The Performance of Political Feeling

Series Convenors:

• Beth Johnson (School of Media and Communication)
• Philip Kiszely (Performance and Cultural Industries)
• Kim Allen (Faculty of Education, Social Science and Law)
• Stephen Coleman (School of Media and Communication)

Project summary

Across the disciplines of arts, humanities and cultures, contemporary academic research has increasingly sought to devote attention toward the topic of emotion. Paired with an emerging focus in the political arena on the performance of emotion - and indeed political feeling more broadly, – the proposed seminar series aims to expand on and contribute to this important and developing body of work.

Centring on the notion of political feeling, the purpose of this seminar series is to facilitate and contribute to interdisciplinary research in this area, exploring the questions, claims and opportunities associated with interpreting, assessing and understanding the performance of contemporary political feeling, particularly post-Brexit. Engaging with politicians, performers, writers, musicians, filmmakers and academics through a series of seminars, screenings, workshops and interviews, we will augment, debate and document the performance of political feeling to think through key research questions, namely:

1. How and where is emotion performed in the contemporary political arena?
2. What is the cultural value of political feeling in the UK and Europe?
3. When, how and through what methods and means is political feeling affectively constructed and mediated?
4. Why is an interdisciplinary understanding of the performance of political feeling important in shaping future research priorities and practises?

The seminar series itself will be structured by two objectives:

1. To facilitate intellectual development – constructing a series of divergent, interdisciplinary questions, ranging from the simple to the more complex in order to outline the priorities and affective framing devices of political feeling, in and across disciplines.
2. To co-ordinate practitioner engagement - learning from the real-world experiences of external collaborators to establish a rich and multi-layered understanding of performances of political feeling.