Invited Speaker: Dr. Ben Anderson (10/31, 2-3PM, Zoom)
As part of a Gaines Center Cooperative Grant, Dr. He, in association with Michael Samers and Charlie Yi Zhang, will be hosting a series of webinars on 'affect'. The first of these will be presented by Professor Ben Anderson entitled "Too much, too little: The politics of intensity and the post 2008 conjunctural crisis". Professor Anderson is a leading figure on affect and his talk will delve deep into the topic of affect and politics in the context of rising right-wing populism in both Britain and the US post-2008. The webinar will take place on Zoom https://uky.zoom.us/j/4073288434 at 2 p.m. on Friday, October 31st. All are welcome. Please join us on Zoom then.
Speaker: Professor Ben Anderson (Durham University)
Title: "Too much, too little: The politics of intensity and the post 2008 conjunctural crisis"
Zoom https://uky.zoom.us/j/4073288434
Time: 2-3 p.m. on Friday, October 31st
Abstract
Amid the multiple ends and afterlives of neoliberalism in the UK and USA post the 2008 financial crisis, we are witnessing a ‘crisis of intensity’, a crisis of whether life feels too much or too little. Crises of intensity are articulated with broader conjunctural crises and have four components: a disjuncture between actual experience and desired experience; judging the present in terms of ‘too much’ and/or ‘too little’; a diagnosis of the present in terms of ‘maladies of intensity’ (such as burnout or boredom); and the proliferation of promises of ‘good intensity’. This paper introduces theories of affect by arguing that understanding affective life and its articulation with politics is a necessary part of a project of diagnostic critique.
Bio
Ben Anderson is a Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. He has published extensively on affective life as articulated with politics. He is co-author (with Prof. Anna J Secor) of The Politics of Feeling: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism (Goldsmiths/MIT, 2025) and Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Routledge, 2014). As well as theoretical work on conjunctural analysis and attachment and detachment as distinctive social-spatial relations, his current research focuses on the politics of intensity in right-wing populism and on climate change disaffection.