The New Key Concepts in Affective Societies

This volume offers a comprehensive rethinking of how affect and emotion shape contemporary social and political life. Against the backdrop of global crises, polarized publics, and media-saturated environments, this book positions affect not as a mere supplement to reason or discourse, but as the connective tissue between self and society, the intimate and the institutional.

Drawing on over a decade of interdisciplinary research at the Berlin-based Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies, the contributors develop a rich conceptual toolbox to understand the affective dynamics at play in governance, media, care, protest, and everyday life. From affective polarization and outrage politics to infrastructures of feeling and institutional affect, this collection identifies new key concepts that serve as both diagnostic tools and theoretical interventions.

Bridging affect theory with empirical inquiry, it demonstrates how affect and emotion are central to how we relate, resist, dwell, and imagine. This is a carefully curated volume that will appeal to scholars and students interested in the affective and emotional foundations of contemporary societies from a range of fields: sociology, cultural studies, psycho-social studies, anthropology, political science, media studies, religious and theological studies, philosophy, and performance studies.

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

Christian von Scheve is Professor of Sociology at Freie Universität Berlin and Research Fellow at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) Berlin, Germany. His research focuses on the Sociology of Affect and Emotion, Cultural Sociology, Economic Sociology, and Social Psychology. With Mikko Salmela, he was co-editor of Collective Emotions (2013). With Jan Slaby, he co-edited Affective Societies: Key Concepts (2019).

Tamar Blickstein is a postdoctoral researcher at the CRC Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin in Germany, trained in social and cultural anthropology. She is an affiliated researcher at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she recently completed a Marie Słodowska Curie Fellowship on the affective experience of deforestation in South America. She has researched and published on colonialism, memory, racialization, and ecology in Europe and Latin America. She wrote the chapter “Affects of Racialization” for the first Affective Societies: Key Concepts (2019) volume.

Polina Aronson is a sociologist and journalist working at the CRC Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin in Germany, as a public relations officer and an editor. Her research interests include post-socialist emotional regimes, cultural translations of the therapeutic turn, and, especially, transformations of ideas about love and intimacy. Polina’s journalistic publications appeared in international and independent Russian-language media, such as Aeon, Deutsche Welle, openDemocracy, and many others.