Abstract: „What roles do feelings play in making and shaping shared but differentiated online experiences? This talk develops the concept of ‘structures of feeling’, proposed by the Welsh cultural theorist Raymond Williams in the mid-twentieth century to account for the dynamic qualities that compose and define a particular historical moment. Building on the centrality of art, media and aesthetics to Williams’ concept, I argue that the feelings generated, moulded and modulated by social media can be understood as key to today’s structures of feeling. These contemporary structures of feeling can be understood in terms of the captivation of digital mediation; where the lure of being ‘always on’ is both exciting and dulling. I offer the concept ‘infrastructures of feeling’ to attend to the ways in which feelings are not unified or unifying, but involve inequalities, difference and contestation, and are always complicated ‘both/and’ rather than ‘either/or’ (Paasonen 2020). While work in media studies has most commonly understood as the network and physical systems which underpin media communications, I see infrastructures as also sensory and aesthetic (Berlant 2008, 2021; Larkin 2013, 2018), and as that which are at the edges as well as underneath. If infrastructures of feeling are understood in these ways, we require approaches that are able to detect and work within such ambivalence and evasiveness, including a re-understanding of what critique and resistance might look and feel like.” 

Rebecca Coleman ist Professorin am Bristol Digital Futures Institute (BDFI) und an der School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) der University of Bristol, UK. Ihre Forschung umfasst die Bereiche Soziologie, Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften und konzentriert sich auf digitale Medien und Kultur, Zeitlichkeit, Gegenwart und Zukunft, Körper und Affekt, feministische Theorie und interdisziplinäre Methoden. Ihre neuesten Veröffentlichungen sind Glitterworlds: The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing (2020, Goldsmiths Press) und How to do social research with... (gemeinsam herausgegeben mit Kat Jungnickel und Nirmal Puwar, 2024, Goldsmiths Press). Derzeit schreibt sie an einem Buch über digitale Vermittlung, Zeitlichkeit und „infrastructures of feeling“ und ist Researcher in Residence am Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol, wo sie an Arbeiten über Community Tech und digitale Zukunft mitarbeitet.

Ihr Vortrag findet in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Teilprojekt „Contested Order of Emotions: (Anti-)Feminist Discourses on Social Media” des SFB „Affective Societies“ statt.

Datum und Ort: 2. Mai 2024, 18-20 Uhr im Seminarraum L115 am Seminarzentrum in der Otto-von-Simson-Str. 26.

Die Veranstaltung wird in englischer Sprache stattfinden.

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