Affect and Emotion across Sites of Technoscience II

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

Affect and emotions not only connect the mind and the body, they also connect us to human and nonhuman others. Affects and emotions are ambivalent: they may both challenge and strengthen dominant social orders. This panel seeks, firstly, to understand the complex ways in which emotion and affect shape the production, circulation, routinization and cultural reception of science. Secondly, the panel charts the role of science and science studies in the emerging political landscapes of “post-truth” reality in which emotions often override factual evidence. The deployment and circulation of affect and emotions within and between sites of technoscience poses an urgent challenge for STS. To make sense of this challenge, we seek to connect empirical analyses of emotions at specific sites of technoscience to theorized accounts of the affective dynamics of technoscientific society. We hope to chart elusive and elucidatory connections between sites where affect and emotion emerge as powers that shape our social worlds. The panel is open to papers that address any empirical site or historical moment. We welcome a range of theoretical approaches that address affect/emotion, for example, as flows, intensities, pulsations, embodied sensations, global networks, culturally circulated objects, socially negotiated structures, or cultural frameworks that shape our actions. Papers may address questions such as: How is affect or emotion evoked, appropriated and embraced at a particular site of science and technology? What kinds of constellations of actors and relations these affective dynamics produce? How are different sites of affect and science connected?

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chair

• Mianna Meskus, University of Helsinki, Department of Social Research

Individual Presentations

• From Bits to Bodies: Race, Sex, and the Affective Embodiment of Genomic Data - Jennifer Hamilton, Hampshire College

• What Needs to Be Done, What is Worth Doing: Non Knowledge, Emotions and Framing in the Relationship between Scientists and Social Movements - Ana Maria Vara, National University of San Martín

• The Culture of Truth: Emotions in a Post-Factual World. - Anna Durnova, Institue for Advanced Studies, Vienna - Technoscience and Societal Transformation

• The Circulation of Affect and Emotions in Cultural Debates about Vaccines - Venla Oikkonen, University of Helsinki