This AISSR lecture explores 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 places AI within the broader framework of sensory and affective politics. It asks 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?

About Arjun Appadurai

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.

Aftertalk

After his lecture, Arjun Appadurai will discuss his ideas with AISSR futures-anthropologist Roanne van Voorst.

Drinks

From 17:00 to 18:00 there will be drinks and snacks in De Brug, offering time for informal discussion.

For who?

Our AISSR lectures are open to everyone interested in fundamental questions in the social sciences: bachelor and master students, colleagues from inside and outside the UvA and AISSR, and anyone curious to learn more.

A video recording of this lecture will be available from 20 April in our AISSR Lecture Series playlist.

PhD & Postdoc workshop

The next morning, on Friday 17 April, Prof. Appadurai invites AISSR / UvA PhD candidates and postdocs to an interactive workshop. This workshop starts from a simple but radical question: who has the right to do research? Research is often imagined as the domain of experts and institutions. Yet should ordinary people not also be empowered to ask their own questions, generate their own data, and produce their own analyses?

Drawing on the idea of research as a fundamentally social undertaking, the workshop explores:

• how research can enable new forms of democratic engagement.
• how to move beyond “giving voice” toward enabling communities to formulate and pursue their own research questions.
• what kinds of infrastructures, tools, and rights are needed to democratize research.

What does it mean to treat research as a collective practice? And how might this reshape relationships between researchers, communities, and institutions?

Participants are invited to read a short chapter on “the right to research” in advance - to be send after formal registration and confirmation - and to bring their own questions, concerns, or experiences to the discussion.

In the workshop, Prof. Appadurai will reflect on research as a collective practice, and participants are encouraged to share and discuss examples from their own work.

Date: 17 April 2026
Time: 10.00 – 13.00 (including lunch)
Location: REC-B2.10

Registration

To participate in the workshop as an AISSR / UvA PhD candidate or postdoc, please send a short motivation (½–1 A4) outlining why you would like to join and how the theme relates to your own research to aissr-fmg@uva.nl by 10 April.