Psychosocial Workshop

Psychosocial Workshop

Starts: 5 March 2010

Project Image - Networking Cables

Understanding Affective Dynamics in the

Researching Affect and Affective

Communication Seminar Series

Researching Affect Through Rhythmic Communications

Cardiff University – 5th February 2010

The role of affective communications in binding communities together in ways which are more corporeal, emotional and non-cognitive has been recognised in mass psychology since the early twentieth centuries (Le Bon). This work often leaves us feeling cold and repugnant rather than engaging us in thinking about processes of change and transformation. Identity politics has fore-grounded the role of meaning-making and representational practices in the formation of identities. Recent work across the humanities has begun to explore the affective ties that bind individuals together and create different networks of relating and belonging. This shift to affect moves beyond meaning-making to explore the different practices, techniques, artefacts and human and non-human others that enable the co-ordination and doing of different subjectivities. This workshop will focus upon the staging of ‘unhappy affect’ and how we might research affective communication by focusing upon the concept of rhythm as developed in the work of the anti-psychiatrist, R.D. Laing and particularly his work on the knot, discussed by Dr Lisa Blackman, Goldsmiths College. This workshop seeks to explore the different relationships established between text and audience in the work of the black, feminist playwright Debbie Tucker Green in light of Laing’s work, presented by Dr Lynette Goddard, Drama, Royal Holloway College. Dr Julian Henriques, Goldsmiths College, who presented a discussion of rhythm in terms of basic principles and used a case study of dancehall music in Jamaica. One of the key aims of this workshop was to establish different methods for researching performance in light of this recent affective turn and to foreground affective communications as a centrally important yet neglected aspect of performance and theatricality.