Short Abstract:

How can the university be understood not just as a forum for the exchange of ideas and the fashioning of knowledge, but as a venue for the circulation of embodied affects and emotions? The discussants will each offer brief responses to our core questions, then open the floor for audience dialogue.

Long Abstract:

How can the university be understood not just as a forum for the exchange of ideas and a workshop for the fashioning of knowledge, but as a venue for the circulation of embodied affects and emotions? What are the emotional priorities that go into teaching, research and writing across the full spectrum of Wissenschaft (human, natural, and social sciences)? Does attention to feeling help us better understand the successes and failures of classrooms, not to mention their capacities to create distinct modes of knowledge? What role do affects/emotions play in the training of scholars and teachers? And how do institutional pressures, professional failures and successes, funding imperatives, burnout, vocation, prestige, integrity, discrimination, and other dimensions of the backdrop of academic life arise from and produce embodied affects and emotions?

How, moreover, do affects of the university define the field of power relations immanent in academic spaces? How can race, sex, class, caste, and gender be framed and understood in terms of their affective imperatives? How are systemic inequalities produced, navigated, challenged, and transformed through circuits of embodied emotions?

Drawing on an evolving body of STS scholarship that has thematized the affective life of the mind, this roundtable will seek to map some of these contours. Leaving the category of affect deliberately open (including emotions, feelings, atmospheres, moods, and vibes), four discussants will comment on our core questions then open the floor for audience dialogue. The focus of the session will be on building conversation around these questions.