Leila Dawney

The Interruption: Investigating Subjectivation and Affect

This paper contributes to current debates concerning affect and the nonrepresentational subject by introducing the concept of the interruption as a means of exploring the politics both of experience and of the feeling body. By thinking about the way in which affect is theorised in Spinozas Ethics alongside a critique of the subject that draws on Foucault, I position the interruption as an event that elicits a mode of critique that enables an interrogation of both the sociality of affect and the somatisation of politics. This paper explores three events that I describe as interruptions, and demonstrates the utility and scope of such a concept.

Social imaginaries and therapeutic self‐work: the ethics of the embodied imagination

This paper explores the concept of the social imaginary as a means for understanding how bodies and worlds interact in the production of therapeutic spaces. The ‘body that imagines’ is discussed through an engagement with Foucaults writing on subjectivation and Spinozas theory of knowledge and the imagination. This focus on the ‘body that imagines’ allows a consideration of social imaginaries as processual and collective entities, and reveals how imaginaries are worked on and through, and invested in affectively by bodies. Two case studies consider the employment and negotiation of social imaginaries in constituting a relation to the self through the embodied experience of walking along a coastal footpath. These imaginaries contribute to a therapeutic framing of specific assemblages of bodies and landscapes. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the subjects capacity to work with and through imaginaries is central to both the production of meaningful space and a politics and ethics of the self.

The figure of authority: the affective biopolitics of the mother and the dying man

This paper discusses the relationship between authority-production and experience through a consideration of the emergence of certain figures as authorities on particular matters as a result of extraordinary experiences that they have undergone. It argues that analysis of such figures of experiential authority can help us to identify ‘objectivities’: foundational tenets upon which their authority is based and to which it ultimately refers. With reference to Harry Patch, a veteran of the First World War and Doreen Lawrence, the mother of Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in a racially motivated attack at a bus stop, I contend that the authority carried by these figures testifies to certain socially produced objectivities which elicit an affective response, an embodied demand that they are listened to.

Authority and experience

This is the final version. Available on open access from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record

Data Diffraction Challenging Data Integration in Mixed Methods Research

This article extends the debates relating to integration in mixed methods research. We challenge the a priori assumptions on which integration is assumed to be possible in the first place. More specifically, following Haraway and Barad, we argue that methods produce “cuts” which may or may not cohere and that “diffraction,” as an expanded approach to integration, has much to offer mixed methods research. Diffraction pays attention to the ways in which data produced through different methods can both splinter and interrupt the object of study. As such, it provides an explicit way of empirically capturing the mess and complexity intrinsic to the ontology of the social entity being studied.

Figurations of Wounding: Soldiers’ Bodies, Authority, and the Militarisation of Everyday Life

ABSTRACT This article argues that the figures of the wounded and dead soldier are central organising nodes in public objects, events, and institutions and are generative of intense affects and feelings, which are in turn bound to and constitute geopolitical imaginaries. Through these figurations, bodies of wounded and dead soldiers are brought to visibility, becoming key technologies for the production of authority and attachment, and fostering powerful affective responses in publics that work to amplify and enliven particular forms of neoliberal militarised nationhood.

The affective life of powerAndersonBen, Encountering Affect Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions. London, UK: Routledge, 2016; 208 pp.: 9781138248489, £37.99 (pbk).

Anderson B (2004) Time-stilled space-slowed: how boredom matters. Geoforum 35: 739–754. Anderson B (2010) Preemption precaution, preparedness: anticipatory action and future geographies. Progress in Human Geography 34(6): 777–798. Anderson B and Harrison P (2010) Taking-Place: NonRepresentational Theories and Human Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate. Marx K (1992) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (Fowkes B, Trans.). London, Penguin. Marx K (1996) Speech at anniversary of the People’s Paper, April 14, 1856. Available at: https://www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1856/04/14.htm.

Authority, experience and the life of power

Taking up the challenge of understanding power in its complexity, this volume returns to and revitalises the concept of ‘authority’. It provides a powerful analysis of the ways that relationships of trust, attachment, governance and inequality become possible when subjectivities and bodies are invested in the life of power. The collection offers a vibrant new analysis of the biopolitical, arguing that ‘experience of life’ has become equated with ‘objectivity’ in contemporary culture and has thus become a primary basis of authority. ‘Biopolitical’ or ‘experiential’ authority can be generated through reference to a variety of experiences, performances or intensities of life including creativity, radicalism, risk-taking, experimentation, inter-relation, suffering and proximity to death. The authority-producing capacities of community and aesthetics are key issues, pointing to vexed relationships between politics and policing, inventiveness and violence. The contributors develop their theoretical analyses through discussion of a range of specific sites including mental-health service user and survivor politics, biological knowledge, refugee activism, stories of suffering, urban art, anarchism, neo-liberal community politics and marketization. Authority, Experience & the Life of Power challenges thinking on what ‘the political’ is and isn’t, pushing against the all too easy equivocation of revolutionary break and empowerment.