The First International Conference of the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies is based on the assumption that affect unfolds essentially in relation – both interpersonally and in the form of deep attachments to places, collectives, technologies and artifacts. Accordingly, affects have to be conceptualized as a dynamic relationality that traverses between and across individuals and not as inner ‘mental states‘. Affect constitutes human subjects as it binds them into social, material and technological constellations.
The conference aims to sharpen a transdisciplinary understanding of affective relationality. For this purpose it combines case studies with theoretical contributions from the fields of social and cultural anthropology, sociology, cultural geography as well as culture and media studies to give shape to affective relationality as a fundamental dimension of human reality. Areas of interest are the formation of aff ective bonds in child rearing constellations across cultures, affective attachment to place in migration and diaspora contexts and the affective shaping of subjectivities.