This weekend, 16 participants from six countries are coming to University of Toronto to participate in my (SSHRC Connections Grant-funded) invitational Symposium on the subject of “Affect, Propaganda, and Political Imagination”. The invited interdisciplinary scholars will share works-in-progress to be published as an edited book with Taylor and Francis and a special journal issue. The aim of our collaborative symposium is to develop better understandings of the following issues:
Public attention to the targeting of emotion and affect — ideologically labelled “post-truth” politics — confirms what many scholars have long recognized regarding the central role of emotion and affect in reproducing hegemony. Yet scholarship in the humanities and social sciences falls far behind the political realities. Despite the “emotional” and “affective” turns across many disciplines over the last 30 years, there remains a glaring need for conversations across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, to develop new approaches to understanding the rapidly changing configurations of affect, propaganda, and politics within digital media landscapes.
Invited participants are: Asma Abbas, Carolyn Pedwell, Adi Kuntsman, Yasmin Jiwani, Merlyna Lim, Ed Cohen, Luke Stark, Leslie Regan Shade, Ezekiel Dixon-Roman, Stephen Kovats, Marnie Ritchie, Rob Hunt, Giulia Evolvi, Dan Adleman, Elizabeth Davis, Michael Primrose, and Hoda Gharib.