The second episode features a conversation about the intro and first two chapters of Sara Ahmed’s Cultural Politics of Emotion, discussing concepts such as emotion, affect, embodiment, subjectivity, circulation, affective economy, and hate. We also explore Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article The Case for Reparations, the recent Isla Vista shootings, and modes of legal redress in relation to Ahmed’s text.
Episode 2 also includes the rest of our interview with philosopher and critical theorist Susan Buck-Morss as well as advice about difficult dissertation advisors and grad school applications.
Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004) explores how emotions shape us as bodies and as constantly shifting subjects in the world. Exploring how emotions and associations “stick” to words and bodies, forming our conceptions of each other, of the nation, of the citizen, of our shifting selves, Ahmed conceptualizes the way affective economies of fear, love, hate and shame make our world. Through this same analysis, she also suggests how to unmake political and social worlds that do violence to bodies, underscoring how a sense of wonder and feminist inquiry can elucidate this unmaking.
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Thanks to Ricky Perry of Go-getter for the music throughout the episode.
Links!:
- Sara Ahmed’s homepage at Goldsmiths, University of London
- Sara Ahmed’s (excellent) blog, Feminist Killjoys
- Cultural Politics of Emotion at Edinburgh University Press
- Review of the book in JAC: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Politics by Rachel C. Riedner
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on emotion
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