Affective Encounters: Philosophy, History, and Politics
March 13-14, 2015, Richardson Library Room 400, 2400 N Sheffield Ave, Chicago, IL 60614
Keynote speaker: Jason Read, University of Southern Maine
CALL FOR PAPERS
Submission Deadline Extended: January 16, 2015
The ‘Affective Turn’ of the 21st century has seen a return to critical thinking about affect, and its
relationships and applications within various philosophical domains. In taking up affect as a question, we
are forced to engage with a number of interrelated concepts: forces and their relations, social organizations and their histories, bodies and their capacities, politics and nature. Affects involve encounters and interconnections that resist analytic separation; they are mediated by social and historical processes, revealing obliquely the connection between political and libidinal economies. Sometimes they encourage or even force us to reflect, critique, and affirm, while at other times they seem to foreclose the very possibility of thought. They texture the worlds in which we find ourselves involuntarily enmeshed: sometimes exhilarating, sometimes excruciating, affects testify to the richness and obscurity of the relations between ourselves and others.
We are interested in exploring these and other connections. What do we learn from affective encounters, and under what conditions? How can we distinguish between the affects that seize us? Can we encourage certain affects, or create situations that disallow others? How can we produce critical genealogies and histories of affects? What are the relationships between affects and bodies – those of embodied subjects, but also social bodies, bodies of work, and bodies of knowledge? What are the relationships between affect and politics, and how do affects open onto possibilities for political engagement and transformation?
Please send full papers of approximately 3,000 words, prepared for blind review, to:
depaul.philosophy@gmail.com
Full CFP at:
http://depaulphilosophy.wordpress.com