Affective Self: Feminist Thinking and Feminist Actions

Connectivity in times of control: writing/undoing/unpacking/acting out power performances

“…As a feminist new materialist response to this hegemonic wave that transverses all spheres of life, disciplines and human and more-than-human ways of life, we mobilise different feminist and queer approaches (e.g. Mohanty, 1984; Barad, 2007; Colman, 2010; Holvino, 2010; Ahmed, 2017) to reflect on possibilities for connectivity in our digitalised and atomised societies, undergoing rapid transformations. We use new materialist thinking to analyse and challenge the structures that enable and legitimise various kinds of oppressions, and to search for novel organisational models and collective praxes.…”

“…For the ‘ir/responsible feminist researcher’ (Cielemęcka and Revelles-Benavente, 2017), one that takes a risk of being ‘problematic’ by having an unpopular opinion, getting angry or refusing to accept what is not right, this means a control that acts in three particular dimensions: according to the acceleration of the knowledge production (canon), (un)practices of self-care and neoliberal forms of capitalism. Thus, ‘as co-opted under capitalism, certain ways of knowing, certain possibilities of being, certain configurations of the body are bound by the labour of the military refrain to which the self, within its communal group, remains tethered’ (Colman, 2010: 547), a tethering or connection to established norms based on the assumption of pre-existing individuals, subjects or objects tethered together.…”

Editorial

“…We expect this journal to be a platform for voicing social injustices and for imagining roads to bio-socio-economical justice in their myriad ways; as well as to promote innovative knowledge creation and production in the light of new materialist approaches. We encourage you, the reader, to submit to us any inquiry, innovative approach, social concern, or feminist endeavour since we expect to provide a scientific and activist platform able to engage with multiple affective subjectivities (Colman, 2010). Each one of the editors has worked at her best to present a rigorous and enlightening corpus based on feminist values and we are ready to rock!…”

Tracking Affective Labour for Agility in the Quantified Workplace

“…Blackman led discussions in feminist and queer studies perspectives, touching on relations of entanglement and the prowess of intersubjectivity and relationality (2008a, 2008b, 2011, 2012). Colman identified the affective feminist self (2010) and, later, Wetherell (2015) critically outlined affect research, calling for a better ontological programme, where questions of emotion, pre-physiological experience and affective transmission and potentials are less bewildered. While this is not an exhaustive list, further research includes Clough (2008), Colman (2008, 2010), Gill and Pratt (2008), Coleman (2012), Thrift (2004), Berlant (2011), Haider and Mohandesi (2015) and the edited collection by Karatzogianni and Kuntsman (2012).…”

“…Colman identified the affective feminist self (2010) and, later, Wetherell (2015) critically outlined affect research, calling for a better ontological programme, where questions of emotion, pre-physiological experience and affective transmission and potentials are less bewildered. While this is not an exhaustive list, further research includes Clough (2008), Colman (2008, 2010), Gill and Pratt (2008), Coleman (2012), Thrift (2004), Berlant (2011), Haider and Mohandesi (2015) and the edited collection by Karatzogianni and Kuntsman (2012). Two recent issues in 2016 and 2017 on ‘Affective Capitalism’ for ephemera and ‘Thinking Critically about Affect in Organizational Studies’ in Organization demonstrate that studies on affect continue to be cross-disciplinary.…”