Colloquium: Feeling Alienated: Prospects for Thinking Alienation as an Emotion

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially presents its winter semester 2020/2021 colloquium:

BEN GOOK, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

Feeling Alienated: Prospects for Thinking Alienation as an Emotion

Alienation is widely discussed in contemporary social life. It has apparently become a social challenge in recent years. The times seem to call for such a concept: social life has fractured, democracy is slipping and economic injustice is widely recognised, all of which have occurred along with feelings of anxiety, insecurity and powerlessness. In this lecture, Ben Gook will consider alienation’s emotionality. This experiential component has to date remained strangely sidelined in scholarly discussions of alienation, where a structural interpretation continues to reign. This lecture will ask if alienation can be considered an emotion – and what the stakes of such a question (and its answer) are for the history of emotions.

Join the talk here

Meeting number (access code): 181 413 5474
Meeting password: FmekZeBd524

Ben Gook is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. He was previously an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin and an associate investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion in Melbourne.

Relevant publications include: Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-unified Germany after 1989 (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015) and “Ecstatic Melancholic: Ambivalence, Electronic Music and Social Change around the Fall of the Berlin Wall” in Emotions: History, Culture, Society (2017). He is working on a forthcoming book, Feeling Alienated: How Alienation Returned in Contemporary Capitalism for the Histories of Emotions and the Senses series with Cambridge University Press in 2021.