SUPPORTING AFFECT INQUIRY

The Society for the Study of Affect (SSA) is a member-funded nonprofit that supports the international scholarly and artistic study of affect: discipline-specific, interdisciplinary, and non-academic inquiry that attends to those near-imperceptible, too-intense, interstitial, or in-the-making forces and feelings that make up our worlds. Through in-person and virtual events like conferences and workshops, publishing, social media, infrastructures of feeling, and non-institutional modes of mentorship, we aim to shake up existing structures and practices and foster a lively and engaged local and international community of affect study. We disseminate academic and creative work related to the study of affect in both print and online media, including the SSA's peer-reviewed and open access publications. Our hope is to encourage and assist graduate students, early career scholars, and others in the study of affect and to provide a centralized organization for affect study that will promote local affiliations and branches in different countries or regions across the globe. Why shouldn't one modest aim of affect study be a "more expansive ongoingness?"¹

BECOME A MEMBER

Join SSA with a small one-time or reccurring membership fee and help support future conferences, open access publishing initiatives, mentorship opportunities and more. SSA benefits include already-free access to Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, Imbricate! Press books, conferences and regional meetups, and a future members' directory and resources. Members can vote on future intiatives at our annual meeting. Fees are not considered a charitable donation and we are unable to issue tax reciepts.

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SSA is a member-funded
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1. Gregory J. Seigworth, "Capaciousness," Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2017): i–v.

The world’s steady sloping toward 21st century fascism took an even more precipitous slide with the US electoral victory of Donald Trump in this fall’s election. There is no way to fully capture where different folks are at in their (dis)orientation to this unfolding fascism—physio-psycho-socio-affectio-logically—but feeling grief, rage, numbness, disgust, despair, flattened, scattered, scared, and intermixtures of all these (and many more) are surely in the running as immediate but inadequate visceral descriptors for this moment.

From out of the very midst of our shared and individualized reelings, we must find the means to wrestle with such questions in spite of or, rather, because of their seeming unfathomability, their dangerous portents, their already very, very real palpabilities. Our hope: such palpabilities can do something more than merely gesture to an elsewhere, an otherwise.

The unifying theme for this project is that each entry (essay, artwork, intervention) will address how theories of affect respond to this ongoing fascist moment in world history with creative/experimental and/or critical-theory oriented approaches and how we—a differential, aspirational, capacious we—endeavor to persist/resist/insist/exist through the pal-pable now and into the foreseeable future.

Download CFP (PDF)

2024 Conference

So much has transpired in the nine years since the #AffectWTF conference. The study of affect has, by now, variously settled/​unsettled within and across a diverse range of academic disciplines, artistic practices, and research approaches. Join us in Lancaster, Pennsylvania from October 12 to 14, 2024 for the SSA's #PITS Conference.

Conference Site