SASNET Lecture with Atreyee Sen: "Anger, Legitimised: Amplified Anger and its Rhetorics of Legitimation in the 21st Century"

For the past decades, this world has faced exponential failures of democracy, resuscitation of dictatorships, rising gender backlash, surveillance capitalism, extractivism, protracted wars, mass killing and displacement, a pandemic, and authoritarian carceral regimes. These are merely some of the factors that has tipped the earth into what social scientists call ‘the bad, ugly Anthropocene’ - signalling that human activity has eroded the social, economic and biological frontiers of planetary life. 

In this talk, Professor Atreyee Sen will bring forth a discussion on how rage has become fundamental to our contemporary human condition as the world gets more interconnected through shared senses of injustice, along with fear, hatred, paranoia, and other ‘negative affect’. She will explore how collective anger as a response to this plenitude in planetary crisis has become the defining fabric of contemporary human lives. 

Whether as resistance to earthly destruction, or riling for enforced segregations, or the fury in daily exposure to death and structural inequalities, anger seeps into ‘public moods’ through news, media and activism, and animates protests, resistances and current social movements. Even the wrath of more-than-human worlds, such as climate vengeance, retaliatory floods, and cleansing wildfires, becomes integrated into this global indignation. 

The presentation, which provides an overview of Atreyee Sen's ERC Advanced Grant, will highlight how these affective landscapes create pervasive atmospheres of human rage across the global North and South. Between the ‘stuckedness’ of human life and the ‘stickiness’ of disparities, the talk will raise some issues around the global circulation of rage, which is embodied, stoked and energised in the contemporary era.

About the lecturer

Atreyee Sen is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Over the course of her academic career in India, the UK and Denmark, Sen has published extensively, and brought critical insights to studies of gender, childhoods, poverty, urban politics and South Asian cities. 

This event is a collaboration between SASNET and the Division of Gender Studies at Lund University. 

All welcome!