Exploring Affect

During the past decades, »The Affective Turn« has emerged as an important interdisciplinary research field at the intersection of the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Problematizing the major role accorded to reason in modernity, it is characterized by an attempt to highlight emotions, for example in works of art, in intimate relationships, in politics and in various historical contexts. This project is part of a broader theoretical debate, where the emphasis on emotions is connected to a reformulation of fundamental concepts in theory, such as reason, consciousness, the subject, and the body; as well as a questioning of dichotomies, for example between humans and animals, humans and machines, and between men and women.

This special issue of LIR.journal presents articles written in the disciplines of literature, history, cultural history, gender studies, and philosophy. It is based on the activities of the feminist multidisciplinary Nordic and Baltic network Exploring affect. A part of the migratory scholarly institution Nordic Summer University, funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers, the network arranged six conferences between 2013 and 2015. The articles published here are the outcome of the network’s final year. The symposium »Exploring affect: Love« was organized in collaboration with the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, in February 2015. The session »Exploring affect: Politics« took place in July the same year in Druskininkai, Lithuania, in cooperation with the European Humanities University. The network’s coordinator Johanna Sjöstedt is the initiator and, together with Johanna Lindbo, the editor of the issue.