tomkins' work at the 
Millennium Conference in Critical Psychology at UWS in 1999, and in 
March that same year, Maria and I organised an interdisciplinary 
conference on Darwin's work ('Darwin Undisciplined') at which there 
were several papers dealing with Darwin's work on affect.

In 2001 my paper on Pauline Hanson and the contagion of distress was 
published in the Australian Humanities Review. I continue to work in 
the area of public emotion and am working on a linkage application to 
this effect currently. I have also presented papers on other aspects 
of affect at the Cultural Studies conference in Boston this year, at 
the CSAA conference in Christchurch, and at various Psychoanalytic 
and Writing conferences in both Australia and overseas, all of which 
will soon appear in print.

Greg also mentions research on the brain in cultural studies: I am 
currently working on a book about mimicry and affect which deals - 
among other things - with the role of mirror neurons in human 
mimicry.  Maria has also done work on the brain in the context of her 
research on Face, and she has also recently had a major paper about 
affect theory accepted for publication. Elspeth Probyn has also 
recently written a paper that deals with the neural organisation of 
the stomach.

There are many other people working on affect in cultural studies all 
over the place  - in the last couple of years it has really been a 
strong focus which has produced a lot of good research, some of it in 
the form of as yet unpublished PhD theses both in mainstream Cultural 
Studies and in Writing, of which I have supervised several and 
examined others. More are in the pipeline.

In fact, I think Cultural Studies is finally getting good at affect, 
seven or eight years after we first started thinking seriously about 
it.

Anna G



-- 
Dr Anna Gibbs
Affect-Image-Media Research Group
School of Communication, Design and Media
University of Western Sydney
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith South DC
NSW 1797
AUSTRALIA
tel (612) 9852.5412
fax (612) 9852.5424
-- 
Dr Anna Gibbs
Affect-Image-Media Research Group
School of Communication, Design and Media
University of Western Sydney
Locked Bag 1797
Penrith South DC
NSW 1797
AUSTRALIA
tel (612) 9852.5412
fax (612) 9852.5424