While most people know that part of right-wing populist appeal relies on its mobilization of affect – what Judith Butler describes as ‘fascist passions’ (2024) – they often struggle to delineate or harness affect for alternative, progressive projects. In this talk, Hemmings asks how to generate solidarity and alternative affective investment for current times, drawing on her work on ‘affective dissonance’. She introduced this concept in 2012 as a way of thinking about affect and political attachments beyond identity and social movements. Hemmings wants to return to ‘affective dissonance’ to propose it as a methodology for underpinning ‘affective solidarity’ based in struggle for current politics. And she returns to early queer theorists, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Gloria Anzaldúa to think with them about both dissonance and solidarity. In both cases she takes up their refusal to seek recognition in dominant world-views and animate their radical energies to help imagine new futures.

Lynda Olman (formerly Walsh) is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her primary field is the rhetoric of science, particularly the public reception of visual STEM arguments and of the ethos or public role of the scientist. Her book Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy (Oxford University Press, 2013) traces a dominant strand in the role of the science adviser back to its roots in Ancient Mediterranean prophecy. Her first book, Sins Against Science: The Scientific Media Hoaxes of Poe, Twain, and Others (State University of New York Press, 2006), examined the pivotal epoch when science first entered American political life. Her current project seeks a structural vocabulary for scientific graphics in order to help non-experts better interpret them. Olman has also published studies in environmental and non-Western rhetoric; these are connected to her main body of work through an unswerving commitment to archival data, inductive methods, and the interpretation of results in terms of local politics.

This event will engage with the debates surrounding Slow cinema as both an aesthetic movement and a political intervention. The discussion will focus on how extended duration and dead time in film have been seen as challenging capitalist temporalities while simultaneously risking recuperation by the very systems they purportedly resist. Works by directors like Chantal Akerman, Albert Serra, Emmanuelle Demoris, and Michelangelo Frammartino will be analysed to consider how Slow cinema’s radical engagement with the everyday — its focus on dead time and quotidian rhythms — may open up alternative ways of experiencing time and attention, yet often remains confined to exclusive art-house circuits. Slow cinema’s long takes and durational emphasis have been interpreted as producing profound shifts in spectatorial consciousness — ranging from boredom to deeper attunement with more-than-human temporalities. The event will explore what the style’s potential significance might be in our contemporary moment, and considers the possibility that such potential lies less in on-screen choices but, rather, in the urgent need to expand these alternative temporal valuations into new modes of production, distribution, and collective reception.

Rosa Barotsi is a researcher at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Principal Investigator of the NextGeneration EU-funded project IMFilm. Her research and curatorial work explores the intersections of film, gender, and labour. She is a co-founder of the Feminist Frames network and the In Front of the Factory collective. She recently co-edited the special issue ‘Gender and Labour in the Italian Screen Industries’ in Comunicazioni Sociali (2023). She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and a Fellow at ICI Berlin.

James Burton is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Cultural History at Goldsmiths. A former Fellow of the ICI, he publishes work in the areas of cultural theory, process philosophy and science fiction studies, with particular interests in the cultural roles of fabulation/storytelling, critical ecology, and animism.

At the risk of oversimplifying, models work by abstracting from the complexity of things: they shed detail and introduce distortion toward ends as numerous as the models themselves. This is as true of neural networks — which can compress huge amounts of online data to an app that can be run on a smartphone — as it is of crash-test dummies, which render the human body in a plastic form better suited for studying high-speed impact. At the same time, models are more than just stripped-down versions of the real thing, instead they are artefacts that produce unexpected social and epistemic effects, and that can end up transforming what they were merely designed to represent.

This event explores the problem of abstraction through the lens of modelling practices, taking as its point of departure the recently published volume Breaking and Making Models (ICI Berlin Press, 2025). The discussion focuses on a central philosophical tension articulated throughout its pages: the role of abstraction in enabling, shaping, and sometimes constraining the epistemic and imaginative scope of scientific and artistic practices. Contributors to the discussion will consider the productive and limiting aspects of abstraction in modelling, from grounding knowledge of hardly accessible events in the world to obscuring and distorting the complex ‘nature’ of those same events.

This talk addresses the relationship between subject formation in contemporary technoscience and the theoretical problems of scale at work in ICI’s lecture series. Drawing on the ontology and media theory of Gilbert Simondon, Woods understands scientific subjectification in terms of a tension between at least two qualitatively different scales such as weather and climate. His central example is computational climate modelling — especially the use of grids, time steps, and parameters to establish a model’s resolution. In such knowledge-political contexts, scale theory and scale critique have taken the subject’s integrity for granted in their various ways of conceptualizing ‘the human scale’ and opposing it to the imperceptible, nonhuman phenomena that lie beyond it. One viable alternative can work with post-structuralist theories of subjectivity to complicate the relation between human and nonhuman scale domains.