AISSR Lecture by Arjun Appadurai
This AISSR lecture explored how affect – emotions, moods, and sensory experience – has, over the past decade, been reshaped, and how we want to utilize it for current day politics – and our shared future.
While right‑wing politics has long and effectively mobilized affect, progressive politics often remains attached to reason and theoretical argument. Without a critical engagement with affect, an essential political energy is ceded to the right. At the same time, people increasingly live and act as “quasi-humans” alongside AI systems: tools like ChatGPT become co-producers of texts, ideas, and analyses.
The lecture placed AI within the broader framework of sensory and affective politics. It asked whether a progressive, democratic sensorium is possible – a politics that begins from the senses and from embodied experience, while embracing AI critically rather than either rejecting it or celebrating it naively. What does it mean for political life when AI becomes part of the infrastructures of connectivity and social mobilization? How does this affect the ways solidarity is formed, felt, and organized?
Arjun Appadurai is a prominent contemporary anthropologist and a leading theorist of globalization, known for his influential work on modernity, migration, and the cultural dimensions of global change. Born in India in 1949, he has held academic positions at several prestigious institutions, including Yale University, the University of Chicago, and New York University.
His work has been particularly influential for its analysis of global cultural flows and the role of THE imagination in shaping social life, most notably through his concept of “scapes” and his seminal book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996).
Beyond academia, Appadurai has also engaged with international organisations such as UNESCO and the World Bank, and his work continues to shape debates on globalization, media, urban life, and the future of democracy.
After his lecture, Arjun Appadurai discussed his ideas with AISSR futures-anthropologist Roanne van Voorst.