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This study examines the affective milieus in the neoliberal university. Previous studies have demonstrated that, despite harsh neoliberal realities, academics still express a love for academic work. This study uses love as its conceptual tool to analyse the different forms of love that academics attach to science. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's theoretisations of affect, this study shows that emotions play a crucial role in organising social order. Emotions work to divide academia into separate ingroups that have different visions of the virtues of science that represent the object of love for its proponents. While analysing higher education magazines with affective-discursive reading, the results of this study show that the neoliberal university favours the forms of love in which the individual ethos and competition are highly valued, while those forms of love that highlight collegial and emancipatory values are on trial. Overall, this study contributes to critical discussions of the neoliberal university by demonstrating the power of emotions in the construction of conflicting, intersecting and overlapping ways of othering and the complex assemblage of affective milieus that exist in today's academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During 2019, we embarked on a fieldwork based on 18 semi-structured interviews with international scholars in the humanities and social sciences in Chilean universities to explore their experiences with knowledge. Drawing on theories of critique and neoliberalism, we analyzed their ambivalent and unsettling conjunction of attachments to neoliberal and critical knowledge formations. By developing the notion of regime of epistemic subjectification, we emphasized the affective intensities these experiences brought to bear amid the differential weight and interplay of neoliberalism and critique as ethico-epistemic modes of engagement. We argued that the dominant focus on neoliberal knowledge and entrepreneurial subjectivity, albeit intense, expansive, and seemingly omnipresent, must be complicated by exposing its ambivalent affective and somatic force, and recognizing the difference between critical academic products and the lived experience of critique. The latter was constituted in the outsides of the inside of the neoliberal knowledge regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the 'performativity of disgust' as a feminist strategy that takes place in various instances of menstrual activism. The analysis is based on an ethnographic study in Spain, which focused on alternative politics and cultures of menstruation that question the negative hegemonic Western vision of menstruation. By analysing the debates around gender, feminism, and corporality that arise in this field, the article highlights alternative corporal and menstrual imaginaries. The article contributes to and extends critical menstruation studies by exploring how feminist activists who engage in menstrual politics produce an aesthetic of disgust by reappropriating the abject, and in so doing, question the politics of menstrual disgust and gender inequalities. Paying special attention to collective initiatives that take place in public space, viewed as a place of social transformation, the article sheds light on how challenging the notion that 'menstruation is disgusting' can help us question gender and social inequalities, and promote social transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent populist 'explosion' in the US, UK and Europe has pushed radical right populist movements to the centre of western politics. Given criminology's long experience of penal populism in the 1980s and subsequent decades, these developments raise important questions as to the role of sociology of punishment, and the wider discipline of criminology, in responding to far-right populism. This article aims to takes stock of the existing literature on this phenomenon with a view to proposing a tentative criminological research agenda that may contribute to our understanding of the recent rise of authoritarian politics in Europe, the UK and US. While highlighting the continued salience of the emotions in contemporary 'security populism', the article cautions against what has been described as a 'pathologising' approach to research in this area. Building on this, the paper advances an argument for a criminological research agenda based on a post-dualistic understanding of political affects that seeks to move the analytic focus beyond negativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last 10 years there has been an increase in access to information and communication technologies among older people, stimulated by widespread adoption of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). At the same time, digital inclusion policies and training programmes continue to develop to increase the access to the digital society for this social group. In this context, it is pertinent to revisit a long-standing research question about how older adults use and learn to use these technologies in their everyday lives while paying attention to how their subjectivities and their knowledge are situated in the collective shared knowledge of digital practices. Using examples taken from a digital team ethnographic study exploring social media use in later life, this article delves into how learning digital practices and affective relations assemble and what they do to older people's subjectivities. Their engagements show how these practices are illustrative of the relevance of social connectivity, place, things and affects for learning how to use ICTs. We, then, move to discuss the policy implications of this for the understandings of ageing within a digital society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we develop the concept of affective infrastructure as the entanglement of affects, meanings and materiality to analyse protest camps as a specific organisational form of social and political movement. Drawing on two ethnographic research projects investigating an asylum seekers' protest camp in Helsinki, Finland, we argue that affects can be understood as having an infrastructural quality. The article contributes to research on affective politics by empirically studying the affective infrastructure of a protest camp. We distinguish between three interrelated dimensions of the affective infrastructure of a protest camp. First, affects are mobilised to mediate place-related meanings, the alteration of which is crucial to all protest camps. Second, affects are involved in creating the social space and atmosphere necessary to sustain a long-lasting protest. Third, affects impress themselves on abstract objects and ideas that must be managed as a part of the protest's political message. Affects not only join subjects and objects together but also divide them, illustrating that an infrastructure becomes visible when it staggers or fails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Movement learning has become a prominent issue in recent sport pedagogy research, including a particular concern about the new perspectives of movement learning. The turn towards new perspectives is partly spurred by discontent with the conventional perspectives of movement learning. The purpose of the article is to explore a journey into the kinescape of unicycling. The article can be seen as a case study of what it means to learn (how) to unicycle for one student teacher in the midst of a pedagogical research module and with the aid of the Deleuzian notion of a triadic relationship between percepts, affects and concepts. The analysis points to how a student, in the midst of material features such as equipment, the sport hall, other people, and instructional video clips, is mapping connections between concepts (what unicycling can be), percepts (a-ha moments) and affects (what moves him to continue practising unicycling), in ways that allow him to learn to unicycle with astonishing pace. His practising of unicycling is guided by particular strategies for exploration and experimentation that his experiences of board culture offer him. Rather than any general principles of movement learning, of importance here are the particular ways in which kinesio-cultural exploration may offer non-linear resources for movement learning. We conclude that this approach to learning may stimulate pedagogies that are not only effective but also more inclusive because they are more creative and more open than linear approaches to movement learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I propose to review Hannah Arendt, H. (1978). The life of the mind. A Harvest Book. Harcourt, Inc perspective on the will and explore her possible contributions for a psychological reflection on this notion. Although willing and other neighbouring concepts such as volition or motivation have occupied many philosophers and other thinkers throughout history (O'Connor, T., & Franklin, C. (2021). Free Will. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/freewill/>), I focus here on Hanna Arendt's book The life of mind (Arendt, H. (1978). The life of the mind. A Harvest Book. Harcourt, Inc), where she developed a perspective on willing that has been somewhat unexplored. In order to review her propositions and assess her contributions I proceed in three steps: Firstly, I follow Arendt's argument and organise it along three questions she explicitly raises: (i) what is the relationship between time and the will? (ii) what affects – or passions – characterise willing?; and (iii) what are the products or results of willing? Secondly, I review psychological and psychoanalytical accounts of the will and I show that Arendt's questions have been implicitly answered in the different perspectives reviewed. Explicitly, psychologists mainly defined the will in relation to products, such as action and consciousness of will, whilst psychoanalysts focused more explicitly on affects and temporality. Thus, thirdly, in reviewing these propositions, I try to show the value in making explicit three dimensions along which the will can be defined. In this way, from a psychological perspective, willing could be defined not only in relation to freedom, action and consciousness – as many have done – but also to time, affects and products, as Arendt proposed. This might provide a more comprehensive understanding leading us to develop tools for its study in empirical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant amount of research has highlighted the different ontological and epistemological dimensions of insider and outsider research positions. In the field of education, this topic could benefit from more research. In this study, three researchers and former early childhood centre directors discussed their own research positions in a completed research project. Based on field notes from following the daily work of the centre leaders – positions the researchers formally held themselves – it is illustrated that the research affects continued to flow after the project had ended, raising new questions about how specific situations and the data had been handled. This study, a folding, unfolding and re-folding of data, highlights the ethical considerations actualised in the movements between research positions. The movements between research positions are understood as a source of tension that can produce affects, becomings and data with the ability to question given positions and established knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances a manifesto for a posthuman creativity studies that highlights the emergent, collective, and ecological aspects of creativity, offering propositions that problematize any individualist or human-exceptionalist approach to the field. We attend to a range of extra/ordinary affects, encounters, and modalities for expanding creative possibilities in the 21st century. Beginning with a recognition that creativity must be rewilded from its current capture in economic and educational discourses, we argue for more sustainable re-engagements. In the specificity of these encounters, we manifest 10 commitments to posthuman creativity as the foundations for a more dynamic and more-than-human creative agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Canadian author Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall's 2004 memoir Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown through the notions of marginalia and the ordinary in order to question dichotomic representations of homelessness. It explores how the author moves beyond binaries, interrogating the dichotomy ordinary/out of the ordinary lives by narrating his ethical encounter with the other (Butler, 2004). The text is written as a journal where Bishop-Stall describes his personal journey through homelessness; and more importantly, it gives a voice to the other down-and-out people in notorious Toronto's Tent City. The characters' unreliable and fragmented storytelling uncovers the lives of the faceless others. I contend that in Down to This individuals' life stories are connected to realities which question binaries through the re/mapping of ordinary experiences and affects; they disintegrate the opposition materiality vs abstraction, or as I argue, exclusion vs inclusion (out of the ordinary/ordinary). Down to These bridges the private details of the residents' life stories, and the public perception of the problem of homelessness, illustrating how everyday moments of precarity intersect with wider political issues. In the process, the narrative also questions the binary attitudes of exclusion (disfranchisement) and inclusion (privilege). This literary strategy gives the constellation of stories a profound illuminating vision of the human condition. I show my point by drawing on the of marginalia (Kistner 2014), and by analysing the characters' narratives of precariousness through the notions of editing and affective assemblage (Gerlach, 2015; Hamilakis, 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in science and technology studies has analyzed how patients' groups engage in practices that connect biomedicine and patient experience in order to become involved in the shaping of biomedical research. However, there has been limited attention to the affective dimensions of such practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a gynecological cancer patients' group in Sweden, this article focuses on practices that aim to influence researchers and research institutions to prioritize biomedical gynecological cancer research. It analyzes how "affects" are woven through these practices and pays attention to the entanglements of affects, biomedical research, and lay experience they involve. The article explores the relation between the gynecological cancer patients' group and biomedical research as a set of material-semiotic practices of "moving evidence." These practices of moving evidence (1) enact gynecological cancer as under-researched; (2) collect and produce new "evidence"; (3) "mobilize" the evidence at public events, in interactions with biomedical researchers, and in different online settings; and (4) entangle affects with biomedical and experiential evidence to enact (a lack of) gynecological cancer biomedical research as a matter of concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the potential of describing things at the periphery of our attention. It discusses how our practices of 'describing collaboratively' shifted what we attended to in observations of participants in a Swedish gynaecological cancer patient organisation. We show how the care the organisation aims to promote is troubled and seemingly undermined by attending to palliative care. Our aim is to explore the ethico-political potential of describing things that 'unsettle' care practices. Building on Feminist Technoscience Studies, arguing that researchers should attend to 'neglected things' in order to care for them, we focus on affects, atmospheres and fleeting moments that are overlooked, or threaten to undermine, participants' practices of care. We show how our descriptions that zoom in on things at the periphery and attend to the elusive, restage what gets to count as care and could support care practices that are more liveable for those concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Excellent Sheep, William Deresiewicz describes 'elite' higher education as one in which students perform excellently, but only in a spirit of compliance with assigned tasks. The depth of this problem – which has a long pedigree in philosophy – is such that an advantage might be found in non-'elite' and even manifestly lame education. This advantage is illustrated through the story of a low point in my teaching career, in which affects of anger, shame and disappointment erupted into the classroom. Because these negative feelings can make it possible for us to discover that we actually do care, such experiences – precluded by excellent compliance – may be important ones in the course of a meaningful education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper elaborate on how sustainabilising entails rethinking about areas that include rationality, organisations, knowledge, leadership and value and about transforming these areas into an ecological way of thinking, learning and acting. We argue that sustainability needs to become a verb, something we do. However, one thing is rethinking areas; another thing is to work it into a craft of research. Therefore, the second section in the paper unfolds a conceptualisation of a specific action-learning project in Danish municipalities, called 'Sustainable and Healthy Cities through Urban Nature Relations'. This project transforms the theoretically rethinking of sustainability into a craft of research. Informed by the proposed theoretical lens, the action-learning process involves research based on the World Health Organization's six P's (people, place, participation, peace, prosperity and planet). The action research can be understood as a process of taking risks, becoming disorientated and moving beyond the comfort zone. However, the six P's and thereby the cross-professional groups, the place, the participation and the value of the process is all about collective techniques and about care. It aims to create an emerging ecology of practices and of belonging and co-existing lives. It creates a field of actions a 'milieu' but without a fixed horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the dogmatic rather than just ethical significance of the biotechnological enhancement of human beings. It begins by reflecting on the close theological connections between salvation, sanctification, and affective and bodily transformation in light of the fact that affects and desires are in principle manipulable through biotechnological enhancement. It then examines the implications of this observation for questions of moral responsibility, asking whether biotechnological enhancement can be viewed as a kind of means of grace. The conclusion argues that theological reflection on the relationship between affects, soteriology and bioenhancement reveals limitations of the emphasis on embodiment in recent Christian theology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces Intimate Entanglements by proposing three interrelated shifts that result from juxtaposing experiences with different world-making practices at the intersection of care, technoscience and theoretical engagements with affect theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The first shift positions intimacy as not only relevant in STS but also as a more general epistemic concern of social scientific enquiry. The second shift is an exploration of the heterogeneous materiality of the intimate and, in particular, of its more-than-human constituencies. The third shift both reclaims and speculates about other politics of relations, including practical challenges (not only conceptual) to the way we do research. The article shows that the beings entangled, the materialities involved, the affects conveyed and the extension of the intimate all come to matter when science and technology is critically analysed, and that they challenge the traditional limits and geographies of the intimate. The paper also argues that this has important political implications for science and technology studies. By countering the invisibilisation of 'intimate work' through its usual association with the emotional and the domestic, the article contests the ready-made framing of the intimate as bound to the interpersonal, corporal and private. In so doing, the authors make visible the politics of relations that scientific and technological settings silently enact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the possible futures for educational research? The essay concerns two intertwined agendas. The first agenda is empirical and concerns how educational policy and leadership constitute, circulate, transform and modify feelings, moods and affects. Especially, motivation, engagement and the desire for learning are targets for policy and leadership technologies. This possible scenario is an affective edu-future that has connections to new modes of governance through standards and thereby present ways of leading educational organisations and the affective fabric hereof. The second agenda concerns the identification of suitable methodologies for researching and critiquing this affective edu-future and its performative effects. This brings me to the learning laboratory as an affective methodology and the possibility of affirmative critiques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates instances of laughter in doing research from a methodological and ethical perspective. Both the theoretical insights of the ‘turn to affect’ and the methodological discussions concerning emotional reflexivity in social sciences are combined in order to explore the ambiguities unravelled by ‘uneasy laughter’ in the particular context of researching the Finnish anti-immigration debate. Through careful reflection, laughter can be recognised as a beginning from which to understand relations of power and the production of whiteness and class in the debate, and the changing place of the researcher in all this. Furthermore, it is suggested that understanding affects as embedded in power relations makes it possible to account also for those affective and emotional reactions that are deemed shameful and ‘wrong’ in doing research. Exploring laughter thus allows approaches in which unruly and ethically questionable affects can be made part of an ethically responsible research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emotions that human beings experience play a fundamental role in all social phenomena. As a result, sociology needs to incorporate the analysis of affective structures and emotional dynamics into its objects of study. The integration of feelings, affects, moods and emotional states into sociological research, which began four decades ago with the birth of the sociology of emotions, must continue advancing until emotions are fully integrated into the general sociological perspective. This article offers an introductory and critical overview of the work sociologists of emotions have carried out so far. They have helped us, first of all, to understand what an emotion is, the countless number of existing feelings, and the great complexity of emotional processes. Second, they have revealed the social nature of human emotions, and the emotional nature of social phenomena. Third, they have developed a number of theoretical approaches to studying the emotions. And, lastly, they have carried out sociological analyses of many specific emotions (fear, trust, shame, etc.), and emotional analyses in many areas of sociology (gender, work, organizations, social movements, etc.). This article also offers suggestions for the future development of the sociology of emotions, and a selected and updated bibliography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages some questions raised by recent work on civil society: What is missed by a rationalist reduction of politics, and why does it matter? How does the somatic dimension of citizenship open deliberation to social economies of power? From these questions, the article interrogates what agency is possible if power is inscribed within the affects that mobilize action and judgment- with particular attention to the work of William Connolly. Over the course of the article, it is argued that Connolly's politics of sensibility makes an ambivalent contribution to these problems. While critics charge that he undermines possibilities for associational agency, this article proposes a rather more productive contribution to the arts of coalition building. And yet, these resources must be pressed beyond recent trends in the literature if they are to do justice to the unruly movements of civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to trace how contemporary (post)psychologies, when used as psy-leadership tools in order to reach new standards, may create new work around the standards and may also create new subjectivities. It is well known that education is a field in which standardization and the making of subjects have held sway for many years; and it is also well known that schools have been some of the most regular purchasers of psychological methods, tests, and classifications. Following, but also elaborating upon governmentality studies, it is suggested that a current shift towards environmentality and learning-centered governance standards has dramatic and performative effects for the production of (educational) subjectivities. This implies a shift from governing identities, categories, and structures towards orchestrating affective intensities and rhythms. Finally, we discuss possible new worries and vulnerabilities when school goes post-psychological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing interest in the neuroscience of emotion regulation, particularly the subfield of implicit emotion regulation, brings new opportunity for the psychodynamic treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders of childhood. At the same time, psychodynamic theorists have become more aware of the centrality of affects in mental life. This paper introduces a manualized psychodynamic approach called Regulation-Focused Dynamic Psychotherapy (RFP-C). Theoretically based on the domain construct of implicit emotion regulation (ER), this approach posits that contemporary affect-oriented conceptualizations of defense mechanisms are theoretically similar to the neuroscience construct of implicit emotion regulation. To illustrate this theoretical similarity, the literature connected with both concepts is reviewed. The implications of this idea, which could promote an interface between psychodynamics and contemporary academic psychiatry and psychology, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans' novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of 'child-shifting' produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where ruptured ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present--the late twentieth-century Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looks at difficult heritage tourism as a form of visiting that to a great extent happens through the tourist’s body as locus. Actual tourists are craving for real experiences in order to feel alive and difficult heritage sites offer this experience of presence to excess. In addition tourists are also interested in witnessing the past and its victims, and the establishment of the witnessing relationship depends on the interactive design present at the site. The difficult pasts in question are situated on site-specific locations in Northern America and Europe and represent classic thanatourist sites bearing on Holocaust, totalitarian communism and terrorism. Through an analysis of the multimodal and interactive design at each site, the article outlines various ways that place designs relate actual tourists and victims of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Andersonian realism is a determinist, empiricist position that acknowledges the important distinction between qualities and relations. However, Anderson's 'mind as feeling' thesis, proposing that the mind's qualities are emotional, is problematic since it fails to account for 'feelings' themselves. O'Neil's (1934) alternative relational account of affects, in conjunction with Maze's (1983) theory of instinctual drives, provides a coherent platform for developing a comprehensive realist account of affects. In discussing the relation between affects, cognition and motivation, affects are viewed as drive-evaluative phenomena, and 'feelings' are known bodily states arising in conjunction with motivationally driven environmental evaluations. The role that affects play in a revised desire/belief model of behaviour explanation is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a brief introduction to Silvan Tomkins, the man and his work, the interdisciplinary reach of Tomkins' theory of affect is demonstrated here in a collection of articles illustrating how affective engagement intertwines inner and outer reality. Susan Best rescues the ‘pleasure in looking’ from renunciation, consolation or a voyeuristic, suspect visual pleasure, and revitalizes aesthetics using Tomkins' conceptualization of affects, interest and joy. These affects suspend the viewer between objectification and identification, as interest leaves the art as object, while joy renders it a source of communion. Adam Frank demonstrates how lingering unspoken affective memory—bodily memory—uncannily shapes our negotiations with the environment, via skills or taboos: skills which remain as phantom ‘nervy guesses’ as to where a lost limb might have been; or taboos on looking limiting our visual pleasure. Doris McIlwain rezones pleasure, renews the promise of drive theory and maps how even transient affective states (or gaps in affective experience) become enduring personality dispositions promoting cascading developmental constraints regarding what we can feel about, and do to, ourselves and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the richness of the association between space, culture, and memory. It starts by indicating the importance of migration in the formation of Brazil and moves on to explore the relation between memory and space by showing how memories can be inscribed in the visible spatiality of a city. It goes briefly back to Marcel Proust's work in order to further suggest links between spatiality and remembrance. Finally Félix Guattari's notion of affect is used to account for the impact that spatial experiences may have upon us. The two spaces--previous and present--eventually superimpose forming a complex arrangement that conveys the idea of displacement. Throughout the article, selected, in-depth interviews with Italian and French immigrants who live in Rio de Janeiro--and who relate memories brought about by the experience of space--provide a lively and consistent background to the arguments proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]