This chapter introduces the notion of the rave moment as an aesthetic experience that foregrounds affect. Its theorisation takes place in the context of an affect-deficit society through the case study of a series of dance parties that took place in Blackburn, UK, between 1989 and 1990. Seemingly resisting a categorisation within hegemonic discourses of raves, the Blackburn parties are used to show that the rave moment is a cultural product that can be exported and adapted. Its flexibility is evident in the changing character of the parties with regard to their location, organisational structure, popularity and promoted values. On the one hand, it is difficult to portray them as a coherent series of events. On the other hand, the parties were retrospectively labelled as ‘raves‘ in an attempt to fit their development into common narratives of rave culture. This tension is used as a starting point to argue for a reframing of electronic dance music events as contextualised aesthetic experiences.

This chapter addresses the nightclub as an architectural typology. It will consider what the Italian architect Carlo Caldini, co-designer and owner of Florence’s Space Electronic nightclub (1969–2017), called the nightclub’s ‘inexistent architecture’ - in other words, the importance of sound and light over bricks and mortar in the design of club spaces. This was echoed by the critic Aaron Betsky who described a design of ‘rhythm and light’ (Queer Space, 1997) in his description of New York’s iconic Studio 54. The discussion further considers a range of nightclubs from the late twentieth century including Rome’s Piper club, Florence’s Space Electronic, and Electric Circus, Studio 54, Area, and Palladium in New York. In addition, it brings in other voices from architecture, design and music – including Simon Reynolds’ concept of the ‘affective charge’, to position design and architecture as a key realm in electronic dance music culture.

This chapter theorises the embodiment of timbral gesture in electronic dance music (EDM) as a convergence point between the vexed categories of affect and meaning. It is argued that timbre is inseparable from gesture in the listening experience and that the embodiment of synthesised gestures affords listeners new ways of experiencing their body-minds by exercising their perceptual agency through sonic prosthesis. In social EDM settings, the heightened potential for entrainment to both the music and other co-participants, together with the established role of entrainment in facilitating social bonding, suggests that the timbral gestures of EDM could be key to fostering intersubjectivity among those present. Considering this, the imaginative embodiment of timbral gestures is shown to constitute a necessary first step towards the communal rationalisation of the EDM experience and the social emergence of musical meaning.

Keats uses the word ‘interread’ to refer to the way that a letter written to one person will also be read by another. The suggestion of interaction and intersubjectivity implied by that ‘inter’ prefix sheds light on Keats’s representations of shared reading in his poetry and letters. This chapter also considers his portrayal of women readers, especially in relation to Fanny Brawne, whose letters about reading with Keats, as well as his sister Fanny Keats, offer insight into the boundaries of privacy and sharing. Where Keats’s early poems seem eager to get inside the feeling of reading, elsewhere, his manner of picturing reading from the outside aims at a more detached form of sympathy, one which avoids intruding too far into another person’s inner experience. Shared reading subsequently comes to represent for him the possibility of connection at a distance.

The chapter addresses the different ways in which Sankofa Danzafro’s Afro-contemporary dance company in Colombia constructs anti-racist narratives. From the perspective of dance as a practice of irruption and an embodied practice, we focus on the role of affective traction in its varied manifestations, which work to assemble collective bodies and discourses. Acting as a site of political enunciation and as a way of resistance-in-motion, dance generates affective atmospheres that make visible and challenge the persistence of structural racism. Among the anti-racist strategies channeled through Sankofa’s Afro-contemporary dance are i) challenging stereotypes about Afro-descendant people by focusing on the message of the dance rather than only its performance; ii) delving into the past, seeking out embodied knowledge and Afro self-referentiality as resources; and iii) developing an Afro-contemporary aesthetic project informed by Afro-Colombian traditional dance and music as well as contemporary styles and rhythms. In particular, the chapter explores Detrás del sur, a recent Sankofa dance work, to see how these anti-racist strategies have informed the creative processes behind the work.

This chapter focuses on the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It offers an account of the major strands of their thinking, how their work evolved over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the ways some important formulations in queer and trans studies can be traced directly or indirectly back to these writers. Sedgwick engages with the entangled relations between sexuality, knowledge, and feeling and Butler with the coconstitutive connections among gender, sexuality, and notions of embodiment. Butler’s and Sedgwick’s critiques of what were commonsensical ideas about gender and sexuality still raise powerful questions about bodies, identity, and collective movements, even as later scholarship puts pressure on the implicit frameworks that shape how those questions are posed and addressed in their work.

The 12-item Perceived Benefits of Thinness Scale (PBTS; Flatt et al., 2022)] assesses an individual’s beliefs about how being thinner would positively influence aspects of their life including their self-esteem, satisfaction, mood, relationships, and professional success. The PBTS can be administered online and/or in-person to adults and is free to use in any setting. This chapter first discusses the development of the PBTS and then provides evidence of its psychometrics. More specifically, the PBTS has been found to have a single-factor structure within exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and incremental validity support the use of the PBTS. Next, this chapter provides the PBTS items in their entirety, instructions for administration to participants, the item response scale, and the scoring procedure. Logistics of use, such as permissions, copyright, and contact information, are provided for readers.

This chapter describes material and immaterial labour in the context of the industrial production, resource extraction, and global circulation of the silvery-alkali metal known as lithium. It focuses on the different kinds of material labour involved in lithium’s extraction from local sites in and around the Atacama Desert in Latin America, as well as less visible forms of labour underpinning the mining industry, including the labour of social reproduction and colonial dispossession. In this context, it asks: how do narrative arts document the violence of lithium’s extraction as it materialises in damaged and dispossessed bodies and environments, as well as those less visible traces of lithium’s circulation around the world, and the different affective economies it inhabits? I suggest that a contradiction or tension between materiality and immateriality, between what is seen and unseen, defines every level of lithium’s transformation into a commodity, as registered within global networks of labour. These larger systems, I argue, are rendered invisible; just as lithium silently provides the charge for iPhone and Tesla, it is a vanishing mediator to what some thinkers have described as ‘new extractive imperialism’. This, however, becomes visible—precisely as a kind of ideological dissimulation—across a whole range of narrative forms.

This chapter explores the interplay between emotions and memory, highlighting the interrelations between regulatory and memory processes. In the first section we describe how, through indirect and direct influences, emotions impact every phase of the episodic memory cycle: encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Whereas many of these influences are attributed to the amygdala and hippocampus, recent work has emphasized the role of a broad network of regions, extending well beyond these medial temporal lobe regions. In the second section, we focus on the role of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex in adjusting the content, emotionality, and narrative context at each phase of the episodic memory cycle. In the third section, we discuss the reciprocal interactions between emotions and memory: Our memories serve as triggers for emotions and can be used as an emotion regulation device, while our emotions and emotion regulation goals can likewise influence our memories. The final section highlights broad directions for future research.

Over the last thirty years, affective neuroscience has become a royal road to our understanding of emotion and other affective phenomena, being both a core discipline of the affective sciences, and an engine for the rise of affectivism. After a brief discussion of the role of human affective neuroscience in affectivism, the chapter addresses some terminological and taxonomy-related issues before suggesting a consensual definition of emotion. Next, five major families of theories of emotions are presented in relation to five components of emotion. This review illustrates the fact that different families of theories typically focus on different components – even if each family also often considers some of the other components to a lesser extent. Whereas expression is central to basic emotion theory, action tendencies are central to motivational theories, autonomic reaction is central to bodily/interoceptive theories, feeling is central to constructionist theories, and the role of cognition in emotion-elicitation is central to appraisal theories.

The chapter examines how anthropologists can produce ethically engaged and scientifically rigorous results in their work with people living at society’s social, political, and economic margins. It builds on long-term participatory research with street-involved youth in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and elucidates affect-focused methodologies to build empathetic relationships with collaborators and to develop critical theoretical insights. The chapter argues against compartmentalizing the researcher’s affect, feelings, and emotions, which is thought to characterize a rigorous scientific approach. The affect, feelings, and emotions experienced in this challenging work are an invaluable source of ethnographic data, allowing greater theoretical insight into emotional economies, where street-involved youths’ careful arrangements of emotives in social interactions create attention, trust, concern, care, or cooperation. Affect, as forms of discourse and governmentality, can construct orders of feeling, found as emotives present in laws, billboards, and news headlines. These matter for discursive changes implemented by governments to sanitize cities of unwanted communities.

This chapter takes the anthropology of emotion and affect as its central problem, with a particular focus on socialization processes. It starts with an overview of how psychological anthropologists have approached the topic of emotion since the 1980s and outlines the social–anthropological understanding of emotion before it considers the “affective turn” in the social sciences and humanities and its impact on anthropology. In the second part of the chapter special attention is paid to the socialization of emotions, first from a cross-cultural and second from a transcultural perspective. Using the example of the socialization of emotions in transcultural settings, it discusses the extent to which the notion of “affect” enhances our understanding of how the transformation of socially learned emotion repertoires might work.

Chapter 5 examines how speechwriters’ claims to transgressive agency are a source for “affective binding” (see Comer 2022) and status production, contributing to the “virtuous outlaw” identity of the speechwriter community. Mapes’ focus here is rooted in affect studies (e.g. Ahmed 2004) and notions of emotional labor (e.g. Hochschild 2012), as well as the rather prolific scholarship concerning professional/personal identity as it emerges in workplace discourse (e.g. Holmes 2007). What comes to the fore is the way in which emotion is complicatedly entangled with the “semiotic ideologies” of one’s professional life (see again Keane 2018). Focusing on both Professional Speechwriting course materials as well as a video-recorded meeting between members of the Speechwriter Organization, Mapes demonstrates how participants characterize their professional expertise as especially superior to that of (hypothetical) speakers. In framing themselves as uniquely skilled and knowledgeable, speechwriters deem their transgressive professional practices as virtuous and admirable, allowing them to claim power and status within the neoliberal linguistic marketplace.