Conference Papers by Alexander Kirby-Reynolds
Drawing on fieldwork experience with anti-racist activists in the UK over the past year, this pap... more Drawing on fieldwork experience with anti-racist activists in the UK over the past year, this paper engages with their intervention efforts against racism and wider forms of structural and cultural violence. These intervention strategies target people who are deemed to not be racist but as having absorbed racist beliefs – commonly understood as the ‘I’m not racist but…s’. Such people are seen to differ from other racists, such as National Front or British National Party supporters. Racist views of the former are explained through the cultural violence of racist narratives which exist in a parasitic relationship with ‘legitimate’ suffering. This suffering is deemed by activists to be caused by the injustice of austerity. Racism comes to obfuscate this structural violence through causing people to ‘irrationally’ attribute their suffering to a nebulous migrant other. This corresponds to activists’ conception of a shifting ontology of racism, with physical violence being supplanted by the infiltration of racism within mainstream political institutions and discourse, as exemplified by Farage and Trump.
Underpinned by this logic of racism, activist training is designed to access people’s ‘emotive reasoning’. Activists are taught not to engage in rational debate or offer ‘facts’ which will be rejected through failing to correspond with a person’s feelings. Instead, using ‘Socratic’ questioning of people’s beliefs, which are open and empathetic, they attempt to reveal the raw and suffering human subject. Once suffering is discovered, it is hoped that the potential affective power that suffering offers the sufferer can be redirected either to solidarity with migrants or to organising against structural violence, thus disrupting its relationship with racist views. With similar strategies being used to recruit new activists I argue that this challenges our understanding of political knowledge as being abstract, disembodied and complete.
Thesis Chapters by Alexander Kirby-Reynolds
Storytelling, in the form of performed personal narratives, permeates through various forms of po... more Storytelling, in the form of performed personal narratives, permeates through various forms of political communication, and has the capacity for mass affective resonance with listeners, moving them to action and organization. While politics through emotion is decried within liberal democratic imaginaries as a tactic of emotional manipulation used by radical political actors, affective mediation and management can be seen to occur in all political arenas. To this effect, here I explore how UK activists qua community organisers have been trained to utilize storytelling in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum as a means of communicating with other political subjectivities. Elaborating upon mutually dependent emotional and imaginative pedagogical logics as they occur within two such advocated forms of stories, I argue that the potential translation of listeners’ affective imaginations allows storytelling to operate as a technology of movement – an intentional communicative tool that mediates the relations of actors with the world as a means of intentionally enrolling them into political projects. Such technologies provide a productive means of thinking about the nature of power and politics that mediates binaries of the material and social, the body and the mind, and feeling and thought.
[stories, affect, imagination, mediation, activism, United Kingdom, Brexit]
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Conference Papers by Alexander Kirby-Reynolds
Underpinned by this logic of racism, activist training is designed to access people’s ‘emotive reasoning’. Activists are taught not to engage in rational debate or offer ‘facts’ which will be rejected through failing to correspond with a person’s feelings. Instead, using ‘Socratic’ questioning of people’s beliefs, which are open and empathetic, they attempt to reveal the raw and suffering human subject. Once suffering is discovered, it is hoped that the potential affective power that suffering offers the sufferer can be redirected either to solidarity with migrants or to organising against structural violence, thus disrupting its relationship with racist views. With similar strategies being used to recruit new activists I argue that this challenges our understanding of political knowledge as being abstract, disembodied and complete.
Thesis Chapters by Alexander Kirby-Reynolds
[stories, affect, imagination, mediation, activism, United Kingdom, Brexit]
Underpinned by this logic of racism, activist training is designed to access people’s ‘emotive reasoning’. Activists are taught not to engage in rational debate or offer ‘facts’ which will be rejected through failing to correspond with a person’s feelings. Instead, using ‘Socratic’ questioning of people’s beliefs, which are open and empathetic, they attempt to reveal the raw and suffering human subject. Once suffering is discovered, it is hoped that the potential affective power that suffering offers the sufferer can be redirected either to solidarity with migrants or to organising against structural violence, thus disrupting its relationship with racist views. With similar strategies being used to recruit new activists I argue that this challenges our understanding of political knowledge as being abstract, disembodied and complete.
[stories, affect, imagination, mediation, activism, United Kingdom, Brexit]