Short Abstract

This roundtable examines the intersections of race, affect, and (in)communicabilities to ask how relational affective paradigms structure relations and engagements that include predation, appropriation, and care in an increasingly polarized world.

Long Abstract

This roundtable examines the intersections of race, affect, and (in)communicabilities to ask how relational affective paradigms structure relations and engagements that include predation, appropriation, and care in an increasingly polarized world. Building on critical social theory that interrogates the entanglements of race, communication, and health, participants will be invited to reflect on who speaks, who is heard, and whose refusals constitute emergent forms of care and neglect in the ongoing crisis of the present. If polarization intensifies communicative breakdowns, we propose that such breakdowns are not merely failures but rather sites where affective and political possibilities might be reimagined.

Participants will explore the relational affective paradigms that sustain and disrupt racial hierarchies: bureaucratic encounters that render some lives ungrievable, circuits that amplify fear and resentment, and the collective practices that cultivate joy as a contrapuntal mode of resistance. Drawing on ethnographic work from Latin America, Europe, South Asia, the Caribbean, and North America we consider how attention to affective structures reshape anthropological understandings of race and racialization—not as a static category, but as a dynamic process of communicative and emotional contestations.

By foregrounding coincidences and tensions of grievability and joy, communicability and silence, this roundtable invites dialogue on what new forms of relation, ethics, pedagogy, and method social anthropology might nurture in a world increasingly defined by polarization yet still animated by the possibility of collective thriving.

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