Dear Colleagues
I'm pleased to announce the next seminar at Queen Mary Centre for the
History of the Emotions:
Dr Constantina Papoulias (Middlesex University) and Dr Felicity
Callard (NIHR Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health)
'Biology's Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect'
6pm, Monday 23 November, Lock-Keepers Cottage, Mile End Campus, Queen
Mary University of London
This is buidling no. 17 on the campus map:
http://www.qmul.ac.uk/about/campus/images/me_map.pdf
The seminar will be followed by a wine reception.
ABSTRACT: This paper investigates how the turn to affect within the
humanities and social sciences re-imagines the relationship between
cultural theory and science. We focus on how the writings of two
neuroscientists (Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux) and one
developmental psychologist (Daniel Stern) are used in order to ground
certain claims about affect within cultural theory. We examine the
motifs at play in cultural theories of affect, the models of
(neuro)biology with which they work, and some fascinating missteps
characterizing the taking up of scientific literature. While
neuroscience frames the affective as part of a system of regulation
that makes both self and social coherence possible, in cultural
theory’s narratives, by contrast, affectivity becomes a placeholder
for the inherent dynamism and mutability of matter. The paper
interrogates the consequences of cultural theory’s strange borrowings
from neuroscience and developmental psychology in their institution of
a model of subjectivity preoccupied with a lived present in excess of
the hold of habit and embodied history.
--
Dr Rhodri Hayward
Department of History
Queen Mary, University of London
LONDON E1 4NS
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