- Convenors:
-
Pascale Schild
(University of Bern)
Bushra Punjabi (Jamia Millia Islamia)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Network:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This APeCS panel suggests affect and emotion as an analytical lens to explore processes of conflict, violence and collective struggle. Building on feminist scholarship, we seek to examine how emotions shape bodies, boundaries, and relationships, bringing people together and driving them apart.
Long Abstract
This panel explores how emotions and feelings sustain and transform processes of conflict, violence and collective struggle. Building on feminist critiques of the supposed dichotomy between emotion and reason, and between the personal and the political, we adopt affect and emotion as an analytical lens to examine 'what matters' (Lutz, 2017) to people. Emotions, we argue, ‘move’ people and groups to see and respond to the world in certain ways. With Sara Ahmed, we understand emotions as ‘a form of cultural politics and world-making’ (Ahmed, 2005, 11). While emotions and feelings are shaped by social encounters, memories and materialities, they enable social and political structures to be reified as forms of being.
For this panel, we invite ethnographic, theoretical and methodological contributions examining what affects and emotions — including emotional intensities, affective practices, and languages of emotion in everyday life and politics — ‘do’ in violent conflicts and collective struggles around the world. We explore how feelings normalise processes of violence and inequality, including authoritarian politics, and how they enable and sustain more inclusive forms of resistance and struggles for freedom and social justice. Possible questions are: How do emotions circulate between bodies, creating intimacies, solidarities, and forms of radical disagreement? How do feelings such as anger, hate, frustration, fear, vulnerability, hope and pleasure shape bodies, boundaries, and relationships, bringing people together and driving them apart? And also: What can we learn about conflict, violence and struggle from listening to our emotions as anthropologists working and living in conflict contexts?