Figuration and the Child

A review of Claudi Castanñeda's Figurations: Child, Bodies, Worlds (Duke University Press, Durham, 2002)

Affective history, working class communities and self-determination

Using a concept of affective history, this paper explores the common creation of everyday being-ness, producing common meanings that may have existed and been passed down over hundreds of years. Indeed, some of those meanings clearly become potent symbols binding us together. Thus, common meanings, held for many hundreds of years can have an effect in relation to the construction of communal beingness in the present. Applying this approach to research in working class communities with a history of suffering or displacement, often understood by agencies as ‘hard to reach’, demands that we take a creative approach to research. Methodologically, this work came out of listening to a fragmentary history of movement and exclusion that emerged out of attending to the collection of often small, anecdotal, details in conversations and interviews. This approach is explored with reference to using a co-production research framework

Remember Not To Die: Young Girls and Video Games

Video games are played very differently by boys and girls, as girls do not tend to take the game as competitively as boys do. If video games are part of a set of technologies and practices for the production and management of contemporary masculinity, then girls have to manage themselves as both masculine and feminine in order to succeed in these games

Couze Venn: Pioneer of Cultural, Post Colonial and Social Theory

This issue is dedicated to the work of Couze Venn, who was an important figure in social. cultural and post/decolonial theory until his death in 2019 aged 79. We had initially planned this volume to be a celebration of his work whilst he was still alive to be able to see it, but events overtook us. Couze was a huge inspiration and founding influence on the journal Subjectivity, introducing throughout the different periods of his writing a distinctive focus and attention on subjectivity, which he thought through the interconnected processes of affect, individuation and relationality. He was in dialogue with many thinkers, including the work of Bracha Ettinger, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Steigler, and many others, always looking for the traces of what he came to identify as the “compossible”

‘No-one listens to us’: post-truth, affect and Brexit

The 2016 referendum result with a majority for Brexit came as a surprise to many in metropolitan centres. Deep divisions were exposed that appeared to have largely been hidden from those centres. In the wake of this, many explanations were put forward: perhaps most importantly, the notion of ‘post-truth’ gained a new prominence. The paper argues that post-truth could be said to depend upon notions of virality, contagion and harks back to founding work in social psychology relating to Le Bon’s work on crowds. In doing so, it concentrates on issues of class, especially in relation to affect and working-class voters. It does so by referring to a small funded study with two South Wales communities, exploring their views on and their demands and desires after Brexit. Considering the outcomes of that work leads to the discussion of the affective histories and practices of the communities involved and asks how we might research working class histories and practices in a non-pathologising way. The paper concludes with a discussion of some examples of approaches that provide suggestive ways forward for future research in this field

Reading the rereadings: Valerie Walkerdine responds to the commentaries on ‘Video Replay’

This paper derives from an e-interview conducted with Valerie Walkerdine by Corinne Squire to reflect on the commentaries produced for this special issue [of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society]. The interview begins with general questions about how the author perceives the impact of ‘Video Replay’ since its publication and its legacy in her own work, moves on to consider some of the specific issues raised by the three commentators, and ends with an address to the article's contemporary and likely future relevance

'I just wanna be a woman': some not so simple ways: families, femininity and/as affective entanglement

Catherine is age 21 years. She is part of a research project that has followed her life from age 4 until 21 years. She is driving along in her car and we hear a song, with the lines “I just wanna be a woman” sung plaintively over and over again. This article considers what the song might mean in the context of what we learn from a very close reading of observation and interview data with her, her parents, and teachers at various stages of her life. The article describes the process of conducting a slow reading and argues that it presents to us an approach to what I call “affective entanglement” as an antidote to classificatory prescriptions of causality. We begin to understand how the complexity of the entanglement of family lives, lived at particular historical periods and in specific geographical locations, gives us a detailed insight into not only the entanglements that shape Catherine’s life, but also allow us to understand something about the affective transmission of class, gender, and sexuality in all its complexity

O raciocínio em tempos pós-modernos

Reasoning in a post-modern ageO raciocínio em tempos pós-moderno