Announcement

This year’s MAPS theme – Methods/Affects/Practices/Sensibilities – is intended to provoke the submission of stream-/paper-/uncharted- proposals that creatively foreground the widely (often wildly) divergent modes of affect inquiry. What kinds of maps guide your approaches to research in & through affect? How does the situatedness of particular sensibilities and sensations shape your procedures? Where and when do the architectures and atmospheres of affect guide and/or disturb the disciplinary formations that generate research trajectories within (and perhaps beyond or outside) your field of specialization? Even more directly, does affect study have a method or methods? Does it truly need one (or several)? And if so, why is it that matters of affect seem to trouble almost any discussion of method and practice and sensibility, and is this the kind of recurrent trouble that we need to always stay with?

The plenary speakers for #affectMAPS – Mel Chen, Keller Easterling, Jennifer Gabrys, Derek McCormack, and Greg Seigworth – have each addressed these kinds of questions in their work. They’ll bring a few answers and probably a whole host of new troublings. Then – together with all of you – across the three full days of the conference, we will find ways to sharpen such methodological queries to hone what’s at stake in (ongoing) mappings of affect.

MAPS offers four different proposal venues: stream proposals, individual submission streams, uncharted interventions, and methods-focused workshop proposals. Please see the detailed call for proposals in order to get more information about each of these categories. 

Time to mark your MAPS!! Chart out these dates:

• Deadline for submission of Conference Stream Proposals: March 20, 2020
• Conference Streams decided and CFP for Individual Paper Submissions posted: April 1, 2020
• Submission deadline of Individual Papers, Workshops, and uncharted interventions ("there by monsters"): May 15, 2020
• Notification of acceptance: May 30, 2020
• Conference dates: September 23 – 26, 2020

Although there is a new conference site, with a new conference convener in Dr. Jenny Rice, the same care, community, and conferencing vibe will prevail. Like our previous affect studies conferences, this event will provide abundant opportunities to traverse multi-disciplinary intersections, to forge intellectual communities that eschew the usual scholarly hierarchies, and to foster generative atmospheres that prefigure ever more hospitable and inhabitable maps for affective academic practices.

Email for any questions: affect@uky.edu