Originally announced for May 2020, (E)motion conference was halted and postponed under global mobility restrictions and bans imposed by Covid-19 outbreak in March 2020. As our changing post-pandemic worlds timidly march into a new normal of (e)motion, the need to re-address the field with old knowledge and new insight becomes pressing.
Emotion, whether as energy current, flow, impact or intensity, is a force of movement and a force on the move. Motile and contagious, it travels and circulates within and across (non/human) bodies and (non-) places. To feel is often an urge to move towards, to move away or to move in sync.
Mobility, whether enforced, controlled or voluntary, be in the form of travel, tourism, migration, exile or as basic human need to come in or avoid encounter and connection, is also necessarily an affective event. It is charged with emotion, shaped by - but also shaping - its force.
It is the aim of this conference to add to the existing body of thought on mobility studies, emotion and/or affect theory, focusing in particular on this inextricable link between emotion and (im-)mobility. We are interested in the ways in which affective structures and the dispositional dimensions of life impact and are impacted upon by physical, cultural, class, racial, gender, technological or juridical modes of mobility in contexts (present or past) that see people, ideas, images and civic structures being actively on the move. We invite papers that explore the different ways in which this interaction between “states” of being, feeling and moving govern how and where we move, think, speak and connect with others. In the aftermath of Covid-19 health and (e)motion crisis, we are particularly interested in what the pandemic and its distancing-lockdown logics have revealed of emotion, mobility and stasis, as well as in the new economies of moving and feeling shaped in a changing post-pandemic world of virtual e-motion, care crisis, increased vulnerabilities, and emotionally loaded protest and uprising.
We invite papers in the fields of literature, language, culture and art that discuss (E)motion in relation (but not limited) to the following:
- Identities (race, gender, class, ethnicities)
- Bodies (organic, inorganic)
- Travel (tourism, trade and transport)
- Geography (e.g. emotional geography)
- Media and Digital Technologies
- Urban Ecology and Eco-criticism
- Biopolitics (medical humanities)
- Nation-state politics (nationalism, populism, extremism, neoliberalism, globalism)
Abstracts (300 words) and a short biographical note (150 words), together with your affiliation (if any) and title of your paper should be uploaded on the following link.
Participants whose proposals had been accepted for presentation in the 2020 conference, and who would like to submit the same proposal, should use the following link.
The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 30 March 2023.
Queries that are not covered by the above webpage can be addressed to Dr E. Botonaki or Dr M. Ristani in the following address: emotionconference@gmail.com.