Capacities To: Affect Up Against Fascism is a collection of more than forty essays, poems, and visual works that convey myriad approaches for understanding, surviving, and creating counter-movements in our increasingly fascist and authoritarian age. From numerous angles and different international locales, the contributors offer insights grounded in their distinctive feeling-encounters across a multitude of everyday contexts, along with critical perspectives informed by affect as a way of registering the energies or intensities of living and their gathering potentials for making a world otherwise than it is now. Fascism is an affective phenomena that works as a large scale ideological form and, also, by insinuating itself into the micro-movements and moments of daily life. Affect studies operates upon this same terrain but, rather than the abject fear of contamination, otherness, and difference that animates fascist imaginings and rouse its violence toward particular elements of the body-politic, affect [up against fascism] can be moved in other ways: open and inclusive and joyful in its embrace of difference as abundance, as messiness, as enlarged capacities for living together.

This volume is a scrapbook and an experiment. It collects the artifacts, written and otherwise, of a year’s worth of public workshops that put science and technology studies and affect studies together. Through zinemaking, collaging, foraging, fermenting, perfuming, and walking together, we do ordinary science from the kitchen table and work to materialize alternative futures. Putting STS and affect together bolsters literacies for how the world is being made and how we might make it differently.

This book engages with how affective encounters are shaped and conditioned by interfacial events. Together, the chapters explore the implications of this on a micro-perceptual and macro-relational level through an experimental middling of approaches and examples. While broadly departing from a Spinozist and Deleuzian theoretical foundation, the book weaves together a compelling number of conceptual and empirical trajectories. Always attuned to the implications, modulations and tonalities arising in the readings through art, journalism, bodies, an/archives, data and design, Affects, Interfaces, Events allows for a truly transdisciplinary resonance driven by theory, technology and practice.