Affect, Power, and Institutions

This volume advances a comprehensive transdisciplinary approach to the affective lives of institutions – theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and critical. With this approach, the volume foregrounds the role of affect in sustaining as well as transforming institutional arrangements that are deeply problematic.

As part of its analysis, this book develops a novel understanding of institutional affect. It explores how institutions produce, frame, and condition affective dynamics and emotional repertoires, in ways that engender conformance or resistance to institutional requirements.

This collection of works will be important for scholars and students of interdisciplinary affect and emotion studies from a wide range of disciplines, including social sciences, cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology, organizational and institution studies, media studies, social philosophy, aesthetics, and critical theory.

Millicent Churcher is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, and an honorary research affiliate of the University of Sydney. Millicent's research draws together insights from affect and social imaginary studies as well as institutional theory to explore how institutions, imaginaries, and affects intersect to support or obstruct social justice outcomes.

Sandra Calkins is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin. She conducted field research in Sudan, Uganda, Australia, and Germany and publishes on questions of uncertainty, multispecies relationships, infrastructure, and postcolonial science. Her current book project is an institutional ethnography of a Ugandan agricultural research institute and examines human-plant intimacies in the biological sciences.

Jandra Böttger is a PhD candidate in philosophy and research assistant at the Collaborative Research Center, Affective Societies (FU Berlin). Her main research areas are aesthetics, political theory, and contemporary history. Jandra's PhD focuses on the role of imagination for political action in the 1960s. She works as a curator for various projects and recently co-edited "The Vibration of Things" with Elke aus dem Moore (2022).

Jan Slaby is Professor of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. His research areas include philosophy of mind, social philosophy, philosophy of science, and, in particular, affect and emotion theory with a focus on subject formation and social interaction. With Suparna Choudhury, he was co-editor of Critical Neuroscience (2012). With Christian von Scheve, he co-edited Affective Societies: Key Concepts (2019).