Dr Anna Feigenbaum (Bournemouth University) and I are organising a workshop focusing on Politics, Emotions and Protest, to be held at Bournemouth University on the 9th and 10th July.

The full description of the event is below:

Politics, Emotions and Protest- A Participatory Workshop

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Cardiff University

Professor Barry Richards, Bournemouth University

From Hong Kong to Kiev, from Ferguson to Madrid, we are living in a time of global protests. Images of smoke filled streets and cities up in flames dart around the world, populating news reports and twitter feeds. Fear, hope, camaraderie, terror, relief, trauma. These protest movements teem with emotion. Their effects are contagious, their indignation infectious. They bring with them new cooperative political formations, as well as new manifestations of fascism and repression. As researchers wanting to contextually understand these events, many of us find ourselves inflamed and overwhelmed by proliferating political commentary, trying to sort through the sensory overload.

What tools, approaches and methods do we need to understand political uprisings today? How can we make sense of them in relation to broader struggles for social change? Can we engage in research on uprisings and protests without falling into blind celebration or armchair critique? What lies between the big data predictions of future protest events and the past histories of unrest that remain unwritten or misunderstood?

Critical interventions in Social Movement Studies around emotion (Jaspers 1998, Flam and King 2005, Goodwin, Jaspers and Poletta 2009), along with the ‘affective turn’ of the early 2000s (Massumi 2002, Sedgwick 2003, Breenan 2004, Ahmed 2004, Gregg 2006) have offered a rich conceptual vocabulary for thinking and talking about the intersections of politics and emotion. Building on these fields of inquiry, this workshop seeks to bring people together to address the challenges and possibilities facing academic engagement with the emotion and politics of protest and social movements.

We seek participants working through these challenges who are interested in engaging in collaborative, interdisciplinary dialogues.

This workshop will include insights from keynote speakers and case study presentations, with dedicated time for collaboration building and a MeCCSA Social Movement Network Seaside Social to end off the event.

This event is supported by the Bournemouth University Politics & Media Group, the University of Leicester Media and Democracy Research Group in the Department of Media and Communication, the MeCCSA Social Movement Network and the Protest Camps Research Network.

For more information on the workshop please see here

Please register here no later than the 19 June.