Books

Better Stories assembles essays and provocations in honor of Lawrence Grossberg’s radically contextual and affectively attuned lifework. In over fifty chapters, contributors trace mattering maps of influence, friendship, and intellectual struggle charged with the hope that thinking together—with feeling—can change the world. These essays not only comment on Grossberg’s ideas and many published works but also engage, expand, confront, and reshape them. Here, cultural studies is not a settled field but an unruly and ongoing conversation: an affective and political project sustained through convivial agonism, where asking “so what?” sparks new thinking and even better stories.

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.

Capacious is an open access, peer-reviewed international journal. The journal’s principal aim is to ‘make room’ for a wide diversity of approaches and emerging voices to engage with ongoing conversations in and around affect studies. The journal encourages the fresh perspectives and provocations that younger scholars bring to bear on affect within and across unique and sometimes divergent fields of intellectual endeavor. Our not-so-secret wish is that the essays and subsequent issues will forever remain capacious and rangy: emerging from various disciplines and conceptual [t]angles.