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?"1BECOME 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.Join Now
hello@affectsociety.com
SSA is a member-funded
nonprofit (S0074830)
- Gregory J. Seigworth, "Capaciousness," Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2017): i–v.
Advisory Board
Lisa Blackman
Goldsmiths UniversityVivienne Bozalek
University of Western CapeRizvana Bradley
UC BerkeleyPatricia Clough
Emeritus, CUNY Graduate Center & Queens CollegeAnn Cvetkovich
Carleton UniversityEzekiel Dixon-Román
Teachers College Columbia UniversityKay Gordon
CUNY Kingsborough Community CollegeM. Gail Hamner
Syracuse UniversityAnna Hickey Moody
Maynooth UniversityChris Ingraham
University of UtahOmar Kasmani
Freie Universität BerlinAli Lara
University of East LondonMichael Lechuga
University of New MexicoDana Luciano
Rutgers UniversityHil Malatino
Pennsylvania State UniversityShaka McGlotten
Purchase College SUNYAndrew Murphie
IndependentTyrone Palmer
Wesleyan UniversityCarolyn Pedwell
University of KentJasbir Puar
Rutgers UniversityJenny Rice
University of KentuckyAndrej Radman
TU DelftTony Sampson
University of EssexDonovan Schaefer
University of PennsylvaniaChad Shomura
University of Colorado DenverNathan Snaza
University of RichmondStephanie Springgay
McMaster UniversityEliza Steinbock
Maastricht UniversityBodil Marie Stavning Thomsen
Aarhus UniversityElizabeth Wilson
Emory UniversityBoni Wozolek
Pennsylvania State University AbingtonXine Yao
University College LondonLibe García Zarranz
Norwegian University of Science and TechnologyTeam
SSA runs on volunteer labour. If you are interested in hosting a conference, starting a regional group, or would like to propose other SSA initiatives, please reach out. We are currently looking for copyeditors for our open access journal and press.
Wendy J. Truran
Managing Co-Directordirectors@affectsociety.com
Gregory J. Seigworth
Co-DirectorMathew Arthur
Co-DirectorCall for Papers
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
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
SSA PUBLICATIONS
Founded in 2017, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry is SSA’s open access and peer-reviewed international journal. Capacious makes room for emerging voices in and around affect studies. We endeavour to promote diverse bloom-spaces for affect’s study over the dulling hum of any specific orthodoxy. Member of the Radical Open Access Collective and affiliated with Open Humanities Press.
SSA PUBLICATIONS
Founded in 2021, Imbricate! Press is SSA’s peer-reviewed and open access book imprint. Imbricate! publishes work that gauges how critical or creative practices can bring together discourses, worlds, sensations, sensibilities, and atmospheres that raise questions and perhaps unsettle what counts as ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ within and across shifting disciplinary contours.
PAST
SSA events are always open to undergrads, graduate students, early-career academics, tenured faculty, artists, activists, and non-academics. Since 2015's Affect WTF conference, we've organized and hosted 2018's Capacious AIMS conference and the 2019 Animations and Provocations Summer School. Alongside more standard panels and workshops, we encourage experiments and playful interventions: non-traditional presentation formats, installation and perfomance works, walking methods, etc.
Affect: Worlding, Tensions, Futures
#AffectWTFThe 2015 conference assembled eighteen plenary speakers, nineteen multi-disciplinary conference panel streams, and over a dozen workshops, installations, and performance pieces. Nearly 700 conference submissions came in from all over the world, narrowed down to 223 presenters, with an estimated 380+ total attendees including faculty, independent researchers, undergrad and graduate students.
Conference Program (PDF)Plenary Videos
October 14–17, 2015
Millersville University's Ware Center
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
2015
Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space
#CapaciousAIMSIn and across the diverse practices and studies of affect, how might we continue to "find room" or "make space" and under what circumstances might such a framing for affect study be problematic? Modeled on the same ethos of community building, mentorship, and intellectual generosity that guides Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affective Inquiry, this conference assembled 200 papers and 240 attendees. Open to students, faculty, and non-academics #CapaciousAIMS emphasized the crucial role of graduate students and early career researchers in shaping the scholarship in affect study.
Conference Program (PDF)
August 8–11, 2018
Millersville University's Ware Center
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
2018
Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space
#CapaciousAIMSIn and across the diverse practices and studies of affect, how might we continue to "find room" or "make space" and under what circumstances might such a framing for affect study be problematic? Modeled on the same ethos of community building, mentorship, and intellectual generosity that guides Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affective Inquiry, this conference assembled 200 papers and 240 attendees. Open to students, faculty, and non-academics #CapaciousAIMS emphasized the crucial role of graduate students and early career researchers in shaping the scholarship in affect study.
Conference Program (PDF)
August 8–11, 2018
Millersville University's Ware Center
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
2018
Summer School: Animations and Provocations
#SSASSWith over 80 participants, the SSA's Summer School offered an amazing opportunity to learn, interact, and create alongside two dozen of the most engaging folks (established and up-and-coming scholars) working in and around affect studies from all around the world. Beyond meeting in seminars, we held twice-daily gatherings for "animations" and "provocations" intended to spark uniquely interdisciplinary, convivially non-hierarchical and full-on invigorating conversation and foster cross-contaminations between conveners and all of the seminar participants.
Schedule (PDF)#SSASS Website
July 29–August 02, 2019
Millersville University, Ware Center
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
2019
Affect: Methods/Affects/Practices/Sensibilities
#AffectMAPSThe 2020 conference was cancelled due to Covid-19. #AffectMAPS was intended to provoke the submission of uncharted proposals that creatively foreground the widely (often wildly) divergent modes of affect inquiry. What kinds of maps guide your approaches to research in and through affect? How does the situatedness of particular sensibilities and sensations shape your procedures? Where and when do the architectures and atmospheres of affect guide or disturb the disciplinary formations that generate research trajectories within (and perhaps beyond or outside) your field of specialization? Even more directly, does affect study have a method or methods? Does it truly need one (or several)? Organized by Jenny Rice.
September 23–26, 2020
University of Kentucky
Lexington, Kentucky