[csaa-forum] Affect in cultural studies

Wed Nov 3 06:06:28 CST 2004

Some of you may be interested to know that some of the people associated
with the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process at
Goldsmiths College, University of London are interested in and working on
affect from a broadly cultural studies perspective (albeit with a Deleuze,
Tarde, Latour, Haraway et al thrown in).

I've enclose a list of speakers for a current seminar series on affect.
The website is -
http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp/source/overview.html

Equally, the Centre for Cultural Studies (headed by Scott Lash) at
Goldsmiths has also been pursuing some of these issues over the recent
years. Website is - http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cultural-studies/

There are others, but I'll leave it at that!

best
David Oswell

Wednesday 8th December
4.30-6.00pm, WT 12 th Floor Seminar Room

THE POLITICS OF BAD FEELING

With Sara Ahmed

Wednesday 24th November
4.30-6.00pm, WT 12 th Floor Seminar Room

SONIC ENVELOPES: AURALITY, SUBJECTIVITY AND GEOMETRY

With Peg Rawes

Monday 22nd November
4.00-6.00pm, WT 12 th Floor Seminar Room

FEMINIST RESEARCH AND MEN'S BODIES

with Ulla-Britt Lilleaas, Department of Sociology and Human Geography,
University of Oslo

Wednesday 10th November
4.30-6.00pm, WT 12 th Floor Seminar Room

THE AFFECT OF LAW

With Kirsten Campbell

Monday 8th November
4.00-6.00pm, WT 12 th Floor Seminar Room

ETHIC OR MORALITY: THINKING BIOETHICS

with Andrea Stockl

Wednesday 27th October
4.30-6.00pm, WT 12 th Floor Seminar Room

AFFECTIO AND AFFECTUS: A WORKSHOP ON DELEUZE'S SPINOZA LECTURES'

Reading Group Discussion led by Alberto Toscano

> Thanks for pointing out this work Anna - of course, my comments were
> aimed at the field generally, not at any particular individual or project -
> and certainly not your work. Indeed, I was originally going to quote your
> critical comments about the poor use of affect in CS in a short piece you
> wrote for Continuum a couple of years ago, as well as Elsepth's comments.
>
> I still believe CS uses affect poorly, despite the good work done by
> you and others. And I think it is particularly needing more empirical work.
> Grossberg's work seemed to me a case in point.
>
>
> Re your brain project - sound great - but one project on the brain
> does not a summer of studies make!
>
> But of course my main intention was to provoke discussion on these
> important issues - your response is important to this discussion. So,
> thanks.
>
>
> cheers greg
>
>
> greg
>
>> 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
>> _______________________________________
>>
>>
>> csaa-forum discussion list of the cultural studies association of
>> australasia
>>
>> www.csaa.asn.au
>
>
> --
> Dr Greg Noble
>
>
> School of Humanities            	ph:     (02) 47 360 365
> University of Western Sydney
> C Bldg, Kingswood campus
> Locked Bag 1797                    	email: g.noble at uws.edu.au
> Penrith South DC
> NSW 1797
> Australia
>
>
> Researcher, Centre for Cultural Research
> Parramatta Campus, UWS
>
>
> Co-author of Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other
> (Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2004)
> _______________________________________
>
>
> csaa-forum discussion list of the cultural studies association of
> australasia
>
> www.csaa.asn.au
>
>