The New Key Concepts in Affective Societies

This volume offers a comprehensive rethinking of how affect and emotion shape contemporary social and political life. Against the backdrop of global crises, polarized publics, and media-saturated environments, this book positions affect not as a mere supplement to reason or discourse, but as the connective tissue between self and society, the intimate and the institutional. Drawing on over a decade of interdisciplinary research at the Berlin-based Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies, the contributors develop a rich conceptual toolbox to understand the affective dynamics at play in governance, media, care, protest, and everyday life. From affective polarization and outrage politics to infrastructures of feeling and institutional affect, this collection identifies new key concepts that serve as both diagnostic tools and theoretical interventions. Bridging affect theory with empirical inquiry, it demonstrates how affect and emotion are central to how we relate, resist, dwell, and imagine. This is a carefully curated volume that will appeal to scholars and students interested in the affective and emotional foundations of contemporary societies from a range of fields: sociology, cultural studies, psycho-social studies, anthropology, political science, media studies, religious and theological studies, philosophy, and performance studies.