Workshop on Affective Intermediality

The Workshop

This two-day workshop aims to broadly discuss how narrative and aesthetic media types/products communicate and elicit affect, by illustrating how different approaches to media centered affect studies, including various theories and methods on intermediality, affect theory, media communication studies, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, cognitive poetics, can shed light on the complex issue of media affect. The workshop acts as an arena of inspiration and discussion, informally, about what we know about affect and media, and what we need to know in order to make more sense of it. The workshop includes a series of longer presentations, followed by discussions, and group discussions. We hope that this can act as a springboard for developing affective intermediality within IMS, including potential publications, conferences, and most importantly, external funding applications.

Within the Linnaeus University Center of Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS), the theoretical and methodological models of intermediality and multimodality constructed by late Professor Lars Elleström are often the basis for excellent research conducted in the center and its affiliates. Just as there has been an accentuated concern and interest in how the social connects to Elleström’s models, impulses of considering emotions, affects, embodiments in intermediality as a communication theory have surfaced. A term for these concerns has been suggested by Ágnes Pethő in a series of recent publications: affective intermediality (Pethő 2022, 2022b, 2023). This term, its theory and concept, as a theoretical model to be attached to Elleström’s media-centered model of communication, have not yet been formalized though. This workshop is part of a larger project that aims to broadly commence a series of actions to define, develop and use affective intermediality as a useful and important component in understanding the affective mechanisms and consequences in mediation and communication building on the foundational work by Pethő.

So why does this matter? Since opinions and agency in a modern media society as well as before depend, or co-depend, on emotional content and manipulation, a thorough understanding of the basic communicative mechanics of affect is an absolute necessity. In disciplines where effect is measured, such as in risk communication studies, health communication studies, science communication studies, and climate change communication studies^[1], the focus is predominantly on response and not on what happens in mediations of messages through specific media types. A study of affective intermediality would offer a more comprehensive understanding of these mechanisms, which would also be of much use in empirical and data-based analyses of communication. Affective intermediality, thus, offers important insights in contemporary pivotal platforms: how to most effectively combat the ecological crisis through media communication?; how to illuminate how popular, and mass media utilize an affective paradigm to convey truthfulness, authenticity, and deliberate deceptions. Furthermore, affective intermediality will add insights to the aesthetics of art, and the nature of narrative emotivity. Consequently, affective intermediality will, by adding new facets to intermedial studies, contribute to Elleström’s predominantly semiotic model of communication.

Works Cited

• Chadwick, Amy E. “Climate Change Communication,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
• Elleström, Lars. “The Modalities of Media II: An Expanded Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” Beyond Media Borders, Vol. 1: Intermedial Relations Among Multimodal Media, ed. Lars Elleström, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021: 3–91.
• Pethő, Ágnes. “Tacita Dean’s Affective Intermediality: Precarious Visions in-between the Visual Arts, Cinema, and the Gallery Film.” MDPI, 12, 4 (2023)
• Pethő, Ágnes. “The Exquisite Corpse of History. Radu Jude and the Intermedial Collage.” Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 21 (2022): 36–100.
• Pethő, Ágnes. “The Uncanniness of Intermediality. Joanna Hogg’s Eerily Self-Reflexive Cinema.” Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 24 (2023): 39–79.
  
  [1] For a recent literature review of some of these fields, see Amy E. Chadwick, “Climate Change Communication,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).