Archived seminar
08 February 2017: Mediated Habits: Images, Networked Affect and Social Change (CISC Seminar Series)
Dr Carolyn Pedwell
At 13:00 in 6.345.
Abstract:
This talk emerges from a wider project concerned with the significance of habit and habituation to contemporary processes of socio-political change in the context of neoliberalism, digital culture and transnational movements for social justice.
Focusing on the role of iconic visual images in debates about the logics of social change, Dr Carolyn Pedwell will explore the critical links among images, affect, habit and transformation in the digital age. While many people remain hopeful that particular images of injustice will have the power to catalyze progressive transformation, there is also widespread belief in the inevitability of ‘compassion fatigue'. Bringing philosophers of habit into conversation with contemporary scholars of affect, visual culture and digital media, she will argue for a more nuanced understanding of the links between images and change – one in which political feeling and political action are complexly intertwined and repeated sensation does not necessarily lead to disaffection. When affect acts as a ‘binding technique’ compelling us to inhabit our sensorial responses to particular images or visual environments, Carolyn will suggest, we may become better attuned to everyday patterns of seeing, feeling, thinking and interacting – and hence to the possibility of change at the level of habit. This talk will thus contend that thinking affect and habit together as imbricated may enable us to better understand the dynamics of both individual and socio-political change today.
Carolyn Pedwell is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent. Carolyn has been a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London; the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney; and the Gender Institute, London School of Economics. She is author of Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014) and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, 2010). Carolyn is an Editor of the international journal Feminist Theory.
This event is open to the general public.