Émotion et affect

Emotion and Affect


Call for papers


FORUM Issue 35


Affect theory turns our attention towards a re-contextualisation of emotional and affective experiences within past and contemporary constructions of race, gender and sexuality. It leads us towards the para-rational zones of lived experience (sensations, disturbances, intensities, etc) and offers new interdisciplinary methodologies. The study of emotionality interrogates the boundary between human and non-human, with contemporary research in ecological feeling playing with the border between humans and other species, nature and geological formations. This issue is interested in how these contemporary and modern affective debates have impacted, and continue to impact, the ways in which we think about feeling.

Critical studies into emotionality explore the materiality and the somatics of emotion, offering new perspectives in the ways in which artistic forms have engaged with and responded to affective dimensions. Recent publications such as Xine Yao’s Disaffected (2021) and Lauren Berlant’s On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022) examined attachment both interdisciplinarily and intersectionally, considering the ways in which sentimental paradigms are universalised, engaged with and criticised through literary and artistic media. In the same vein, we are interested in discussions of the limits and boundaries of feeling, and in new interdisciplinary, intersectional and contextual understandings of feeling, affect and emotionality.

The 35th issue of FORUM invites contributions from across the arts and humanities that engage with the concepts of emotionality and affect. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

- Responses and depictions: Portrayal of emotions in art and emotional responses to art

- Emotions and the creation of art; readerly and writerly affect

- Interdisciplinary attitudes to affect

- Ecocriticism and nonhuman affect

- Limits to emotionality: ugly feelings; unemotionality and emotional manipulation

- Contextual perceptions of affect: historical attitudes to emotions; medical feelings and pathology

- Rationality and emotion: emotionality and artificial intelligence; criticism and emotionality

- Affect theories: phenomenology; terminology and language of feeling; aesthetics and poetics of feeling

- The role of emotionality in the construction of racial, gender, sex and/or class identity; racial and transgressive feeling

- Mind vs body: modes of perception, sensation and the senses

- Affective networks; communities of feeling


Send the full article by 5 April 2023 at http://journals.ed.ac.uk/forum/about/submissions. Suitable submissions will be subject to double-blind peer-review. For questions email Forum.Journal@ed.ac.uk.

N.B. We are usually only able to accept submissions from postgraduate students or from early career researchers within three years of having finished a postgraduate qualification.