NTU Journals: Climate Change and Affect

When Simon Dawes not working on his PhD thesis at NTU, he works as an editorial assistant for the sister journals Theory, Culture and Society and Body and Society, and is also responsible for the content on the website, blog, Facebook and Twitter sites. Here he reports on some recent issues of the journal.

To accompany the new TCS special issue on Changing Climates (TCS vol 27, issue 2-3, May 2010, edited by Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry), I’ve been busy working with the contributors to the issue on collating extra material for our website that could be of interest to readers. The double issue demonstrates how social science can help to illuminate the very nature of the challenge of climate change, and gathers papers by some of the world's leading authors working on climate and society (Ulrich Beck, Mike Hulme, Elizabeth Shove and Brian Wynne among them). The contributors trace the way that climate science has been produced, organised, mobilised and contested, and explore the relationships between climate change, politics, global inequity, financial turbulence and even life itself. For the extra material, we’ve so far got an extensive bibliography of climate change texts, and links to podcasts of interviews and talks, as well as a host of other material on related projects, events and articles. We’re hoping it will serve as a valuable resource to anyone in the social sciences interested in climate change.

We’ve also just published on the site an interview I conducted with Lisa Blackman, Mike Featherstone and Couze Venn, as a supplement to the current issue of Body and Society (vol 16, issue 1, March 2010, edited by Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn), which doubles as a special issue on Affect and as the relaunch issue of the journal. The issue focuses on the significance for body-studies of the ‘turn to affect’ that has taken place across the humanities and the social sciences, particularly in terms of a re-engagement with perception, sensation and memory, and explores the role of different versions of affect in the theorising of the body. Articles featured are by Constantina Papoulias & Felicity Callard, Julian Henriques, Valerie Walkerdine, Erin Manning and Patricia T. Clough, as well as those by Blackman, Featherstone and Venn. In the online interview, the editors discuss the significance of affect to their own research, as well as the future theoretical and methodological direction of the relaunched journal. I’ll be conducting more interviews with editorial board members and special issue editors of both journals in the near future.

Subsequent issues and sections in Body and Society on bodily integrity, medicine, and animation and automation, and in TCS on Ricoeur, Megacities, Simmel, and Code and Codings, are all in the pipeline, and there will be many more interviews and much more extra material available on the website to accompany them, so keep checking the website and blog for new developments.