An online seminar series exploring how emotions are measured, managed, and mobilised through digital technologies and data-driven governance.
As a new quantum age is on the horizon but not yet fully actualized, this talk explores how mining affective genealogies of ‘the quantum’ might surface urgent perspectives on our current computational moment, while conjuring sociotechnical futures beyond Big Tech rhetorics. What might emerge, Prof Pedwell asks, in thinking through the logics of quantum intuitions? Prof Pedwell explores quantum intuitions that are not only multiple, but also strange, disconcerting, and explicitly counter-intuitive. Invoking the physicist Richard Feynman’s post-war ‘elemental intuition’ and millennial theories of affective ‘quantum potential’, she imagines a twenty-first century physics of computation that engages potentiality and ‘the virtual’ to reconfigure collective energy for survival amid the compounding geopolitical, ecological, and technological crises of the present.
Bio
Carolyn Pedwell is Professor in Digital Media and Head of Media and Film in the School of Arts, University of Lancaster. She is a cultural and media theorist with an international reputation for her work on affect and artificial intelligence; digital media and culture; habits and social change; the politics of empathy; and feminist, queer, critical race and decolonial studies.
Carolyn is the author of three monographs: Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation (McGill-Queens UP, 2021); Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014); and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison (Routledge, 2010). She is also the co-editor (with Gregory J. Seigworth) of The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures (Duke UP, 2023). Carolyn’s monograph in progress is Speculative Machines and Us: Intuition, AI, and the Making of Computational Cultures.
Professor of Social and Political Geography
School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences
Professor Pykett explores governance, emotion, and public policy through social and political geography, with a focus on neuroscience, urban wellbeing, and sociodigital futures.
