Date change: lunchtime work-in-progress seminar (Richard Ashcroft)
Wednesday 22nd June, 2016
13.00, room 2.17, Arts Two
Note that the date of this event has changed.
Please join us for our work-in-progress seminar on Wednesday 22 June, 1pm (Arts Two: Room 2.17) where Richard Ashcroft (QMUL) will give a paper titled: The Future of Emotions and Emotional Utopia
Abstract:
If we start from the presumption that emotions have histories, then we have to accept that they have futures too. Emotions appear, disappear, mutate, and can, perhaps, be created and destroyed. In this conversation piece (its too early to call it work in progress!) I would like to explore how we can talk and think about emotional futures. In particular I’m interested in ideal emotional futures – emotional utopias, utopias of the emotions. I am starting work on a book, tentatively entitled Utopian Biofutures, which explores the ethics, politics and imaginaries of biological enhancement in humans. One feature of most discussions of this theme is the priority given to reason and intelligence; however we are seeing an emergent discussion about moral enhancement, and about enhancement of our abilities to control and modify our romantic and sexual entanglements. On one – very important – level we can read these accounts symptomatically. But we can also take them at face value as explorations of our wants, and what we want to want, and of the futures of our wants, and the futures we want.
All are welcome and lunch will be provided from 12.45. Arts Two is number 35 on this campus map and coloured purple.
The full programme during May and June is as follows:
- Wed 8 June, 1pm – Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild (University of Cologne), ‘The Nerves of the Soul”. Emotional Knowledge between Music Aesthetics and Medicine (1740-1880)’ (Arts One: 2.07-g)
- Wed 15 June, 1pm – Eva Yampolsky (IUHMSP, University of Lausanne and Centre Alexandre Koyré, Paris) ‘The pathology of suicide: a historical study of doctrines and practice in 19th-century France’ (Arts Two: 2.17)
- Wednesday 22 June, 1pm – Richard Ashcroft (QMUL) ‘Emotional Utopias and Emotions of the Future’, (Arts Two: Room 2.17)