Location: Ellen Wilkinson Building, B2.4
This is a face-to-face event only.
Published in 2018, Affinities, by Jennifer Mason, sought to highlight the potential of opening our perspectives to the idea of potent connections that rise up and matter in everyday and personal lives. Jennifer conceptualised these as ‘encounters where it is possible to identify a spark or charge of connection that makes personal life charismatic, or enchants or even toxifies it’. Perhaps the most distinctive part of the argument was that affinities are ‘connective charges and energies that are of interest in themselves and not because of what they connect’, and that these charges emanate from encounters of some kind. Jennifer explored what affinities/potent connections can involve in the book by interweaving layers of argument and facets around themes of sensations, ineffable kinship, ecologies, socio-atmospherics and time. But instead of arguing these constitute a framework or complete catalogue of affinities, Jennifer suggested that it would be better to think of Affinities as ‘the suggestion of an orientation’, and ‘as an invitation to think and theorise differently, to invite us to imagine connections, charges and energies that cannot be contained within, or done justice by, existing sociological modes of thought’. The aim of the book was ‘to tantalise and beckon us to think more boldly, freely and poetically about how we understand living in the world’. We would like that spirit to underpin our proposed event.
The Morgan Centre have made some funds available towards helping participants who would like to attend but do not have any research allowance to do so. Please contact sociologydepartmentuom@outlook.com for more information.
