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Dr Karen Engle (University of Windsor, Canada) and Dr Yoke-Sum Wong (Alberta University of the Arts, Canada), Thinking About Feeling

Wednesday 5th May, 2021

POSTPONED,

** POSTPONED **

** THIS EVENT WILL BE RESCHEDULED LATER IN THE YEAR **

Thinking About Feeling: Once more with…

We will discuss our recent book project, Feelings of Structure: Explorations in Affect and our research-creation project and exhibition, Structures of Anticipation. The edited book addressed the built environment as spatial attunements. The essays explored the affective consciousness of spatial form/s that is at once social and personal – emergent and emerging and ever in process in an ‘interrelating continuity’. How do spatial forms contribute to, as Susan Lepselter writes, an ethnography of emergent feeling? How do we feel these spaces and world them – taking worlding as a way of apprehension and comprehension – giving it a structure that we make (non)sense of. What are the emergent feelings, strategies and practices that are integrated into our material and experiential world? Reversing Raymond Williams’ influential essay, “Structures of Feeling”, we ask how and in what way we could address the mixed experiences to which ‘the fixed forms do not speak at all’. We felt, to capture the traces of the experiences, the reverse phrasing, “feelings of structure,” was a more intriguing invitation to grasping the (un)/knowable.

The project Structures of Anticipation emerged out of working on the book as well as other related individual projects. The theme “anticipation” attended to the anxious unknowables of the times during the Trump years and before the pandemic happened. The theme hinged on the “sensation” of anticipation – circulating forces that build up, the turning of the corner, hope, reverie or of impending dread, anxiety, trepidation, as we refreshed our social media feed – and how it affected our daily material lives. 

Dr Karen Engle is Associate Professor at the University of Windsor, Canada, in the School of Creative Arts, Windsor, Ont. Canada

Dr Yoke-Sum Wong is Associate Professor at the School of Critical and Creative Studies at the Alberta University of the Arts (formerly ACAD) in Calgary, Ab. Canada

Please contact Regan Koch (r.koch@qmul.ac.uk), Pen Woods (p.woods@qmul.ac.uk) or Tiffany Watt Smith (t.k.watt-smith@qmul.ac.uk) for the Zoom details