hello@affectsociety.com

SSA is a member-funded
nonprofit (S0074830)

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.

Join Now
 

hello@affectsociety.com

SSA is a member-funded
nonprofit (S0074830)

  1. Gregory J. Seigworth, "Capaciousness," Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1, no. 1 (2017): i–v.

Advisory Board

Lisa Blackman

Goldsmiths University

Vivienne Bozalek

University of Western Cape

Rizvana Bradley

UC Berkeley

Patricia Clough

Emeritus, CUNY Graduate Center & Queens College

Ann Cvetkovich

Carleton University

Ezekiel Dixon-Román

Teachers College Columbia University

Kay Gordon

CUNY Kingsborough Community College

M. Gail Hamner

Syracuse University

Anna Hickey Moody

Maynooth University

Chris Ingraham

University of Utah

Omar Kasmani

Freie Universität Berlin

Ali Lara

University of East London

Michael Lechuga

University of New Mexico

Dana Luciano

Rutgers University

Hil Malatino

Pennsylvania State University

Shaka McGlotten

Purchase College SUNY

Andrew Murphie

Independent

Tyrone Palmer

Wesleyan University

Carolyn Pedwell

University of Kent

Jasbir Puar

Rutgers University

Jenny Rice

University of Kentucky

Andrej Radman

TU Delft

Tony Sampson

University of Essex

Donovan Schaefer

University of Pennsylvania

Chad Shomura

University of Colorado Denver

Nathan Snaza

University of Richmond

Stephanie Springgay

McMaster University

Eliza Steinbock

Maastricht University

Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen

Aarhus University

Elizabeth Wilson

Emory University

Boni Wozolek

Pennsylvania State University Abington

Xine Yao

University College London

Libe García Zarranz

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Team

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-Director

 

directors@affectsociety.com

 

Gregory J. Seigworth

Co-Director

Mathew Arthur

Co-Director

Call 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.


1600

Monthly readers

8

Issues so far


ISSN 2816-9913

Creative Commons (CC by 4.0)
 


Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry
Read OnlineBuy in Print

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.

2

Books published

1

Forthcoming


imbricate.press

Creative Commons (CC by 4.0)
 
See our books
Catalog

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.

4

Conferences

1

Summer School


700+

Attendees
Want to host a conference?
Contact Us

Affect: Worlding, Tensions, Futures

#AffectWTF

The 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

#CapaciousAIMS

In 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

#CapaciousAIMS

In 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

#SSASS

With 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

#AffectMAPS

The 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

2020