Fourth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies
1-3 July 2013 at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Session: Leaking affects and mediated spaces.
Session organisers: Darren Ellis, John Cromby, Lewis Goodings, Tony Sampson and
Ian Tucker
We seem to
possess the ability to move and to be greatly moved by our daily interactions
with increasingly complex forms of electronic media. We are soaked in the
seepage of affective information about others (other humans, other beings,
other spaces) and continually leak similar stuff about ourselves, both
intentionally and unintentionally, and often somewhere in-between the two. For
example, signified affective states are issued through the often mundane
emoticons ():), kisses (x), and curses (f**k); and
our pleasures and pursuits can be captured by sophisticated algorithms that
track internet activity. Perhaps digitised space has opened the way to new
realms of affective contagions, transactions, communications
and doings. To what extent then do we get a sense of the affect-trails that we
leave behind and those that we pick up? What kinds of senses are involved and
how might we experience them on a day to day basis? Indeed what are the
possibilities and limitations of sharing, imparting and capturing affects
across this electronic ether? Is there a flattening of affect or is something
qualitatively different occurring? Central to these questions are notions of
distribution and spatial expression, and the need to understand the affective
nature (or not) of the relations and connections between bodies and
technologies that form our everyday territories. The sessions that make up this
proposal seek to explore these issues in a number of theoretical and empirical
ways, with interest in (although not limited to) areas such as surveillance,
social media and embodiment.
Key Questions:
How do we understand
the multiple and fluid ways that affect becomes distributed across and through
bodies, technologies and spaces?
How is affect marked
out and made visible in mediated online spaces?
Is affect still a
useful way for configuring the expression of intensive processes spatially?
Paper proposals are
invited focusing on (although are not limited to):
Surveillance
Social Media
Embodiment
Digital and
non-digital topology
Body-technology
relations
Novel empirical
approaches to studies of affect
Please send abstracts of up to 250 words to Darren Ellis ([log in to unmask]) before the 11th of January 2013