Workshop for master- and PhD students, June 24 – 26, 2016.

Place: The Museum of Jón Sigurðsson, Hrafnseyri, The Westfjords of Iceland

Teacher: Professor Gregory J. Seigworth, Millersville University, Pennsylvania, USA.

Other foreign guest teachers/researchers, specialized in affect theory, will be available for students in the workshop discussions through Skype.

The workshop is organized by the Museum of Jón Sigurðsson at Hrafnseyri, Iceland (www.hrafnseyri.is) and Jón Sigurðsson Professorship at the University of Iceland, Reykjavík (http://jonsigurdsson.hi.is/ ) in cooperation with The University Centre of Westfjords and The Rögnvaldur Institute, Ísafjörður, Iceland.

Students are asked to send a short overview of their current project no later than 25 May. The sample does not have to address affect theory.

The workshop is free of charge for the students, as well as the (sleeping-bag) accommodation and transport from Reykjavík to the Museum of Jón Sigurðsson. However, the students will have to pay for their food during their stay at Hrafnseyri.

Nine years have passed since The Affective Turn. Theorizing the Social (2007) was published; a collection of essays which extended some of the most productive existing trends in research on the body and emotions, and opened „ new avenues for study... politics”, to quote Michael Hardt from the foreword of the book.

Since then many articles and books on affect theory have been written within various fields of the humanities and the social sciences, including philosophy, psychology, human geography, pedagogy, aesthetics, feminist studies, and communication studies, in addition to fields such as cognitive-, computer- and neurosciences, to name but a few. In other words, the area of study is vast.

However, one can hardly characterize affect studies as a definable theoretical school, because “There is no single, generalizable theory of affect: not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be”, as Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg write in their The Affect Theory Reader (2010). It is rather an attitude or an orientation among these researchers, where the concept of affect is in the centre of their studies.

Scientists interested in affect have investigated emotional states and the disturbances they cause in the body and mind. But the study of affect can also lead to much more general modes of influence, movement and change, when affect is regarded as a force or an active relation. The turn to affect signifies for these researchers, a more extensive ontological and epistemological upheaval than adding emotion to the inventory of social research topics. It marks a moment of paradigm change. The turn to affect becomes a decisive shift away from the current conventions of critical theory, away from research based on discourse, talk and texts, towards more vitalist, post human and process-based perspectives. The focus of study is then on “becoming”, the “potential” and the “virtual”.

Those who are interested to participate in the workshop contact Valdimar J. Halldórsson tlf. 00354 845 5518 or hrafnseyri@hrafnseyri.is