Join us at King's College London on Monday 30 June for a public lecture with Professor Ben Anderson. The lecture will be held in Bush House Lecture Theatre 1 BH(S)1.01, 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG from 18:00 till 19:30, followed by refreshments.

The Politics of Feeling in Crisis Times: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism

In this lecture I argue that today’s competing political forms – populism, progressivism, liberalism - offer differentiated affective responses to shared conditions of uncertainty amid the ongoing, perpetually deferred end of neoliberalism. Rather than naming coherent programs of political thought, these popular political forms operate as arrangements or modes of attachment and intensity. Each one suggests a different way of remembering the past, imagining the future, and making the present politically meaningful. Each one offers distinctive structures of feeling amid today’s crisis times. Each one elevates some affective orientations over others and thereby etches differences of race, class, and gender within its structure. Drawing on the forthcoming The Politics of Feeling (with Anna J Secor), I offer a set of propositions about how each political form works affectively, including: ‘Liberalism promises nothing need ever change’; ‘Populism is optimistic’, and, for progressivism, ‘everything matters now’. Alongside these propositions, I reflect on our process of conceptual creation and revision as we attempted to write about the affective present from within that present.

Professor Ben Andreson

Ben Anderson is a Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. His work focuses on the politics of affect and emotion in relation to various contemporary conditions, most recently events and figures associated with populism. Books include Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (2014, Routledge) and the forthcoming (with Anna J Secor) The Politics of Feeling: Populism, Progressivism, Liberalism (2025, Goldsmiths Press/MIT). He is currently researching climate change disaffection, and occasionally writing a book on boredom at the end of neoliberalism.

The Politics of Feeling