Preliminary Programme:

• 14:15 Introduction (Christoffer Kølvraa)
• 14:30 Alexander Ulrich Thygesen
• 14:55 Britta Timm Knudsen
• 15:20 Coffee Break
• 15:40 Christoffer Kølvraa  
• 16:05 Jan Ifversen
• 16:30 Christian Von Scheve

As an increasing number of voices – both scholarly, activist and political – have pointed out the potentialities and possibilities as well as the challenges and conflicts inherent to ’culturally diverse’ or decolonizing societies, cannot be fully understood without considering their affective dimension.

Affect and emotion have as such been identified as core at various levels and sites in which the construction of contemporary societies are at stake; in debates about democracy and the place of religion, in struggles over collective memory and its representation in public space, in new forms of anti-racist activism, but also contrarily in the ongoing revamping of nationalism, in the rise of populist performatives in the political space, and the accelerating xenophobia typically centered on the immigrant.

This workshop will present a range of short interventions from scholars whose research in different ways addresses the intersection between affect and cultural diversity in contemporary societies, serving hopefully to facilitate a broader discussion on how we might question, explore or critique this intersection in ways that bring our understanding forward and opens it up to imagining different futures.

The workshop will entail interventions from Christian von Scheve, Britta Timm Knudsen, Alexander Ulrich Thygesen, Jan Ifversen and Christoffer Kølvraa taking as their starting point their own ongoing research into topics ranging from insurgency and counter-insurgency in Denmark in response to the big bang event of the murder of George Floyd, practices of memory activism and demonumentalisation in Chile, re-imagining Europe as a continent of immigrants and the expansion of national-populist sentimentality after Covid19.