Carolyn Pedwell
Lancaster University, Sociology, Faculty Member
- Philosophy, Postcolonial Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, Political Economy, Cultural Studies, and 14 moreMedia Studies, Critical Theory, Gender and Sexuality, Critical Race Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Theory, Affect Studies, Affect Theory, Affect (Philosophy), Cultural Modifications of the Body, Embodied Practice, Gender, Critical Race Theory, and Feminismedit
- I am Professor in Digital Media in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University (UK). Prior to this, I was Profes... moreI am Professor in Digital Media in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University (UK). Prior to this, I was Professor of Cultural Studies and Media in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at University of Kent. My research interests lie at the intersection of media and cultural studies, sociology, gender studies and international politics, with a focus on feminist, postcolonial and queer theory. My research centres on digital culture and sociality; the politics of emotion and affect; habits and social transformation; gender, the body and culture; and feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial theories.
Current research:
My Leverhulme Fellowship, 'Digital Media and the Human: The Social Life of Software, AI and Algorithms' (2020/2021) explores how digital, smart and computational technologies may be radically transforming ‘the human’. Leading corporate and scholarly accounts of emergent media, however, entail an implicit universalism that downplays embodied differences and power relations. Arguing that it matters what kind of human our engagements with technology (re)produce, this project will develop a framework to explore the transformative dynamics of digital media informed by feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial studies.
My recent research project, ‘Habit, Power and Social Transformation’, explores how the concept of ‘habit’ can inform new approaches to understanding both the complex behaviour of social subjects and the dynamics of cultural and socio-political relations. In particular, I am interested in the cultural salience and potentiality of habit as an embodied technology at the contemporary intersection of neoliberalism, digital culture, and transnational politics. My monograph, Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, is forthcoming with McGill-Queens University Press. I have also published journal articles in Body and Society; Cultural Studies; Subjectivity; and Culture, Theory and Critique.
My AHRC Fellowship, ‘Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Emotion’ (2013-2014), explored the links between transnational politics and the ‘turn to affect’. As part of the Fellowship, I undertook research visits to the University of Sydney and Queen Mary, University of London and convened an international symposium, ‘Transnational Affects’ at Queen Mary in May 2014. This project produced a monograph, Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy, published by Palgrave in September 2014. The book explores the power dynamics underlying the contemporary affective injunction to 'be empathetic', and their complex social and geopolitical implications. Through analysis of a range of popular and scholarly sites and texts – including Obama's speeches and memoirs, best-selling business books, international development literatures, popular science tracts, postcolonial literature and feminist, anti-racist and queer theory – it investigates the possibilities, risks and contradictions of figuring empathy as an affective tool for engendering transnational social justice. On the basis of this research, I have also published a co-edited special issue (with Anne Whitehead), ‘Affecting Feminism: The Question of Feeling in Feminist Theory’, Feminist Theory (2012) and articles in New Formations; Society and Space; Emotion, Space and Society; Feminist Theory; and Samyukta.
My previous research explored the links between gender, cross-cultural comparison and ‘the body’ and was funded by an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship held at the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths in 2008. Based on this research, my first monograph, Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison, was published by Routledge in 2010 (2012 in paperback). The book explores how, within both feminist theory and popular culture, establishing similarities between embodied practices understood to be rooted in different cultural and geo-political contexts (e.g. ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery) has become increasingly common as a means of countering cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism. It examines how cross cultural comparisons of embodied practices function as a rhetorical device – with particular theoretical, social and political effects - in a range of contemporary feminist texts.edit
Building on the foundational The Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily... more
Building on the foundational The Affect Theory Reader, this new volume gathers together contemporary scholarship that highlights and interrogates the contemporary state of affect inquiry. Unsettling what might be too readily taken-for-granted assumptions in affect theory, The Affect Theory Reader 2 extends and challenges how contemporary theories of affect intersect with a wide range of topics and fields that include Black studies, queer and trans theory, Indigenous cosmologies, feminist cultural analysis, psychoanalysis, and media ecologies. It foregrounds vital touchpoints for contemporary studies of affect, from the visceral elements of climate emergency and the sensorial sinews of networked media to the minor feelings entangled with listening, looking, thinking, writing, and teaching otherwise. Tracing affect's resonances with today's most critical debates, The Affect Theory Reader 2 will reorient and disorient readers to the past, present, and future potentials of affect theory.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Social Theory, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, and 15 moreMedia Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Theory, Digital Humanities, Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Digital Media, Cultural Theory, Critical Race Theory, Continental Philosophy, Social Media, Affect Theory, Affect/Emotion, Affect (Cultural Theory), and Affect (Philosophy)
What everyday habits tell us about social change, power, and progressive politics. Although we tend to associate social transformation with major events, historical turning points, or revolutionary upheaval, Revolutionary Routines... more
What everyday habits tell us about social change, power, and progressive politics.
Although we tend to associate social transformation with major events, historical turning points, or revolutionary upheaval, Revolutionary Routines argues that seemingly minor everyday habits are the key to meaningful change.
Through its account of influential socio-political processes - such as the resurgence of fascism and white supremacy, the crafting of new technologies of governance, and the operation of digital media and algorithms - this book rethinks not only how change works, but also what counts as change. Drawing examples from the affective politics of Trumpism and Brexit, nudge theory and behaviour change, social media and the international refugee crisis, and the networked activism of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, Carolyn Pedwell argues that minor gestures may be as significant as major happenings, revealing the powerful potential in our ability to remake shared habits and imaginatively reinhabit everyday life.
Revolutionary Routines offers a new understanding of the logics of habit and the nature of social change, power, and progressive politics, illustrating diverse forms of consciousness and co-operation through which political solidarities might take shape.
Although we tend to associate social transformation with major events, historical turning points, or revolutionary upheaval, Revolutionary Routines argues that seemingly minor everyday habits are the key to meaningful change.
Through its account of influential socio-political processes - such as the resurgence of fascism and white supremacy, the crafting of new technologies of governance, and the operation of digital media and algorithms - this book rethinks not only how change works, but also what counts as change. Drawing examples from the affective politics of Trumpism and Brexit, nudge theory and behaviour change, social media and the international refugee crisis, and the networked activism of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, Carolyn Pedwell argues that minor gestures may be as significant as major happenings, revealing the powerful potential in our ability to remake shared habits and imaginatively reinhabit everyday life.
Revolutionary Routines offers a new understanding of the logics of habit and the nature of social change, power, and progressive politics, illustrating diverse forms of consciousness and co-operation through which political solidarities might take shape.
Research Interests:
Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy explores the power dynamics underlying the contemporary affective injunction to ‘be empathetic’ and their complex social and geopolitical implications. Through analysis of a rage... more
Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy explores the power dynamics underlying the contemporary affective injunction to ‘be empathetic’ and their complex social and geopolitical implications. Through analysis of a rage of popular and scholarly sites and texts – including Obama’s speeches and memoirs, best-selling business books, international development literatures, popular science tracts, postcolonial literature and feminist, anti-racist and queer theory – the book investigates the possibilities, risks and contradictions of figuring empathy as an affective tool for engendering transnational social justice. Opening up ways of thinking and feeling empathetic politics beyond universalist calls to ‘put oneself in the others’ shoes’, it examines empathy’s dynamic links to processes of location, translation, imagination and attunement. Affective Relations is interested throughout in how empathy might be translated differently - how dominant liberal, neoliberal and neocolonial visions and practices of empathy can be reinterpreted in the context of transnationality to activate alternative affective connections, solidarities and potentialities.
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Psychoanalysis, Gender Studies, International Relations, and 14 moreEnglish Literature, Media Studies, Development Studies, Feminist Theory, Empathy (Psychology), Postcolonial Studies, Political Science, Critical Race Theory, Affective Neuroscience, Affect/Emotion, Affect (Cultural Theory), Empathy, Empathy (discourse), and Mirror Neurones and empathy
Within both feminist theory and popular culture, establishing similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural and geo-political contexts (e.g. ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery) has... more
Within both feminist theory and popular culture, establishing similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural and geo-political contexts (e.g. ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery) has become increasingly common as a means of countering cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism.
Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice examines how cross cultural comparisons of embodied practices function as a rhetorical device – with particular theoretical, social and political effects - in a range of contemporary feminist texts. It asks: Why and how are cross-cultural links among these practices drawn by feminist theorists and commentators, and what do these analogies do? What knowledges, hierarchies and figurations do these comparisons produce, disrupt and/or reify in feminist theory, and how do such effects resonate within popular culture? Taking a relational web approach that focuses on unravelling the binary threads that link specific embodied practices within a wider representational community, this book highlights how we depend on and affect one another across cultural and geo-political contexts.
This book is valuable reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers in Gender Studies, Postcolonial or Race Studies, Cultural and Media Studies, and other related disciplines.
Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice examines how cross cultural comparisons of embodied practices function as a rhetorical device – with particular theoretical, social and political effects - in a range of contemporary feminist texts. It asks: Why and how are cross-cultural links among these practices drawn by feminist theorists and commentators, and what do these analogies do? What knowledges, hierarchies and figurations do these comparisons produce, disrupt and/or reify in feminist theory, and how do such effects resonate within popular culture? Taking a relational web approach that focuses on unravelling the binary threads that link specific embodied practices within a wider representational community, this book highlights how we depend on and affect one another across cultural and geo-political contexts.
This book is valuable reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers in Gender Studies, Postcolonial or Race Studies, Cultural and Media Studies, and other related disciplines.
In this Introduction to our special section on 'Laurent Berlant and Media Theory', I argue, with our contributors, that both appreciating and extending Berlant's vital contributions to media theory requires addressing the distinctive... more
In this Introduction to our special section on 'Laurent Berlant and Media Theory', I argue, with our contributors, that both appreciating and extending Berlant's vital contributions to media theory requires addressing the distinctive place of 'mediation' in her/their writing. The first section addresses the challenges and potentialities of efforts to position Berlant within existing genealogies of media theory, with particular attention to their work on affective genres, scenes, cases, and attachments. The second section explores the shifting relations among infrastructure, data politics and the making of media theory that Berlant's capacious mode of cultural critique helps us sense and make sense of-with a focus on intimacy-infrastructure entanglements, whether with respect to the 'inconvenience' of networked media and AI or the affective possibilities of collaborative projects of writing otherwise. What constitutes Berlant's most profound lesson concerning what it means to live lives immanently mediated by aesthetic-material forms, genres, and infrastructures, I conclude, is that friction, vulnerability, and ambivalence, are our vital animating conditions-and how we negotiate them personally and collectively is both a matter of survival and an affective-political art.
Research Interests:
What happens when intuition becomes algorithmic? This article explores how approaching intuition as recursively trained sheds light on what is at stake affectively, politically and ethically in the entanglements of sensorial, cognitive,... more
What happens when intuition becomes algorithmic? This article explores how approaching intuition as recursively trained sheds light on what is at stake affectively, politically and ethically in the entanglements of sensorial, cognitive, computational, and corporate processes and (infra)structures that characterise algorithmic life. Bringing affect theory and speculative philosophies to bear on computational histories and cultures, I tease out the continuing implications of postwar efforts to make intuition a measurable and indexable mode of anticipatory knowledge. If digital computing pioneers tended to elide the more ambivalent implications of quantifying intuition, this article asks what computational myths are at play in current accounts of machine learning-enabled sensing, thinking, and speculating and what complexities or chaos are disavowed. I argue that an understanding of more-than-human intuition which grapples meaningfully with the indeterminacy central to digitally-mediated social life must recognise that visceral response is recursively trained in multiple ways with diverse, and often contradictory, effects.
Research Interests:
In the wake of Turing’s ‘universal machine’, this article foregrounds intuition as a generative concept and lens to unfold the affective genealogies of human-machine relations in post-war transatlantic cultures. As a mode of sensing,... more
In the wake of Turing’s ‘universal machine’, this article foregrounds intuition as a generative concept and lens to unfold the affective genealogies of human-machine relations in post-war transatlantic cultures. As a mode of sensing, knowing, anticipating, and navigating the world that exceeds rational analysis, intuition is, I will argue, vital to attuning to our contemporary ‘algorithmic condition’, in which machine learning technologies are actively re-distributing cognition across humans and machines, transforming the nature of (in)human experience, and rearticulating questions of cultural value and desire. The article focuses on three key historical moments which enable us to retrospectively glimpse an emerging condensation of interest and urgency concerning our changing relationships with ‘new’ technologies in Britain and North America – 1) 1950s: The birth of AI and cybernetics; 2) 1980s: The rise of the personal computer and software cultures and; 3) 2010s: Inhabiting algorithmic life. In each period, particular aspects of intuition surface as significant in animating our affective and cultural entanglements with computational technologies. While intuition has gained affective traction at particular historical junctures as both what essentially defines ‘the human’ and what has become essentially inhuman, I argue that addressing the sensorial, socio-political, cultural, and ethical issues current machine learning architectures open up requires attuning to immanent human-algorithmic entanglements and the techno-social ecologies they inhabit and recursively reshape.
Research Interests:
This chapter considers the extent to which we can apply the insights of pragmatist and continental philosophers of habit to understand the dynamics of networked and computational media and how they may be re-mediating ‘the human’. If... more
This chapter considers the extent to which we can apply the insights of pragmatist and continental philosophers of habit to understand the dynamics of networked and computational media and how they may be re-mediating ‘the human’. If habit is key to processes of social transformation, how, this chapter asks, does it figure in algorithmic dynamics that are altering the very meaning of ‘the social’ – and at what point might the logics of habit meet the limit of their analytical purchase? It argues that attention to habit assemblages remains salient to understanding the unfolding constitution of human nature within emergent media ecologies, but only if we reassess what constitutes ‘habit’ in a social field increasingly organised by media analytics and machine learning – and, in turn, what implications arise for understanding more-than-human sensibility, cognition, agency and experience.
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Social Theory, Algorithms, Media Studies, New Media, and 14 moreDigital Media, Critical Social Theory, Continental Philosophy, Habitus, Affect Theory, Affect/Emotion, Affect Studies, Affect (Cultural Theory), New Media Studies, American Pragmatism, Affect, Habits, New Materialisms, and Computational Media
This chapter begins with a critical hypothesis: in order to better understand the logics, challenges and potentialities of social change at the current conjuncture, we might need to attend more carefully to the relationship between affect... more
This chapter begins with a critical hypothesis: in order to better understand the logics, challenges and potentialities of social change at the current conjuncture, we might need to attend more carefully to the relationship between affect and habit. That is, in the midst of the turn to affect, renewed interest in habit, the rise of various 'new' materialisms and ecological approaches and the growing salience of algorithmic life, both apprehending and pursuing socio-political transformation may require closer engagement with the emergent links among sensation, duration, repetition, iteration, automation and atmosphere.
Research Interests:
Despite what its title, blurb and editorial endorsements might suggest, Ruth Leys' The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique is not a genealogy of the 'turn to affect' or a critical account of the emergence of affect theory across the... more
Despite what its title, blurb and editorial endorsements might suggest, Ruth Leys' The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique is not a genealogy of the 'turn to affect' or a critical account of the emergence of affect theory across the humanities, social sciences and life sciences. It is, rather, a postwar history of the 'science of emotion' focusing on mainstream, American, largely male, psychologists and philosophers investigating the relationship between feelings and facial expressions in human and non-human animals. In its pursuit of the latter, it is rigorous, incisive and illuminating. In its claim to the former, it is partial, dismissive and, at times, misguided-though not without critical food for thought for interdisciplinary affect and emotion studies. In what follows, I summarise Leys' important arguments and insights before offering a more detailed consideration of her critique of affect theory.
Research Interests:
With the rise of new digital, smart and algorithmic technologies, it is claimed, ‘the human’ is being fundamentally re-mediated. For some, this is problematic: digitally colonised by capitalism at the level of gesture, affect and habit,... more
With the rise of new digital, smart and algorithmic technologies, it is claimed, ‘the human’ is being fundamentally re-mediated. For some, this is problematic: digitally colonised by capitalism at the level of gesture, affect and habit, it is argued, we are now increasingly politically disaffected. There are also, however, more hopeful socio-political visions: Michel Serres, for example, argues that, in delegating habits of mental processing and synthesising to digital technologies, millennials have honed cognitive conditions for a more ‘intuitive’ mode of being-in-the-world. While there is no necessary link between intuition and progressive social transformation, there are, this essay argues, significant resonances between the ‘intuitive digital subjects’ that Serres imagines and the logics and sensibilities of new networked social movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Vitally enabled by digital technologies, these activisms combine a tendency to oppose exploitation and oppression with a capacity to sense change as it is happening and thus remain radically open to alternative futures.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Social Movements, Media Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, and 13 moreFeminist Theory, Digital Humanities, Digital Media, Michel Serres, Social Media, Social Movements (Political Science), Habitus, Social movements and revolution, Affect Theory, Affect/Emotion, Affect Studies, Affect (Cultural Theory), and Prefigurative Politics
While many people remain hopeful that particular images of injustice will have the power to catalyse progressive transformation, there is also widespread belief in the inevitability of 'compassion fatigue'. Bringing philosophers of habit... more
While many people remain hopeful that particular images of injustice will have the power to catalyse progressive transformation, there is also widespread belief in the inevitability of 'compassion fatigue'. Bringing philosophers of habit into conversation with contemporary scholars of affect, visual culture and digital media, this article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the links between images and change – one in which political feeling and political action are complexly intertwined and repeated sensation does not necessarily lead to disaffection. When affect acts as a 'binding technique' compelling us to inhabit our sensorial responses to images, I suggest, we may become better attuned to everyday patterns of seeing, feeling, thinking and interacting – and hence to the possibility of change at the level of habit. This article thus contends that thinking affect and habit together as imbricated may enable us to better understand the dynamics of both individual and socio-political change today.
Research Interests:
Rethinking the political workings of habit and habituation, this article suggests, is vital to understanding the logics and possibilities of social change today. Any endeavour to explore habit's affirmative potential, however, must... more
Rethinking the political workings of habit and habituation, this article suggests, is vital to understanding the logics and possibilities of social change today. Any endeavour to explore habit's affirmative potential, however, must confront its legacies as a colonialist, imperialist and capitalist technology. As a means to explore what it is that differentiates contemporary neoliberal modes of governing through habit from more critical approaches, this article compares contemporary 'nudge' theory and policy, as espoused by the behavioural economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, with the pragmatist philosophies of habit offered by John Dewey, William James and Shannon Sullivan. While nudge advocates focus on how policy-makers and corporate leaders can intervene in the 'choice archi-tectures' that surround us to outsmart or bypass problematic human tendencies, I argue, pragmatist philosophers appreciate the necessity of collective efforts to develop new and flexible forms of habituation in order to engender more enduring and democratic forms of social transformation.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Organizational Behavior, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Political Sociology, and 17 morePolitical Philosophy, Pragmatism, Social Policy, Behavioral Sciences, Neoliberalism, Habitus, Behavioral Economics, John Dewey, Pragmatism (Philosophy), Health Nudges, Habits, Behvaiour change, Eating habits, Nudge, Process and Speculative Philosophy, Behavioural Nudges, and Nudge Theory
Compelling recent scholarly work has explored the crucial role affect, emotion and feeling might play in activating radical social and political change. I argue, however, that some narratives of ‘affective revolution’ may actually do... more
Compelling recent scholarly work has explored the crucial role affect, emotion and feeling might play in activating radical social and political change. I argue, however, that some narratives of ‘affective revolution’ may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of the material relations and routines though which ‘progressive’ change might occur and endure in a given context - while side-stepping the challenge of how to evaluate progress itself in the current socio-political and economic landscape. Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick, John Dewey, Felix Ravaisson and others, this article asks whether critical work on habit can provide different, and potentially generative, analytical tools for understanding the contemporary ethical and material complexities of social transformation. I suggest that it habit’s double nature – its enabling of both compulsive repetition and creative becoming – that makes it a rich concept for addressing the propensity of harmful socio-political patterns to persist in the face of efforts to generate greater awareness of their damaging effects, as well as the material forms of automation and coordination on which meaningful societal transformation may depend. I also explore how bringing affect and habit together might productively refigure our understandings of ‘the present’ and ‘social progress’, as well as the available modes of sensing, instigating and responding to change. In turning to habit, then, the primary aim of this article is to examine how social and cultural theory might critically re-approach social change and progressive politics today.
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Social Change, Social Movements, Social Theory, and 16 moreGender Studies, Pragmatism, Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Cultural Theory, Revolutions, Embodiment, The Body, Habitus, Sociology of the Body, Affect Theory, Affect/Emotion, Affect (Cultural Theory), Empathy, American Pragmatism, and Habits
"This special issue engages with the relationship between feminist theory and ‘the affective turn’. Through their analyses of a range of affective states, spheres and sites, the authors in this volume pose critical questions regarding... more
"This special issue engages with the relationship between feminist theory and ‘the affective turn’. Through their analyses of a range of affective states, spheres and sites, the authors in this volume pose critical questions regarding feminist theoretical engagements with affect, emotion and feeling. They ask whether it is necessarily a positive move to put affect theory and feminist theory together, or whether there are there inherent risks, for example of depoliticisation, or of an over-privileging of the individual; whether feminist theorists have made, or can make, distinctive contributions to conceptualising affect; and what particular insights feminist theory can bring to bear. In different ways, the authors featured here consider how we can understand the complex implications of the turn to affect in and for feminist theory, and how we might examine its potentialities for theoretical, political and social transformation.
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In staging an encounter between Sedgwick’s discussion of reparation, Spivak’s analysis of translation, and critical scholarship on mood, this essay considers how we might understand contemporary cultural theory as a form of ‘mood work’... more
In staging an encounter between Sedgwick’s discussion of reparation, Spivak’s analysis of translation, and critical scholarship on mood, this essay considers how we might understand contemporary cultural theory as a form of ‘mood work’ that is at once discursive and material, textual and affective, political and aesthetic. In particular, I am interested in how thinking reparation, translation and mood together might open up different ways of conceptualising and negotiating the affective ‘double binds’ central to both critical thought and socio-political relations at the current conjuncture. As Sedgwick and Spivak each show us, I will argue, tarrying with contradiction and ambivalence is the mood work that cultural theory must continue to pursue, both in order to understand the material implications of our own emotional investments in intellectual production and to appreciate the complex ways in which power operates within the structures of feeling of late liberalism.
Keywords mood, paranoia, reparation, translation, double bind
Keywords mood, paranoia, reparation, translation, double bind
Research Interests:
What does it mean to think and sense beyond empathy’s iterative associations with emotional equivalence, fellow-feeling, or humanisation to instead confront its deep and immanent entanglement with radical otherness? What, in turn, are the... more
What does it mean to think and sense beyond empathy’s iterative associations
with emotional equivalence, fellow-feeling, or humanisation to instead
confront its deep and immanent entanglement with radical otherness? What,
in turn, are the implications of understanding empathy not as simple or singular
but rather as an unfolding set of socio-biological, techno-cultural, and
politico-ethical relations that imbricate the human and non-human within
worldly transactions and ecologies? These are two of the central questions
this interdisciplinary volume explores with considerable distinctiveness,
acuity, and insight.
with emotional equivalence, fellow-feeling, or humanisation to instead
confront its deep and immanent entanglement with radical otherness? What,
in turn, are the implications of understanding empathy not as simple or singular
but rather as an unfolding set of socio-biological, techno-cultural, and
politico-ethical relations that imbricate the human and non-human within
worldly transactions and ecologies? These are two of the central questions
this interdisciplinary volume explores with considerable distinctiveness,
acuity, and insight.
Research Interests:
As a means to open up modes of political thinking and feeling take us beyond Euro-American calls to 'put oneself in the other's shoes', this article examines empathy's dynamic relationships to transnational processes of location,... more
As a means to open up modes of political thinking and feeling take us beyond Euro-American calls to 'put oneself in the other's shoes', this article examines empathy's dynamic relationships to transnational processes of location, translation, imagination and attunement. The first section maps some political genealogies of empathy, while considering what it might mean to 'decolonise' emotion. The second section begins to flesh out my own critical approach by examining the ambivalent relationship between empathy and transnational capitalism. I do so through considering the links and distinctions among feminist and anti-racist ethics of care, Obama's political affect, and the neoliberal rhetoric of the 'empathy economy' within popular business literatures. The third section focuses on the related workings of empathy in the affective aftermaths of slavery and colonialism. Considering the potentialities and limitations of what I call 'alternative empathies', I draw on Antiguan-American author Jamaica Kincaid's postcolonial invective, A Small Place (1988), to ask how empathy expressed at the margins 8 of normative postcolonial imaginaries might disrupt or refigure universalist emotional politics. Extending these critical concerns, the fourth section examines what I call 'affective translation'. Drawing on British-Sierra Leonean author Aminatta Forna's novel, The Memory of Love (2011), I explore what might be gained in moving away from mainstream ideas of empathy premised on knowledge, accuracy and prediction towards a mode of affective translation involving attunement, negotiation, and invention. Throughout, I am interested in how empathy might be translated differently – how liberal, neoliberal and neocolonial visions and practices of empathy can be reinterpreted in the context of transnationality to activate alternative affective meanings, practices and potentialities.
Research Interests:
"This paper asks how we might theorise the politics of empathy in a context in which visions of social justice premised on empathetic engagement need to be situated within prevailing neoliberal frameworks. Through reading the ambivalent... more
"This paper asks how we might theorise the politics of empathy in a context in which visions of social justice premised on empathetic engagement need to be situated within prevailing neoliberal frameworks. Through reading the ambivalent grammar of President Obama’s emotional rhetoric, I examine how it resonates in different ways both with feminist and antiracist debates about empathy and social justice and with the neoliberal discourse of the ‘empathy economy’ expressed within popular business literatures. I argue that, in framing empathy as a competency to be developed by individuals alongside imperatives to become more risk-taking and self-enterprising, Obama’s rhetoric reveals its centrist neoliberal underpinnings and risks (re)producing social and geopolitical exclusions and hierarchies. Yet, I suggest that seeing the phenomenon of ‘Obama-mania’ as produced not only within discourses of neoliberal governmentality but also through more radical intersections of empathy, hope, and imagination illustrates how empathy might be conceptualised as an affective portal to
different spaces and times of social justice. "
different spaces and times of social justice. "
Affective self-transformation premised on empathy has been understood within feminist and anti-racist literatures as central to achieving social justice. Through juxtaposing debates about empathy within feminist and anti-racist theory... more
Affective self-transformation premised on empathy has been understood within feminist and anti-racist literatures as central to achieving social justice. Through juxtaposing debates about empathy within feminist and anti-racist theory with rhetorics of empathy in international development, and particularly writing about ‘Immersions’, this article explores how the workings of empathy might be reconceptualised when relations of postcoloniality and neoliberalism are placed in the foreground. I argue that in the neoliberal economy in which the international aid apparatus operates, empathetic self transformation
can become commodified in ways that fix unequal affective subjects.
Empathy may function here less to produce more intersubjective relations and ways of knowing than it does to augment the moral and affective capacities of development professionals. Yet, I suggest, it is in the ambivalences, tensions and contradictions of both emotion and neoliberalism that spaces for thinking and feeling transnational encounters differently might be cultivated.
can become commodified in ways that fix unequal affective subjects.
Empathy may function here less to produce more intersubjective relations and ways of knowing than it does to augment the moral and affective capacities of development professionals. Yet, I suggest, it is in the ambivalences, tensions and contradictions of both emotion and neoliberalism that spaces for thinking and feeling transnational encounters differently might be cultivated.
Against the contemporary universalist injunction to ‘be empathetic’, this paper explores the possibilities of what I call ‘alternative empathies’ in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism. Offering an affective... more
Against the contemporary universalist injunction to ‘be empathetic’, this paper explores the possibilities of what I call ‘alternative empathies’ in the aftermath of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism. Offering an affective reading of Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place (1988/2000), it examines how empathy expressed at the margins of postcolonial imaginaries might disrupt or refigure some of the dominant ways that affect is thought and mobilised in pervasive Euro-American liberal and neoliberal discourses. As a powerful commentary on the cultural, political, economic and affective links between slavery, colonialism, and contemporary practices of tourism in the Caribbean that has provoked intense emotional responses among its readers, A Small Place offers a pertinent site through which to consider how history, power and violence shape the meanings and effects of empathy. It illustrates how the affective afterlives of decolonisation shape contemporary subjectivities in ways that are not easy to penetrate, nor possible to undo, through the power of empathetic will alone. Yet it also points to the role that alternative empathies can play in interrogating ideas of time as linear and universal and space as self-contained, revealing how we live affectively through different temporalities and spatialities – with varying implications for our senses of possibility in and for the world. I thus argue that exploring alternative empathies might open out to affective politics which do not view emotions instrumentally as sources of – or solutions to – complex social and political problems, but rather examine diverse and shifting relations of feeling for what they might tell us about the affective workings of power in a transnational world.
Empathy, it would seem, has become a Euro-American political obsession. Within contemporary liberal political imaginaries – from Obama’s political rhetoric, to international development discourse, to particular strands of feminist and... more
Empathy, it would seem, has become a Euro-American political obsession. Within contemporary liberal political imaginaries – from Obama’s political rhetoric, to international development discourse, to particular strands of feminist and anti-racist theory and praxis – empathy has been conceptualised as an affective capacity or technique via which ‘we’ can come to know the cultural ‘other’. Through transporting one into the affective world of another, it is argued, empathic perspective-taking can promote cross-cultural dialogue and understanding that leads to political action in the interests of transnational social justice.
Yet for empathy to do its important cross-cultural and transnational work, these discourses suggest, it must be accurate. A key imperative in this respect is that genuine empathy involves understanding ‘the other’ accurately from the perspective and context of the other, rather than projecting one’s own perspective and context. As such, liberal (and neoliberal) discourses maintain, ‘we’ must become skilled in reading others’ culturally specific mental and emotional states, as well as the intricacies of their social predicaments. (There are, as ever, critical questions to ask concerning who ‘we’ and ‘the other’ are within ubiquitous calls for transnational empathy as affective panacea).
Yet for empathy to do its important cross-cultural and transnational work, these discourses suggest, it must be accurate. A key imperative in this respect is that genuine empathy involves understanding ‘the other’ accurately from the perspective and context of the other, rather than projecting one’s own perspective and context. As such, liberal (and neoliberal) discourses maintain, ‘we’ must become skilled in reading others’ culturally specific mental and emotional states, as well as the intricacies of their social predicaments. (There are, as ever, critical questions to ask concerning who ‘we’ and ‘the other’ are within ubiquitous calls for transnational empathy as affective panacea).
Research Interests:
This chapter is part of the collection Transatlantic Conversations: Feminism as a Travelling Theory (Davis and Evans eds, 2011): The second wave of feminism which challenged and changed many assumptions about the world in which we live... more
This chapter is part of the collection Transatlantic Conversations: Feminism as a Travelling Theory (Davis and Evans eds, 2011): The second wave of feminism which challenged and changed many assumptions about the world in which we live was a product of various western cultures, with no single country possessing a monopoly on the writing of the texts that became the canonical statements of the 'new' feminism. Though many of the contributions to feminist scholarship that went on to become internationally significant hailed from Europe and the United States, these works were often formed within the context of local debates and framed within traditions of feminism and other political engagements specific to these nations. Transatlantic Conversations explores the differences yielded by such conditions and their consequences for the meaning of feminism.Examining the meaning and implications of the different ways in which various shared categories have been treated on both sides of the Atlantic, this volume both analyses differences within feminism and provides a framework for the wider discussion of what is sometimes assumed to be the homogeneity of The West. With leading scholars from either side of the Atlantic presenting brand new work, Transatlantic Conversations suggests directions for future research will be of interest to scholars of feminism, gender studies, sociology, political science and international relations, geography and cultural studies, as well anyone concerned with the ways in which the different political and intellectual traditions of Europe and the US have shaped current political and intellectual debates.
Through illustrating the similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural contexts (such as `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery), feminist theorists seek to reveal the instability of... more
Through illustrating the similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural contexts (such as `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery), feminist theorists seek to reveal the instability of essentialist binaries which distinguish various groups as culturally, ethnically and morally `different'. They also aim to query how the term `culture' is employed differentially on the basis of embodied axes such as race and nation. However, in emphasizing overarching commonalities between practices, feminist cross-cultural comparisons risk collapsing into economies of sameness that elide the complex relations of power through which such practices have been constituted. They can also fix the imagined subjects of these practices in troubling ways. Using the ubiquitous `African' female genital cutting and `Western' cosmetic surgery binary as an example, this article explores the difference it might make to address culturally essentialist constructions of embodied practice with a focus on relationality rather than commonality. As a means to reorient feminist cross-cultural approaches which depend on assertions of similarity or sameness, it argues for the theoretical and pedagogical utility of thinking through relational webs.
Research Interests:
Drawing commonalities between embodied practices understood to be rooted in different cultural contexts has become prevalent in a range of feminist literatures. One analogy increasingly made is that between Muslim veiling and so-called... more
Drawing commonalities between embodied practices understood to be rooted in different cultural contexts has become prevalent in a range of feminist literatures. One analogy increasingly made is that between Muslim veiling and so-called Western fashion and beauty practices. In this chapter, I examine how these cross-cultural analogies work, focusing on their implications for how feminist scholars can think through intersectionality, cultural difference and agency with respect to embodied practice.
Making links between different embodied cultural practices has become increasingly common within the feminist literature on multiculturalism and cultural difference as a means to counter racism and cultural essentialism. The... more
Making links between different embodied cultural practices has become increasingly common within the feminist literature on multiculturalism and cultural difference as a means to counter racism and cultural essentialism. The cross-cultural comparison most commonly made in this context is that between 'African' practices of female genital cutting (FGC) and 'western' body modifications. In this article, I analyse some of the ways in which FGC and other body-altering procedures (such as cosmetic surgery, intersex operations and 19th century American clitoridectomies) are compared within this feminist literature. I identify two main strategies of linking such practices, which I have termed the 'continuum' and 'analogue' approaches. The continuum approach is employed to imagine FGC alongside other body-altering procedures within a single 'continuum', 'spectrum' or 'range' of cross-cultural body modifications. The analogue approach is used to set up FGC and other body-altering practices as analogous through highlighting cross-cultural similarities, but does not explicitly conceive of them as forming a single continuum. Two key critiques of the continuum and analogue approaches are presented. First, because these models privilege gender and sexuality, they tend to efface the operation of other axes of embodied differentiation, namely race, cultural difference and nation. As such, the continuum and analogue approaches often reproduce problematic relationships between race and gender while failing to address the implicit and problematic role which race, cultural difference and nation continue to play in such models. This erasure of these axes, I contend, is linked to the construction of a 'western' empathetic gaze, which is my second key critique. The desire on the part of theorists working in the West to establish cross-cultural 'empathy' through models that stress similarity and solidarity conceals the continuing operation of geo-political relations of power and privilege.
Research Interests:
... New Working Paper Series Tracing 'the Anorexic' and 'the Veiled Woman': Towards a Relational Approach (2007). Download: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/genderinstitute/c CACHED: Download as a PDF.... more
... New Working Paper Series Tracing 'the Anorexic' and 'the Veiled Woman': Towards a Relational Approach (2007). Download: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/genderinstitute/c CACHED: Download as a PDF. by Carolyn Pedwell , Carolyn Pedwell. Add To MetaCart. ...
This discussion paper provides an overview of ILO research on women, gender and the informal economy which was undertaken during the last two decades. It examines methodological and analytical frameworks used in various studies,... more
This discussion paper provides an overview of ILO research on women, gender and the informal economy which was undertaken during the last two decades. It examines methodological and analytical frameworks used in various studies, identifies research gaps and proposes directions for future work. It ultimately aims to enhance ILO’s work in developing consistent, coherent and coordinated policy advice to constituents across the four pillars of the ILO Decent Work Agenda: standards and fundamental principles and rights at work, employment, social protection and social dialogue.
This discussion paper is an outcome of two converging initiatives. Firstly, in order to assess the work accomplished by the ILO on Decent Work and women-specific and gender equality topics, an initial mapping exercise on existing research conducted by Headquarters and field offices was undertaken in 2007. The first findings from this mapping exercise were presented at the Workshop “Gender Equality and Decent Work: Towards a Comprehensive Research Strategy” in May 2007. 1 A direct outcome of the Workshop was the conclusion that a substantive review and analysis of ILO researches on women, gender and the informal economy was necessary.
Secondly, this discussion paper is one of the outputs of the In-Focus Initiative on the informal economy which was launched by the Director General to give further effect to the 2002 International Labour Conference’s Resolution and conclusions concerning decent work and the Informal Economy. 2 In this context the In-Focus Initiative had recently held the Interregional Symposium on the Informal economy: Enabling the Transition to Formality in Geneva, 27–29 November 2007. 3 This Symposium provided a tripartite forum for in-depth discussion and exchange of experience on recent trends, policy responses and practical strategies that are being developed in key areas across the Decent Work Agenda that enable transition to formalization. In preparation for this Interregional Symposium, it was decided to provide specific focus on the gender dimension for the informal economy, both in the background document, as well in the
symposium deliberations.
This discussion paper is a follow-up to the conclusions of both the abovementioned gender research Workshop in May and the Symposium in November of 2007. Both initiatives had identified the challenge of developing and implementing research, policy and practical initiatives which combine employment creation, social protection, rights at work and representation in ways that ensure gender equality and enable empowerment of workers in the informal economy. Therefore, this discussion paper comes as a step towards assessing the particular gaps in ILO research on women, gender and the informal economy and identifying key areas in need of future prioritization.
This discussion paper is an outcome of two converging initiatives. Firstly, in order to assess the work accomplished by the ILO on Decent Work and women-specific and gender equality topics, an initial mapping exercise on existing research conducted by Headquarters and field offices was undertaken in 2007. The first findings from this mapping exercise were presented at the Workshop “Gender Equality and Decent Work: Towards a Comprehensive Research Strategy” in May 2007. 1 A direct outcome of the Workshop was the conclusion that a substantive review and analysis of ILO researches on women, gender and the informal economy was necessary.
Secondly, this discussion paper is one of the outputs of the In-Focus Initiative on the informal economy which was launched by the Director General to give further effect to the 2002 International Labour Conference’s Resolution and conclusions concerning decent work and the Informal Economy. 2 In this context the In-Focus Initiative had recently held the Interregional Symposium on the Informal economy: Enabling the Transition to Formality in Geneva, 27–29 November 2007. 3 This Symposium provided a tripartite forum for in-depth discussion and exchange of experience on recent trends, policy responses and practical strategies that are being developed in key areas across the Decent Work Agenda that enable transition to formalization. In preparation for this Interregional Symposium, it was decided to provide specific focus on the gender dimension for the informal economy, both in the background document, as well in the
symposium deliberations.
This discussion paper is a follow-up to the conclusions of both the abovementioned gender research Workshop in May and the Symposium in November of 2007. Both initiatives had identified the challenge of developing and implementing research, policy and practical initiatives which combine employment creation, social protection, rights at work and representation in ways that ensure gender equality and enable empowerment of workers in the informal economy. Therefore, this discussion paper comes as a step towards assessing the particular gaps in ILO research on women, gender and the informal economy and identifying key areas in need of future prioritization.
Research Interests:
... The Politics of Democratic Governance: Organising for Social Inclusion and Gender Equity. Author(s), Dr Carolyn Pedwell. Publication type, Report. Series Title, Year, 2008. Report Number, ISBN: 1898776652. Pages, 35. Full text is not... more
... The Politics of Democratic Governance: Organising for Social Inclusion and Gender Equity. Author(s), Dr Carolyn Pedwell. Publication type, Report. Series Title, Year, 2008. Report Number, ISBN: 1898776652. Pages, 35. Full text is not currently available for this publication. ...
We desperately need more empathy. At least, that’s what we are told—in political rhetoric, in bestselling popular science books, in international development discourse, in feminist and anti-racist activism. Among current political... more
We desperately need more empathy. At least, that’s what we are told—in political rhetoric, in bestselling popular science books, in international development discourse, in feminist and anti-racist activism. Among current political antagonisms, especially the rise of Trumpism, many are worried about the deleterious effects of “empathy erosion.”
Empathy has been touted as a necessary quality in leadership, the solution to a wide range of social ills and a central component of social justice. If we see from another’s perspective, imaginatively experiencing her or his thoughts, feelings or predicaments, we will open up lines of dialogue, ameliorate conflicts and grievances, and engage in more ethical or socially responsible action. The problem, however, is that empathy is much more uneven and unpredictable than these narratives convey.
Empathy has been touted as a necessary quality in leadership, the solution to a wide range of social ills and a central component of social justice. If we see from another’s perspective, imaginatively experiencing her or his thoughts, feelings or predicaments, we will open up lines of dialogue, ameliorate conflicts and grievances, and engage in more ethical or socially responsible action. The problem, however, is that empathy is much more uneven and unpredictable than these narratives convey.
Research Interests:
How might we understand the links among affect, habit, temporality and social transformation – and what might such a critical investigation imply for the ‘here and now’ of cultural and social theory and praxis? Recent (as well as much... more
How might we understand the links among affect, habit, temporality and social transformation – and what might such a critical investigation imply for the ‘here and now’ of cultural and social theory and praxis?
Recent (as well as much earlier) work in Cultural Studies, and related fields, has explored the vital role certain affects, emotions and feelings might play in catalyzing radical social and political change. Such narratives of ‘affective revolution’ are often rich, important and inspiring. My sense, however, is that some of these analyses may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of how ‘progressive’ change might occur and endure in a given context (while side-stepping the vexing question of how to evaluate the concept of social ‘progress’ itself in the current socio-political landscape).
As such, this short piece is animated by the following key questions: Can critical work on habit provide different, and potentially more fruitful, conceptual terrain for understanding the complexities of social stasis and transformation at the current cultural, political and socio-economic conjuncture? And might it do so in ways that enable a reconfiguring of dominant binaries of cognition/embodiment, individual/environment, and human/non-human, while troubling linear notions of time?
Recent (as well as much earlier) work in Cultural Studies, and related fields, has explored the vital role certain affects, emotions and feelings might play in catalyzing radical social and political change. Such narratives of ‘affective revolution’ are often rich, important and inspiring. My sense, however, is that some of these analyses may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of how ‘progressive’ change might occur and endure in a given context (while side-stepping the vexing question of how to evaluate the concept of social ‘progress’ itself in the current socio-political landscape).
As such, this short piece is animated by the following key questions: Can critical work on habit provide different, and potentially more fruitful, conceptual terrain for understanding the complexities of social stasis and transformation at the current cultural, political and socio-economic conjuncture? And might it do so in ways that enable a reconfiguring of dominant binaries of cognition/embodiment, individual/environment, and human/non-human, while troubling linear notions of time?
Research Interests:
As I discuss in my book Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palsgrave, 2014), creating more or better empathy is now framed as an affective ‘solution’ to a wide range of social ills and as a central component of... more
As I discuss in my book Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palsgrave, 2014), creating more or better empathy is now framed as an affective ‘solution’ to a wide range of social ills and as a central component of building cross-cultural and transnational social justice. Yet empathy - understood in shorthand as the affective ability to ‘put oneself in the other’s shoes’ - can easily become a kind of end-point. Precisely because it is so widely and unquestioningly viewed as ‘good,’ its naming can represent a conceptual stoppage in conversation or analysis. Thus, the most pressing questions tend less to be ‘what is empathy?’, ‘what does it do?’, ‘what are its risks?’, and ‘what happens after empathy’, but rather the more automatic refrain of ‘how can we cultivate it?’ It is also evident that, although a number of commentators in the global North insist that empathy can play an important role in mediating relations between different social and cultural groups and across national and geo-political boundaries, relatively scant attention has been paid specifically to the transnational politics of empathy. As such, we have little insight into how empathy emerges and flows through global circuits of power, and the complex ways in which it transforms and translates as it travels between diverse contexts. In the face of these dynamics, my work has grappled with two central questions: firstly, how can we think more critically about the contemporary political workings of empathy? and secondly, how might we understand the complex links between empathy and transnational relations of power?
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The John Dewey Society aims to foster intelligent inquiry into the pressing social problems of our time, especially pertaining to the place and function of education in resolving such problems, as well as to share, discuss, and... more
The John Dewey Society aims to foster intelligent inquiry into the pressing social problems of our time, especially pertaining to the place and function of education in resolving such problems, as well as to share, discuss, and disseminate the results of such inquiries.
Research Interests:
This conference has capacious aims! In and across the diverse practices and studies of affect, how might we continue to 'find room' or 'make space' and under what circumstances might such a framing for affect study be problematic? This... more
This conference has capacious aims! In and across the diverse practices and studies of affect, how might we continue to 'find room' or 'make space' and under what circumstances might such a framing for affect study be problematic? This conference will be open to all (students, faculty, non-academics, and others) while emphasizing the crucial role of graduate students and early career researchers in shaping the scholarship in affect study.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Sociology of Religion, Psychoanalysis, Emotion, and 76 moreBlack Studies Or African American Studies, Queer Studies, Political Philosophy, Philosophy Of Religion, Media Studies, New Media, Composition and Rhetoric, Design, Feminist Theory, Film Studies, Film Theory, Disability Studies, Critical Disability Studies, Queer Theology, Transgender Studies, Sociology of Emotion, Queer Theory, Animal Studies, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Animal Studies, Anthropology of the Body, Literary Criticism, Cultural Theory, Cognition, Embodied Cognition, Bodies and Culture, Embodiment, Critical Race Theory, Embodied Mind and Cognition, Continental Philosophy, Emotional Labour, Digital Culture, Rhetoric and Public Culture, Sound studies, The Body, Affective Neuroscience, Rhetorical Criticism, Feminism, Critical Media Studies, Theories of Gender and Transgender, Queer Theory (Literature), Sociology of the Body, Phenomenology of the body, Architectural Theory, Affect Theory, Freud and Feminist Psychoanalysis, Rhetorical Theory, Affect/Emotion, Spinoza, Critical and Cultural Theory, Affect Studies, Black Feminist Theory/Thought, Phenomenology of the Body (Philosophy), Affect (Cultural Theory), Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, Affect (Philosophy), Cinematic Affect, Embodiment Theory, Embodied and Distributed Cognition, Sensation and Perception, Affect, Emotion and Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Affect, Blackness, Negative Affect, Contemporary Continental Philosophy, Queer, Sensation, Lauren Berlant, Feelings, Embodied and Enactive Cognition, Structures of Feeling, Anthropology of Religion, Politics of Affect, Feeling and Emotion, Phenomenology of Feelings, and Critical Disability Theory
“[P]olitics is always emotional”, as Lauren Berlant emphasizes. According to the American literary scholar and queer theorist, it is “a scene where structural antagonisms — genuinely conflicting interests — are described in rhetoric that... more
“[P]olitics is always emotional”, as Lauren Berlant emphasizes. According to the American literary scholar and queer theorist, it is “a scene where structural antagonisms — genuinely conflicting interests — are described in rhetoric that intensifies fantasy”, or that attaches people to dreams of a better life. The relevance of affect and emotions in the realm of realpolitik, but also in societal power relations in general, has increasingly become the focus of scientific and artistic disciplines. Approaches influenced by the field of affective neurosciences, for example, understand emotions no longer as the opposite of cognition; instead they seem to go ineluctably and necessarily hand in hand.
Particularly in recent political events emotions seem to be on the rise as a currency — in restitutive and reactionary efforts towards exclusion and isolation, for example. The cx centre for interdisciplinary studies takes this as a cue to once again address the theme of affect and emotions as a meaningful category for analyzing the social — almost two decades after the first proclamation of the “Affective Turn”. The sixth lecture series of the cx focuses on the contemporary relations of power and emotions, as in the emotionally saturated technologies of power that promise happiness, or in evocative scenarios of fear and rage, but also in the more positively evaluated power of empathy and movements of solidarity. The series investigates the influence of mediated emotions and affective attunements, potential new balances of power through the mechanization of affect, as well as current artistic and design-based reflections and deconstructions of emotional regimes. Following prominent voices of affect theory, like Brian Massumi, this lecture series differentiates between affect as a change of a body’s agency created by the encounter with other bodies, and emotion as a social phenomenon and psychological capture of affect. However, as these terms are multi faceted and are interpreted and applied differently depending on discipline and theorist, each panel will define and discuss their dissimilarities and transitions anew.
Particularly in recent political events emotions seem to be on the rise as a currency — in restitutive and reactionary efforts towards exclusion and isolation, for example. The cx centre for interdisciplinary studies takes this as a cue to once again address the theme of affect and emotions as a meaningful category for analyzing the social — almost two decades after the first proclamation of the “Affective Turn”. The sixth lecture series of the cx focuses on the contemporary relations of power and emotions, as in the emotionally saturated technologies of power that promise happiness, or in evocative scenarios of fear and rage, but also in the more positively evaluated power of empathy and movements of solidarity. The series investigates the influence of mediated emotions and affective attunements, potential new balances of power through the mechanization of affect, as well as current artistic and design-based reflections and deconstructions of emotional regimes. Following prominent voices of affect theory, like Brian Massumi, this lecture series differentiates between affect as a change of a body’s agency created by the encounter with other bodies, and emotion as a social phenomenon and psychological capture of affect. However, as these terms are multi faceted and are interpreted and applied differently depending on discipline and theorist, each panel will define and discuss their dissimilarities and transitions anew.
Research Interests:
The ability to express and feel empathy has long been presented as one of the defining traits of what it means to be human. Although this ability is increasingly being recognised in non-‐human entities, this very act of identification... more
The ability to express and feel empathy has long been presented as one of the defining traits of what it means to be human. Although this ability is increasingly being recognised in non-‐human entities, this very act of identification roots the empathetic response further in a " natural " bodily automatism that is involved in mediating social experience and the way we relate to others. This workshop will complicate the immediacy of the feeling of empathy – our ability to really feel " it " , be moved and reach out to the other – by foregrounding that the expression of empathy also hinges on " specific " cultural knowledge and experience, which shapes our perception of and responses to others. If we accept that empathy is not merely a " universal " human phenomenon, but one that is also situated, at work in different ways in different places and situations, then empathy also reveals a fractious potential. Rather than making us merely reach out to others, empathy also immunises an " us " against those for whom no such feelings are felt. Whilst feeling empathy we inevitably also have the impression of " understanding " the other, which embeds the other's pain in our own experience and system of values, even though these values may not be universally shared. Here the genuine expression of empathy can end up entrenching stereotypes, power-‐relations and cultural ignorance because the other's situation seems so immediately understood and obvious. Empathy can also lead to moral catharsis, which vents emotional tensions and doubts to give one the impression of " caring " and " sharing " the other's pain. As such, it can act as a disincentive to scrutinise one's own behaviour and might lead to inaction and the sanitation of the violence of social exclusion and structural injustices. The very fact that a wide range of cultural practices – from adverts, political speeches, TV-‐soap operas, museum exhibitions to music and sentimental literature – routinely seek to elicit empathetic responses, alerts us to the political and mediated nature of this feeling. When we all cry at the same time in a Hollywood movie, is this really an expression of our shared humanity, or are other forces at work here also? The participants of this workshop will have the opportunity to engage in a day long discussion about the construction and role of empathy in the sphere of cultural politics. Key points of discussion will include cultural translation, empathy and international geo-‐politics, postcolonialism, critical race studies, feminist and gender studies, national identity, class and memory studies and the connected questions of the politics of representation and technological mediation, especially in the context of digital media, literature and the arts. The overarching aim of the day is to raise awareness of the multiple ways in which empathy intersects with cultural politics, and to help participants gage how questions of cultural politics intersect with their own work. As such, this workshop will be useful for researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds. The programme (overleaf) is designed to combine a thematic overview of the field with workshops and presentations by participants. Deadline for Application / Registration: 30 th of April, 2017 To set the ground for the discussions, participants are asked to register for the event by preparing a short (300-‐400 word) narrative about their own research and how this touches on empathy. These narratives will be circulated in advance to all participants and will form the basis for introductions and workshops on the day. Some foundational reading has also been recommended. Please send your application to: MullerCJ@cardiff.ac.uk and andreamaria.zimmermann@unibas.ch
Research Interests:
Assembling a distinctive genealogy of cybernetic thought situated in relation to Progressive Era technocracy, industrial capitalism, (de)colonial relations, and eugenic machinery, Code uncovers the vital interdependence of informatics,... more
Assembling a distinctive genealogy of cybernetic thought situated in relation to Progressive Era technocracy, industrial capitalism, (de)colonial relations, and eugenic machinery, Code uncovers the vital interdependence of informatics, the humanities, and the human sciences in the 20th century. Rather than figuring cybernetics as emerging from Second World War military technologies and postwar digital computing, Code argues that liberal technocrats' inter-war visions of social welfare delivered via 'neutral' communication techniques shaped the informatic interventions of both the Second World War and the Cold War. Tracing how an organizing concept of code linked the work of diverse structurally-minded thinkers, such as
Research Interests:
I first became interested in theorizations of habit after encountering Sara Ahmed’s work in Queer Phenomenology (2006), where she discusses how orienting or distancing oneself from a subject or an object is the result of familiarization... more
I first became interested in theorizations of habit after encountering Sara
Ahmed’s work in Queer Phenomenology (2006), where she discusses how
orienting or distancing oneself from a subject or an object is the result of
familiarization and habituation processes. Carolyn Pedwell’s fascinating
book, Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, honours
Ahmed’s legacy by urging readers to question learned habits, drawing from
a robust body of feminist anti-racist theories, affect studies, and continental
and pragmatist philosophical traditions. This transdisciplinary framework
allows Pedwell to map out some distinctive habitual formations at this historical juncture, characterized by increasing polarization, backlash to racial and gender equity, and the intensification of patterns of exceptionalism and sensationalism.
Ahmed’s work in Queer Phenomenology (2006), where she discusses how
orienting or distancing oneself from a subject or an object is the result of
familiarization and habituation processes. Carolyn Pedwell’s fascinating
book, Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, honours
Ahmed’s legacy by urging readers to question learned habits, drawing from
a robust body of feminist anti-racist theories, affect studies, and continental
and pragmatist philosophical traditions. This transdisciplinary framework
allows Pedwell to map out some distinctive habitual formations at this historical juncture, characterized by increasing polarization, backlash to racial and gender equity, and the intensification of patterns of exceptionalism and sensationalism.
Research Interests:
The self-help genre dominates the space for shaping and changing habits at the individual scale. The individual and the personal-where many self-help books end-is where Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, begins.... more
The self-help genre dominates the space for shaping and changing habits at the individual scale. The individual and the personal-where many self-help books end-is where Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation, begins. The book builds a theoretical manifesto, inspiring thought on the "immanent process" of social change, its non-linearity, its continuing nature, and the significance of minor gestures or habits.
Research Interests:
Pedwell seeks to develop a new ontology of transformation in which ‘the revolutionary and the routine are perpetually intertwined and minor gestures and tendencies may be just as significant as major events’ (6). With the rise of... more
Pedwell seeks to develop a new ontology of transformation in which ‘the revolutionary and the routine are perpetually intertwined and minor gestures and tendencies may be just as significant as major events’ (6). With the rise of explicitly racist and xenophobic practices in recent years – enunciated especially through the ‘major’ political events of right-wing populism, Trumpism and Brexit – Revolutionary Routines offers a timely
examination of how habits can both perpetuate and combat social injustices.
Pedwell is interested in the possibilities of everyday habits for reformulating social progress in the present, as opposed to the distant future, and the potential of habit to reinscribe social practices in the now. Pedwell’s disciplinary background in media, communications and cultural studies is evident through her emphasis on how contemporary social justice movements pursue transformation through the making of new digital ecologies. She considers how such movements reinhabit everyday spaces of digital networks and technologies to cultivate new habits and possibilities to challenge the status quo. In making this connection, the book advances a conceptualisation of habits as at once embodied, subconscious and felt as well as ‘political, institutional and datalogical’ (xix).
examination of how habits can both perpetuate and combat social injustices.
Pedwell is interested in the possibilities of everyday habits for reformulating social progress in the present, as opposed to the distant future, and the potential of habit to reinscribe social practices in the now. Pedwell’s disciplinary background in media, communications and cultural studies is evident through her emphasis on how contemporary social justice movements pursue transformation through the making of new digital ecologies. She considers how such movements reinhabit everyday spaces of digital networks and technologies to cultivate new habits and possibilities to challenge the status quo. In making this connection, the book advances a conceptualisation of habits as at once embodied, subconscious and felt as well as ‘political, institutional and datalogical’ (xix).
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Social Change, Algorithms, and 14 morePragmatism, Media Studies, Feminist Theory, Digital Humanities, Digital Media, Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, Social Justice, Continental Philosophy, Affect Theory, Affect Studies, Affect (Cultural Theory), American Pragmatism, and Habits
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Social Change, Social Movements, Social Theory, Algorithms, and 12 moreFeminist Theory, Critical Race Studies, Digital Media, Critical Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory, Continental Philosophy, Social Media, Affect Theory, Pragmatism (Philosophy), Affect (Cultural Theory), New social movements, and Habits
Pedwell’s rich study examines the diverse ways in which empathy is mobilised – from political speeches that uphold neoliberalism, to postcolonial literatures that refuse certain forms of empathic connection. Empathy is an a!ective... more
Pedwell’s rich study examines the diverse ways in which
empathy is mobilised – from political speeches that uphold
neoliberalism, to postcolonial literatures that refuse certain
forms of empathic connection. Empathy is an a!ective
relation often conceptualized in liberal and neoliberal
thought as the imaginative and felt ability to “put oneself
in the other’s shoes”. In challenging the appropriative
dynamics of this mode of perspective taking, alongside its
assumptions of universality, A!ective Relations underscores
the multiple configurations of empathy across di!erent
contexts. As empathy is produced and circulated
transnationally, it is used for divergent political ends: it
may reinforce dominant economic, political and cultural
relations but it may also open up the possibility for
transformative social justice. Pedwell’s development of the
concept of a!ective translation is key to this latter
potential as the contested (re)production of a!ect across
borders produces what she calls “alternative empathies”,
that is, “ways of sensing, being and feeling that do not
simply confirm what we think we already know” (page
189).
empathy is mobilised – from political speeches that uphold
neoliberalism, to postcolonial literatures that refuse certain
forms of empathic connection. Empathy is an a!ective
relation often conceptualized in liberal and neoliberal
thought as the imaginative and felt ability to “put oneself
in the other’s shoes”. In challenging the appropriative
dynamics of this mode of perspective taking, alongside its
assumptions of universality, A!ective Relations underscores
the multiple configurations of empathy across di!erent
contexts. As empathy is produced and circulated
transnationally, it is used for divergent political ends: it
may reinforce dominant economic, political and cultural
relations but it may also open up the possibility for
transformative social justice. Pedwell’s development of the
concept of a!ective translation is key to this latter
potential as the contested (re)production of a!ect across
borders produces what she calls “alternative empathies”,
that is, “ways of sensing, being and feeling that do not
simply confirm what we think we already know” (page
189).
Research Interests: Cultural Studies, Political Sociology, Emotion, Human Geography, Cultural Geography, and 19 moreGender Studies, International Relations, Media and Cultural Studies, Feminist Theory, Empathy (Psychology), Postcolonial Studies, Critical Race Theory, Affective Neuroscience, Postcolonial Feminism, Postcolonial Theory, Affect Theory, Affect/Emotion, Kinesthetic Empathy, Affect (Cultural Theory), Empathy (Philosophy), Feminism and Social Justice, Empathy, Affect, and Mirror Neurones and empathy
Carolyn Pedwell's Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy critiques the romanticisation of empathy as a catalyst for transnational social justice, a resolution to violence and misunderstanding, and an individual... more
Carolyn Pedwell's Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy critiques the romanticisation of empathy as a catalyst for transnational social justice, a resolution to violence and misunderstanding, and an individual competency embodied by ideal neo-liberal citizens. Rather than question how politicians, activists and academics can more effectively cultivate empathy transnationally, Pedwell draws attention to the discursive, material and affective labour that Western deployments of empathy perform throughout the world. Namely, she considers how empathy has been employed in the service of biopolitical governmentality and neo-liberal subject-making. In this way, empathy serves not as a foundation for revolutionary social change, but as a vehicle for reproducing colonial hierarchies of power that privilege the political and corporate elite. Importantly for Pedwell, emotions cannot be understood as discrete entities or universal, biologically-rooted experiences contained within or possessed by a single individual. Following scholars like Sara Ahmed and Lauren Berlant, Pedwell views empathy as relational, interactive and circulating. Rather than differentiate between affect—a term that many scholars associate with biological or physiological processes—and emotion—a term that scholars attribute to sociocultural expression and cognition—Pedwell uses both interchangeably; for Pedwell, dividing such terms fallaciously implies that a clear-cut distinction between biology and culture exists. Assuming this approach enables her to map the uneven circulation of empathy onto structural relations of power. In so doing, she demystifies empathy as the magical antidote for the trauma of colonial violence and political exclusion, or as an evolutionary adaptation that situates morality in human biology.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Political Sociology, Gender Studies, and 16 moreInternational Relations, Feminist Theory, Critical Race Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Mirror Neurons, Critical Race Theory, Affective Neuroscience, Neoliberalism, Postcolonial Feminism, Postcolonial Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Affect Theory, Affect/Emotion, Affect (Cultural Theory), Feminist Literary Theory and Gender Studies, and Empathy
Carolyn Pedwell opens her book, Affective Relations: the transnational politics of empathy, with a Foucauldian-style reframing of the dominant discourse around empathy. Rather than assuming the benevolence of empathy and debating how to... more
Carolyn Pedwell opens her book, Affective Relations: the transnational
politics of empathy, with a Foucauldian-style reframing of the
dominant discourse around empathy. Rather than assuming the
benevolence of empathy and debating how to best cultivate it to
produce a more empathetic society, Pedwell switches the conversation
to ask “What is empathy?”, “What does it do?”, and “What are
its risks?” (Pedwell, 2014, x). To answer these questions, she engages
with and builds upon work in Translation Studies to highlight
the interlocking politics of multiple forms of translation, from the
translation between cultural texts to the translation between disciplinary
knowledges, to the translation between emotional states.
She defltly weaves together theories from cultural studies, feminism,
postcolonialism, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis through
a style of translation that, she argues, seeks to “cultivate empathetic
relations between these (often very different and sometimes
incommensurable) epistemological strands to create a ‘creolised’
critical perspective” (182).
politics of empathy, with a Foucauldian-style reframing of the
dominant discourse around empathy. Rather than assuming the
benevolence of empathy and debating how to best cultivate it to
produce a more empathetic society, Pedwell switches the conversation
to ask “What is empathy?”, “What does it do?”, and “What are
its risks?” (Pedwell, 2014, x). To answer these questions, she engages
with and builds upon work in Translation Studies to highlight
the interlocking politics of multiple forms of translation, from the
translation between cultural texts to the translation between disciplinary
knowledges, to the translation between emotional states.
She defltly weaves together theories from cultural studies, feminism,
postcolonialism, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis through
a style of translation that, she argues, seeks to “cultivate empathetic
relations between these (often very different and sometimes
incommensurable) epistemological strands to create a ‘creolised’
critical perspective” (182).
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Political Sociology, Human Geography, Cultural Geography, and 19 moreGender Studies, International Relations, English Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, Empathy (Psychology), Postcolonial Studies, Mirror Neurons, Cross-Cultural Studies, Affective Neuroscience, Postcolonial Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Cultural Studies (Communication), Affect/Emotion, Affect Studies, Kinesthetic Empathy, Affect (Cultural Theory), Empathy (Philosophy), Empathy, and Affect
Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice discusses embodied practices and cross-cultural comparisons. Using the pairs genital cutting – western body modifications and veiling – western beauty practices Pedwell re-examines the theoretical... more
Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice discusses embodied practices and cross-cultural comparisons. Using the pairs genital cutting – western body modifications and veiling – western beauty practices Pedwell re-examines the theoretical assumptions and particular methods of cross-cultural comparisons as well as their political and ideological implications. She carries out this task demonstrating both robust theoretical knowledge and clarity of perspective, engaging with the construction of equivalence and similarity between cultural practices, exposing shortcomings such as the (often unintended) proliferation of essentialism, highlighting the theoretical limitations of privileging gender over race, history or culture, challenging the production of the forms of knowledge and subjectivity effected through comparisons and reassessing the theoretical contribution of comparisons to the debate of humanism vs anti-humanism.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Rhetoric, and 12 moreFeminist Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Eating Disorders, Cultural Theory, Embodiment, Critical Race Theory, The Body, Female Genital Mutilation, Feminism, Postcolonial Theory, Anorexia Nervosa, and Feminism and Social Justice
In this insightful book, Carolyn Pedwell argues that the rhetorics which feminist scholars use to discuss and compare cultural embodied practices often risk reifying and masking the very power dynamics and essentialism they seek to... more
In this insightful book, Carolyn Pedwell
argues that the rhetorics which feminist
scholars use to discuss and compare cultural
embodied practices often risk reifying and
masking the very power dynamics and
essentialism they seek to disrupt. She analyzes
two popular types of discourse which
are used to compare different cultural
embodied practices: the analogue approach
and the continuum approach. She demonstrates
how these discourses succeed to
some extent in highlighting various similarities
between practices, yet ‘‘fail to take into
account historical, social, and discursive differences
which affect how practices have
been constituted, experienced, and mobilised’’
(p. 33). Ignoring these issues in order
to unite cultural practices under a banner
of ‘‘sameness’’ unintentionally masks the
various ways in which cultural essentialism
and racism are perpetuated.
argues that the rhetorics which feminist
scholars use to discuss and compare cultural
embodied practices often risk reifying and
masking the very power dynamics and
essentialism they seek to disrupt. She analyzes
two popular types of discourse which
are used to compare different cultural
embodied practices: the analogue approach
and the continuum approach. She demonstrates
how these discourses succeed to
some extent in highlighting various similarities
between practices, yet ‘‘fail to take into
account historical, social, and discursive differences
which affect how practices have
been constituted, experienced, and mobilised’’
(p. 33). Ignoring these issues in order
to unite cultural practices under a banner
of ‘‘sameness’’ unintentionally masks the
various ways in which cultural essentialism
and racism are perpetuated.
Research Interests: Sociology, Cultural Studies, Plastic Surgery, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, and 22 moreRhetoric, Cultural Sociology, Feminist Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Queer Theory, Eating Disorders, Cultural Theory, Embodiment, Critical Race Theory, Gender, The Body, Female genital cutting, Female Genital Mutilation, Feminism, Postcolonial Feminism, Postcolonial Theory, Sociology of the Body, Eating Disorders and Body Image, Anorexia Nervosa, Feminism and Social Justice, Cosmetic surgery, and Postcolonialism
Pedwell’s Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison engages on a theoretical level with feminist work that address a variety of embodied practices, including female genital cutting (FGC), ‘western’ body... more
Pedwell’s Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison engages on a theoretical level with feminist work that address a variety of embodied practices, including female genital cutting (FGC), ‘western’ body modification practices (such as cosmetic surgery procedures), anorexia and the veil.
Research Interests:
Re-animating salient controversies from ‘weird science’ and ‘alien phenomenology’, Blackman explores how networked and computational media are changing the evolution of science and interrogating established ‘truths’ concerning embodied... more
Re-animating salient controversies from ‘weird science’ and ‘alien phenomenology’, Blackman explores how networked and computational media are changing the evolution of science and interrogating established ‘truths’ concerning embodied communication and less-than-conscious cognition. Bringing together media studies, critical psychology, feminist science studies, queer theory, cultural studies and affect theory, the book develops a manifesto for how we might engage critically and imaginatively with digital communication to develop a Future Psychology and a genuinely Open Science.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Queer Studies, Philosophy of Science, Media Studies, and 11 moreMedia and Cultural Studies, Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Feminist Philosophy, Critical Psychology, Social Media, Critical Social Psychology, Affect Theory, Affect/Emotion, Affect Studies, and Affect (Cultural Theory)
In Encountering Affect, Ben Anderson offers an extremely careful and considered, yet also truly engaging and enlivened, account of affective life across a range of social and geopolitical landscapes, sites and encounters. Drawing on a... more
In Encountering Affect, Ben Anderson offers an
extremely careful and considered, yet also truly
engaging and enlivened, account of affective life
across a range of social and geopolitical landscapes,
sites and encounters. Drawing on a rich
collection of theoretical resources, including
Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Brian Massumi
and Raymond Williams, the book provides an
ambitious and distinctive account of the contemporary
meaning and implications of affect. Anderson’s
nuanced theoretical analysis is animated and
fleshed out through a salient assemblage of empirical
examples, from the affective atmospheres of
neoliberalism, to the sensorial intensities of ‘total
war’, to the everyday relationships between hope and music, to the racialized politics of affect in the writing of Frantz Fanon.
extremely careful and considered, yet also truly
engaging and enlivened, account of affective life
across a range of social and geopolitical landscapes,
sites and encounters. Drawing on a rich
collection of theoretical resources, including
Michel Foucault, Eve Sedgwick, Brian Massumi
and Raymond Williams, the book provides an
ambitious and distinctive account of the contemporary
meaning and implications of affect. Anderson’s
nuanced theoretical analysis is animated and
fleshed out through a salient assemblage of empirical
examples, from the affective atmospheres of
neoliberalism, to the sensorial intensities of ‘total
war’, to the everyday relationships between hope and music, to the racialized politics of affect in the writing of Frantz Fanon.
Research Interests:
“The story of 9/11 is a melodrama” (2014, 2). This bold claim headlines Elisabeth R. Anker’s Orgies of Feeling, which provides a fascinating account of the centrality of melodramatic conventions to the “War on Terror” and contemporary... more
“The story of 9/11 is a melodrama” (2014, 2). This bold claim headlines Elisabeth R. Anker’s Orgies of Feeling, which provides a fascinating account of the centrality of melodramatic conventions to the “War on Terror” and contemporary American politics more generally. Throughout the book, Anker incisively demonstrates that melodrama is not only a cultural or literary genre; it is also political one. Indeed, she argues, melodrama is the primary affective frame through which US neo-liberal and neo-imperial practices and policies have been articulated, interpreted and legitimized since the Cold War. To this end, Anker offers a theoretically rich and ambitious analysis that brings together the likes of Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Weber, and Foucault with contemporary cultural theory and feminist film scholarship to consider the striking links between popular melodramatic novels, films and stage productions and the spectacles of 9/11 and its aftermath. The result is a highly engaging read that has much to say about the affective workings of contemporary US politics and their troubling transnational implications.
Research Interests:
In this bold book, Naomi Zack insists that an unapologetic reclaiming of women's commonality is what must drive forward feminism's third wave. The author wants to move beyond a focus on intersectionality, which she argues has... more
In this bold book, Naomi Zack insists that an unapologetic reclaiming of women's commonality is what must drive forward feminism's third wave. The author wants to move beyond a focus on intersectionality, which she argues has resulted in fragmentation that has prevented the establishment of common goals and basic empathy. The book seeks to offer a new model of feminism that will be 'inclusive'. Outlined in the book's eight chapters, this comprehensive framework consists of what Zack terms 'inclusive'feminist theories of ...
Research Interests:
... DOI: 10.1177/1357034X070130040703 2007 13: 116 Body & Society Carolyn Pedwell 9 −− Nirmal Puwar Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004, pp. ... 187, ISBN 1859736599 Reviewed by Carolyn Pedwell, Gender Institute, London School of... more
... DOI: 10.1177/1357034X070130040703 2007 13: 116 Body & Society Carolyn Pedwell 9 −− Nirmal Puwar Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004, pp. ... 187, ISBN 1859736599 Reviewed by Carolyn Pedwell, Gender Institute, London School of Economics ...
Research Interests:
Whereas scholars once lauded the utopian possibilities of cyberspace to dissolve embodied markers of gender and race, Jaishree K. Odin argues that a paradigm shift is now required to bring attention back to 'the embodied status... more
Whereas scholars once lauded the utopian possibilities of cyberspace to dissolve embodied markers of gender and race, Jaishree K. Odin argues that a paradigm shift is now required to bring attention back to 'the embodied status of the human and the situated nature of experience'(p. ix). Hence, in order to interrogate theoretical conventions that confine us to machinic, technorationalist constructions of the human (and the masculinist and Western-centric assumptions on which they often rely), Hypertext and the Female Imaginary ...