Critical Affect

Ashley Barnwell is a Senior Research Fellow in Sociology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She is the author of several journal articles and book chapters, including a contribution for What if Culture Was Nature all Along? edited by Vicki Kirby (Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

Ashley Barnwell challenges the clear-cut separation of critical and affective approaches, examining how longstanding ideas of critique and criticism are applied by the recent wave of affect theory across the social sciences. As much a methodological reflection as a critique of existing literature, Barnwell offers both a meditation on how to read with ‘epistemic charity’ and a very timely provocation on what it means to be in academia today.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Enduring Divisions2. Evidence in Flux3. The Crisis of ‘Non-Representation’4. Ordinary Paranoia5. The Life of GenreNotesBibliography