Archive
emotion
Injured Cities, Urban Afterlives
What are the effects of catastrophe on cities, their inhabitants, and the larger world? How can we address the politics of terror with which states react to their vulnerability? This conference, convened ten years after September 11, 2001, aims to explore the effects of catastrophe and to imagine more life-affirming modes of redress and reinvention. […]
Read MorePublic Feelings Salon
Lauren Berlant, Lisa Duggan, José Muñoz, Tavia Nyong'o, and Ann Pellegrini
The inaugural event in BCRW’s new Salon series, this engaged dialogue brings together several prominent and influential scholars whose work explores how affect and emotion influence public life. Just as feminism has sought to identify the ways in which the personal and the political are linked, the study of “public feelings” draws our attention to […]
Read MorePublic Feelings Salon with Lauren Berlant
Conversation featuring Lauren Berlant, José Muñoz, Ann Pellegrini and Tavia Nyong'o. Moderated by Janet Jakobsen.
Read MorePublic Feelings Salon with Lauren Berlant
Recorded Apr 12, 2011
The inaugural event in BCRW's Salon series, this engaged dialogue brings together several prominent and influential scholars whose work explores how affect and emotion influence public life. Just as feminism has sought to identify the ways in which the personal and the political are linked, the study of "public feelings" draws our attention to how and why feelings and emotion (assumed to be a private, personal experience) influence politics and notions of social belonging and intimacy. This conversation, moderated by BCRW Director and Professor of Women's Studies, Janet Jakobsen, focuses on how perceptions of citizenship and solidarity are often bound up in emotions—like optimism, rage, and disgust—and how feelings can govern policy and political debates. Panelists include Jose Munoz, Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong'o, and Lauren Berlant.
ListenCurrent Cravings, Strange Desires, and Frightening Things: The Effect of the Frontal Lobe and Amygdala on Affect and Actions
Elisabeth A. Murray
Dr. Elisabeth Murray’s laboratory studies the neural basis of learning, memory, emotion and action. One topic of particular interest is the neural bases of decision-making. What motivates us to make choices? How do our emotional responses lead to certain decisions over others? Examining the neural circuits critical for affective processing and the way in which […]
Read MoreThe Arts of Healing: The Work of Quilts in Grief
Lisa Collins
This visual presentation explores possible parallels between the process of grieving and the practice of quilt-making by focusing on a 1942 quilt from Gee’s Bend, Alabama, created by Missouri Pettway (1902-1981). Featured in the popular traveling exhibition “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend,” this 7 1/2 foot by 5 3/4 foot stained “work-clothes” quilt offers lessons […]
Read MoreAfter the Good Life, an Impasse: Notes on the Cinema of Precarity
Lauren Berlant
“After the Good Life” works with two films of Laurent Cantet [Ressources humaines/Human Resources (1999) and L’Emploi du Temps/Time Out (2001)] to engage the new affective languages of the contemporary economic atmosphere across Europe: languages of anxiety, contingency, and precarity that take up the space where social democracy, upward mobility, and meritocracy used to reign. […]
Read MoreErotohistoriography
Elizabeth Freeman
Elizabeth Freeman is associate professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She specializes in American literature and gender/sexuality/queer studies, and her articles have appeared in numerous scholarly journals. Her first book was The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture, and she is the editor of Queer Temporalities, a special double […]
Read MorePostcards from Tora Bora
Wazhmah Osman and Kelly Dolak
In the summer of 2004, filmmakers Wazhmah Osman and Kelly Dolak set out to make an independent film that explored whether Afghan women’s lives had actually improved as a result of the US military campaign. The documentary that came out of this question, Postcards from Tora Bora, became far more than an exploration of women’s […]
Read MoreSex-Typed Interests: Do Early Hormones Create “Empathizers” and “Systemizers”?
Rebecca Jordan-Young
There is currently widespread scientific endorsement of the idea that early hormones channel our fundamental interests in masculine or feminine directions. Even before the research leaves the pages of scientific journals, this idea is directly linked to career choices and chances, education, the division of labor in families, and the “drive” to be a leader […]
Read MoreWriting a Feminist’s Life: The Legacy of Carolyn G. Heilbrun
Nancy K. Miller and Victoria Rosner
Contributors include Leila Ahmed, Mary Ann Caws, Ann Douglas, Joan Ferrante, Susan Gubar, Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Shirley Geok-Iin Lim, Deborah E. McDowell, Nancy K. Miller, Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Victoria Rosner, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Susan Winnett, and Margaret Vandenburg.
Read MorePublic Sentiments
Ann Cvetkovich and Ann Pellegrini
Contributors include Nieves Ayress, Jean Carlomusto, Mary Marshall Clark, Anne Cubilié, Ann Cvetkovich, Judith Halberstam, Roger Hallas, Alyssa Harad, Marianne Hirsch, Sharon Holland, Jonathan Kalb, Sarah Jones, Rachel C. Lee, Daphne Lei, Peter Lucas, Meg McLagan, Lorie Novak, Ann Pellegrini, Jorge Ramos, Janelle Reinelt, Steven Reisner, Jane Rosett, Rebecca Schneider, Anna Deavere Smith, Kathleen Stewart, and Jason Tougaw.
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