Ben Anderson

Ben Anderson's work research conceptualises ordinary affective life, and examines the politics of affect in relation to emergency governance, Brexit and the rise of populisms of the left and right, and other contemporary conditions. His 2014 book – Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions (Routledge)– set out a theory of how affective life is organised and mediated. He is currently working on a geo-history of boredom and changes in capitalism since the 1970s, using boredom as a way into thinking about the politics of eventfulness in political times often described and critiqued as intensely turbulent.

Affect and critique: A politics of boredom* - Ben Anderson, 2021 (sagepub.com)

Throughout his empirical work, he is concerned with how futures are encountered, related to, and made present through ordinary affects, including hope and boredom. This includes research on how events and conditions are governed through ‘emergency’, drawing out the specificity of emergency in the context of the other genres through which we come to feel, know and render actionable events, for example disaster, crisis, catastrophe, and incident.