Introduction: mediating affect

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue brings together seven affective mediations on the theme of mediating affect. The articles were presented in an earlier form at the inaugural Affect Theory Conference, held in Millersville (USA) in October 2015. Responding to a Call for Papers, authors were invited to take on the question of ‘media’ and ‘mediation’ in the context of the blossoming field of affect studies. Each article in turn tackles a particular trajectory of concern examined as a multiplicity – the philosophy/study of living and feeling, fear and the amplification of affect, trauma and absence, detention and compassion, memorialization and shōjo (少女) (the girl trope in postwar Japanese cinema), and whiteness and the good life. The theoretical, disciplinary, and cultural lineages are many. Developed together within the context of the project of cultural studies, the resulting Special Issue provides an opportunity to consider more deeply how ‘media-world assemblages’ (Murphie, A., in press. The world as medium. In: E. Manning, A. Munster, S. Thomsen and B. Marie, eds. Immediations. Sydney: Open Humanities Press) give rise to certain political and ethical questions. In this Issue, we encounter six different media-world formations and learn how they shift as they pulsate with affective relations. As well as introducing these relations, this Introduction canvases some of the conceptual work that has gone into ‘mediating affect’, addressing the context that underpins this bringing together of terms and seeking out ways of provoking further research.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural studies
• affect
• media
• medium
• mediation
• feeling

Acknowledgements

With credit to the organizers of the Affect Theory Conference, ‘Wordings, Tensions, Futures’ (2015) – Gregory Seigworth, Lisa Blackman and Healther Love. Deepest gratitude to the contributors, Bryan Behrenshausen, Blake Hallinan and the editors of Cultural Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Sarah Cefai is a Lecturer in Communications and Media. She has previously taught media, communications and cultural studies at the University of Surrey and LSE. Sarah was awarded her PhD in Gender and Cultural Studies (2012) by the University of Sydney and has published in the areas of feminist and queer theory, affect and cultural studies.

Notes

1. The BBC Radio 4 program interviews Norman Ohler, the author of Blitzed (2016) and Lukasz Kamienski, author of Shooting Up (2016).

2. Just a year prior, the UK media-public went into a furor over Katie Hopkins’ article ‘Rescue boats? I’d use gunships to stop migrants’ (17 April 2015). Published in The Sun, Hopkins wrote: ‘These migrants are like cockroaches. They might look a bit “Bob Geldof’s Ethiopia circa 1984”, but they are built to survive a nuclear bomb.’