This conference convenes scholars from the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, archeology, heritage studies, political science, and sociology, to examine the intersection of affect studies and material culture. We are concerned with how individuals engage with objects, environments, and infrastructures and how these engagements are implicated in debates surrounding cultural heritage, restitution, ecological crisis, medical infrastructures and digital worlds. Such engagements are always shaped by broader relations of power, inequality, and historical violence, both at local, transnational, and global levels. 

Rather than treating things as passive bearers of meaning, we approach materiality as generative: atmospheres arise, values are contested, and futures are envisaged in the encounter between humans and the material world. The question of futuring is central in this context. How might we envision and articulate alternative futures amid environmental breakdown, contested heritage, and global health crises and disparity through engaging material environments? How are futures affectively sensed, mediated, and negotiated through material worlds? How are affective engagements with material worlds shaped by political, economic, and (post-)colonial formations that structure access, visibility, and belonging? All these questions constitute an academic and methodological challenge – one that demands new forms of inquiry and representation.

We invite contributions that reflect upon the “how” of research and representation. How might multisensory and multimodal approaches enrich academic inquiry beyond modalities of writing? What occurs when disciplinary boundaries become porous? How might academic writing itself become a site of experimentation – alongside film, installation, performance, or other formats? What forms of knowledge emerge when we attend to atmosphere, affect, and material encounter? We welcome presentations that combine empirical research with methodological reflection, whether situated within academic scholarship, artistic practice, or at their intersection.

Please register by October 4 at:  emma.boi@fu-berlin.de .

Keynote lectures by:

• Prof. Dr. Ciraj Rassool (University of the Western Cape, Department of Historical Studies): “Museums, deobjectification and rehumanisation”
• Prof. Dr. Salvatory Nyanto (University of Dar es Salaam, Department of History): “Memory Sites, Affective Communities and Changing Landscapes of Slavery in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Tabora, c. 1860-1970”  

Organizing Team:

 Freie Universität Berlin, CRC Affective Societies:

• Kristina Mashimi, Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology; CRC sub-project “Affective Engagements: Decolonial Debates on Cultural Goods and Social Transformation between Tanzania and Germany”)
• Paola Ivanov (Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), Laibor Kalanga Moko (Universität Hamburg, Institut für Ethnologie) (CRC sub-project “Contested Property II: Affective Dissonance and Relational Ethics in Museum Collaborations”)

University of Dar es Salaam

• Richard Sambaiga, Anitha Tingira, Simon Mutebi & Kisiaya Saruni (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Dar es Salaam)
• Valence Silayo (Department of Archeology and Heritage Studies)