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Paper short abstract:

I examine children’s affective discourses about digital technologies, both online learning and the tools they use to access, experience, and learn music. I argue that children have a clear sense of themselves as people affected by technology and that digital technologies are ‘sticky’ objects.

Paper long abstract:

Much has rightly been made of the disruption to children’s lives and educations due to the online instruction necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Less has perhaps been said about their affective relationships with digital technologies, particularly as many re-enter face-to-face schooling after extended periods spent learning online. This paper suggests that we take seriously children’s affective discourses about their everyday technologies, and the sudden changes thereto that occurred (and continue to occur) during the pandemic.

This paper reports on ethnographic research conducted with Rock Jam, a private, fees-based music education organization in Dublin, Ireland. This research included fieldwork at Rock Jam’s face-to-face summer camps and their return to term-time, in-person instruction in September 2021. It examines students’ discourses and narratives about digital technologies, including the online learning tools with which they have become intimately familiar, but also the everyday, non-pandemic-related digital technologies that they use to access, experience, and learn music, such as Spotify and YouTube. It argues that these children have a very clear sense of themselves as people who are affected by technology, and that digital technologies are ‘sticky’ objects (to use Sara Ahmed’s term) to which a variety of affective orientations might accrue – affects which may or may not mirror those of the adults around them. It further suggests that the relationship between affect and domination in these child-technology encounters is complex and fluid, with children experiencing technologies as both a dominating force and as tools that they themselves can dominate.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores dominance and prestige as distinct bases for high status and the affective responses they elicit. Through a comparative perspective, I explore how children in China and the UK develop an understanding of hierarchical relations and culturally shaped emotional patterns in conflict.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates the dynamics of dominance, prestige and affect at the level of interpersonal relations. From an early age, children start to understand status processes in their social environments. Findings of cognitive sciences suggest that the ability to discern hierarchical relationships, as well as the processes of dominance and prestige that give rise to them, is to an extent an evolved cognitive capacity available to all humans. By bringing together approaches from anthropology and psychology, I move towards an understanding of how relations of dominance and subordination emerge in everyday interactions, and how the affective responses at both ends of the power vacuum are simultaneously shaped by the evolved dispositions of our species and cultural-historical processes we are embedded in. I investigate how children in China and the UK develop an understanding of dominance-based and prestige-based status processes, and how they are shaped by culturally specific moral frames that pertain to emotional expression and hierarchy. According to evolutionary models, dominance is grounded on coercion and assertion of power and elicits fear and avoidance in subordinates. Prestige is grounded on merit and pro-sociality, and elicits admiration and imitation in others. But at the level of interpersonal relations, children can become skilled in both processes, and there is cultural variation in the tolerance of dominant affects. More aggression and assertiveness is tolerated in the UK than in China, where high status is intrinsically connected to ability to control emotional impulses.

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Paper short abstract:

This article explores the practice of mission as an aspect of living a Christian life in proximity of non-Christians. By drawing on Sara Ahmed’s model of affective contagion, I suggest a conceptualization of mission as emission from bodies oriented through a Pentecostal ethics.

Paper long abstract:

Missionaries are contested figures implicated in the civilizing efforts of colonial powers and powerful advocates for policies endangering LGBTQIA+ communities in Uganda. In Danish Pentecostal communities many are conscious of these histories. past and present, and seek to dissociate evangelization from persuasion through dominance. Instead, mission as evangelization is articulated by many as an almost inevitable consequence of living a devout Christian life with or in proximity of non-Christians. This, in addition to but also part of other forms of missionary work such as preaching, handing out of bibles and humanitarian work. Pentecostals believe in, and provide examples of, others coming to faith as a result of recognizing this way of life as aspirational. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s model of affective contagion as well as Jason Throop’s concept of moral moods, I analyze this idea of mission as a kind of emission. This (e)mission seeks to inspire transformation in others but does so without being directed at one individual. Instead, I argue that this idea of mission anticipates a “missionary” embodying a Pentecostal ethics oriented in relation to “other” bodies that are projected in Pentecostal imageries as “incomplete” or burdened. I discuss the relationship between this idea of mission and the moralizing practices of persuasion it seeks to extinguish. Finally, this article engages with this idea of mission, as it is practices in in Denmark and in Tanzania respectively by Danish missionaries and the social, political and historical arrangements which shape, delimit and define the evangelizing encounter in these contexts.

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Paper short abstract:

This contribution is a collaborative experiment in narrativised affectivity between a feminist activist and an activist scholar bonded in friendship and comradery in turbulent times. We will attempt to co-weave our lived experiences as we reframe notions of resilience, resistance, and burnout.

Paper long abstract:

Our contribution is a collaborative testimony of affect (and affection) blurring the lines between researcher and activist working together in turbulent times and hostile environments. Crossing each other’s territories of feminist knowledge, we explore linked experiences at the intersection of our positionalities; triggered, dismissed, gaslighted, deprived, violated, medically experimented on, mentally broken. The etymology of ‘resilience’ is spiralling back but we are constantly spiralling down, we break; we trip and fall while attempting to carry the glorious message of resilience and the conditioned optimism of our activist resistance. Constantly discomforted, we are resisting on survival mode. UC50 Form. We do not understand the language that is not supposed to make sense to us. Deconditioning. We cannot ‘keep calm and carry on’ in style, we are immigrants (with a persistent accent), as pictured on the van. Gender justice. We practice high kicks on the communal bins. Accommodation. We fall asleep in Schrödinger’s litter box and wake up on the Procrustean bed. Sanity. We fail to package our fall and translate it into academic affect formulas defining burnout. Is our mental universe expanding or stretching? When ‘it seriously hurts, amiga’, we co-weave a cry against narratives of oblivion and detachment from our embodied pain. Resistance. We roll over our negative affects stubbornly, amplify the glorious failure, and echo each other’s pain readily and efficiently like a mini size amphitheatre. Trauma. We are positively hopeful that someone can open the curtains.

Co-authored with Macarena Chaviano Sánchez

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how UK artists gather momentum towards keeping on being an artist when they are marginalised and exploited. These artists' perseverance reveals "dominated affect": the momentum generated by the changing dynamics between individuals' will and the political domination over it.

Paper long abstract:

While UK-based visual and performing artists' precarious situations are well documented, their perseverance remains less explored. For example, these artists not only reconfigure their ways of being dominated by classism, racism and capitalism but also adapt themselves to this domination. This poses a challenge to the predominant affect theory that sidelines the issue of domination. At the same time, examining this fact will add a dynamic perspective to the body of literature that analyses the symbiotic relationship between affect and domination. Also, while the political consciousness of the dominated is well researched, the affect of the dominated has not been fully studied. In this paper, I will ethnographically examine how UK artists gather momentum towards keeping on being an artist when they are marginalised and exploited. Building on my ethnographic materials, I argue that UK artists' perseverance reveals "dominated affect": the momentum generated by the changing dynamics between individuals' will and the political domination over it. This momentum allows individuals to endure the domination and maintains this domination simultaneously. "Dominated affect" aims to provide an explanation of perseverance that captures the subtle influence of domination on people's will better than terms such as "resilience" and "resistance".