CALL FOR PAPERS: Affect, Emotion and the Political Imagination: Emergent Approaches to Studying the African State

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Workshop

Date: 18 October 2019
Where: Department of International Development, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

As scholars increasingly reject the evaluation of African states against Western liberal norms, opportunities have opened up to study the state for what it is in practice and how it is experienced within society. A number of approaches have emerged, including ethnographic explorations of state bureaucracies, and analyses of encounters with its bureaucrats, many of which blur the lines between formal and informal governance mechanisms and institutions. In this workshop, we aim to build on this emergent trend to focus on the powerful emotions and affective relations that states elicit. We consider how ordinary citizens and civil servants experience the state through a range of feelings, emotions and affects generated both by encounters with and within state institutions, and through perceptions of its absence. In this we draw on work by Laszczkowski and Reeves (2015) and Aretxaga (2003) to engage with the ways in which the state is produced through affects and their “embodied responses”. Considering the realm of affect allows us to take seriously how power emerges from imagined relations, expectations and illusions, and the ways in which values, norms and distinctive political imaginations emanate from subjective and intersubjective experiences with the state.

The aim of this workshop is to provide an informal, collaborative space to examine how the notion of affect assists our examination of the African state. We intend to explore, for example, how hope, disillusion, and fear constitute, shape, and transform relationships between citizens, civil servants, and the state at different historical junctures. In doing so, we intend to push against normative notions of African states, to focus instead on how affective relations shape how the state is imagined and enacted in meaningful ways and on the political subjectivities that emerge as a result.

To express an interest in taking part in such a discussion, please send a 250 to 300 word abstract to this address  and this one by 30 August 2019.