Time: Monday, September 8 at 11:20
Venue: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Fabianinkatu 24 A (3rd floor), Common Room, and Online
The seminar explores collective and psychosocial processes through which affective canons—normative, commonplace ways of feeling formed through the repetition of affective-discursive practices—are shaped, contested, and negotiated. Currently, social and affective dynamics in contexts ranging from social media to employment encounters and academia are shaped by a neoliberal emphasis on individualised perseverance and entrepreneurialism, which promotes normative positivity and confidence. At the same time, social media and other contexts have cultivated affective communities or publics around efforts to create social change and deconstruct normative social practices and affective canons formed around issues such as the climate crisis, ongoing genocides, and human and animal rights. However, membership in such communities and efforts often demands specific affective labour. It entails a risk of being perceived in various social contexts as a "killjoy", in Sarah Ahmed’s terms, whose exclusion functions as a means to maintain hegemonic affective atmospheres. The presentations in our seminar address these complex affective, social, and psychological dynamics. They explore questions such as: How does a form of feeling become commonplace or even normative? To what extent do contemporary affective canons entail variability and flexibility, and how do these qualities manifest themselves discursively and through embodiment? How do those who stretch the boundaries of affective canons negotiate contemporary feeling rules? By exploring these dynamics, the presentations address broad questions about the interplay of affect and discourse, embodiment and society, and mutability and stability in affective practices.
Registration
In-person participants do not need to register. However, if you plan to join us online, please register in advance by completing the form below no later than September 7:
Registration Form for Online Participants.
Registered online participants will receive the Zoom link via email on the day of the event.
Program
11:20: Welcome by HCAS Deputy Director Svetlana Vetchinnikova
11:30: Introductory presentation: Satu Venäläinen: Affective canons, killjoys and affect aliens
12:00: Keynote speech: Kaarina Nikunen: Feeling together: Affective practice, disruption and resistance in the digital age
13:00: Lunch (served for the speakers in the HCAS Common Room)
14:00: Henri Hyvönen: “It’s always a sensitive topic”: Affective-discursive canons around sensitivity among Finnish male influencers who create food content on social media
14:40: Octavia Calder-Dawe: Rise and grind: Exploring gendered affective labour on Instagram
15:20: Coffee break
15:50: Marja Lönnroth-Olin: Care Deliberations of Adult Children Caring for People with Dementia – Applying an Affective Discursive Practices Approach
16:30: Christian Haugestad: Negotiations of Ecological Distress in Youth Conversations and Instagram Posts – Where are the affective-discursive possibilities for resistance?
17:10: Conclusion
Abstracts
Affective canons, killjoys and affect aliens
Satu Venäläinen, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
This introductory presentation outlines the idea of affective (or affective-discursive) canons, as defined by Margaret Wetherell and her colleagues. Turning to Sarah Ahmed’s work, it then discusses what it means to feel and act against the grain. Drawing on Ahmed’s discussion on killjoys and affect aliens, I introduce the main area of focus of the current research project Social media conversations on violence and inequalities: Affects and intersections. Using examples from a subproject that charts affective responses to Donald Trump's re-election as US president in 2024, I specifically discuss the complex relationship between affective investments in caring and non-violence, alienation, and (loss of) hope in the current, increasingly hostile postdigital climate.
Feeling together: Affective practice, disruption and resistance in the digital age
Kaarina Nikunen, Tampere University
To understand the ways in which emotions are crafted, shaped, and mobilized has become critical in understanding social engagements in the digital era: how human interaction and expression of emotions may change in mediated contexts, and how platforms and social media contexts may amplify particular affective registers, and in different ways shape and regulate emotions and even produce what we may call ’gut feelings’.
In this talk I discuss affective practices as collective formation of emotions that drive various social and political forces from solidaristic campaigns to hate groups. I argue that digitalization and datafication of the media landscape engender intense and corporeal affective economies that make use, craft, gear, and circulate emotions in different ways.
I explore the formation of affective canons through various case studies, that point out the ways in which emotions and affects can be understood as practices, routines, rituals, and patterns that also carry and shape moral judgements.
“It’s always a sensitive topic”: Affective-discursive canons around sensitivity among Finnish male influencers who create food content on social media
Henri Hyvönen, University of Eastern Finland
In social media, food has become an arena of identity work for men, both content creators and commenters. Yet, the relationship between men who create food content and their followership has remained relatively underexplored. Drawing on interviews with male food influencers and netnographic fieldwork in Finland, this study focuses on how comments and commercial opportunities shape male creators’ operating environments within digital spaces centered around food, and what kind of feeling positions men adopt in relation to them. The study demonstrates that men’s material practices in digital spaces and their affective-discursive identity work revolve around notions of sensitivity and the perception that “nothing can be said anymore.” Social media work necessitates flexibility and self-minimization. Commenters were seen as both a resource and a threat, which led to cautious concessions towards both defenders of men’s conventional eating habits and their critics. Fear and caution were associated with both the mainstreaming criticism of meat and the ascending neo-conservatism among passionate meat hobbyists. The study shows that the perception of food as a potentially problematic topic and a field of many cultural sensitivities constituted a shared affective-discursive canon among male food influencers.
Rise and grind: Exploring gendered affective labour on Instagram
Octavia Calder-Dawe, Victoria University of Wellington
While often associated with leisure, consumption and frivolity, the social media platform Instagram is also a site of affective labour. Posting to Instagram is very literally a form of work for professional influencers, whose livelihoods are tied to their ability to attract and emotionally engage followers. This framing of social media as affective labour also has resonance, however, for more regular users, for whom Instagram use may entail work on a number of levels: the relational labour of keeping up-to-date with friends; the identity work of crafting and maintaining a profile (or profiles); the psychosocial work of ensuring posting has the “right” affective tone; and the reflexive work of maintaining a “healthy” relationship with the platform (or at least, ensuring it seems this way to others). This presentation interrogates the gendered affective labour of social media use through a close analysis of young adult women’s talk about their use of Instagram. Threading together accounts from Instagram influencers with more typical, everyday users, I set out to understand the ‘affective work ethic’ and accompanying affective canons that structure engagements with Instagram, and trace their implications.
Care Deliberations of Adult Children Caring for People with Dementia – Applying an Affective Discursive Practices Approach
Marja Lönnroth-Olin, University of Jyväskylä
Dementia is the leading cause of care needs for older adults in Finland, with significant care contributions from family members. This type of care is demanding, often resulting in increased responsibilities for families due to limited access to professional services. Dementia is a social illness that profoundly impacts not only those diagnosed but also their families. Although not legally obliged, family members continue to take on caregiving roles driven by emotional bonds, moral obligations, and practical considerations. Even though previous research has extensively explored these motives and rationales for why family members provide care, analyses of the affective dimensions remain scarce. This study aims to explore the affective dimensions by examining the care deliberations of family carers for people living with dementia, with an affective-discursive practices approach. It focuses on how the entangled dimensions of affect, embodied experience, and discourse shape their care deliberations. This perspective, combined with insights from feminist care literature, is applied on written diaries of 15 Finnish adult children of people living with dementia. The combination embeds personal experiences and interactions within broader sociocultural structures. The analysis shows that negotiations of care are informed by personal relationship histories, but also by societal norms and expectations on family care. By exploring the affective dimensions the study highlights the affective dilemmas carers face in their everyday caring practices and seeks to understand how these dilemmas are managed. Methodologically, the analysis highlights how affective dilemmas can be approached by linking affect to discourse both on a macro-level drawing on societal discourses and affective climates of care, and by mobilising affect in micro-level interactions, to make sense of and to justify care choices.
Negotiations of Ecological Distress in Youth Conversations and Instagram Posts – Where are the affective-discursive possibilities for resistance?
Christian Haugestad, University of Oslo
This presentation draws on two discursive studies from my PhD work on how ecological distress is shaped, contested, and negotiated in different spheres in contemporary society. In the context of escalating climate and ecological crises, concepts such as “climate anxiety” and “eco-anxiety” have emerged as meaningful ways for people to make sense of our current predicament. Critical work has pointed out how mainstream theorizing around climate emotions often individualizes and psychologizes them, driven by neoliberal values emphasizing personal responsibility and affective management. My focus group study with Norwegian youth illustrates this, showing how participants navigate climate affective dilemmas through self-care and positivity imperatives, rather than sustained engagement with difficult emotions. While seemingly adaptive, this focus on individual emotional resilience can inadvertently sideline collective climate action and obscure the systemic nature of the crisis. At the same time, certain affective atmospheres offer possibilities for resistance. I will illustrate this with examples from a digital ethnographic study on Instagram representations of eco-anxiety, where therapeutic framings and toxic positivity are explicitly contested through humour and satire, fostering alternative affective communities that resist the individualization of systemic issues. Together, these studies illustrate some of the complex dynamics through which people engage in meaning-making around climate emotions, negotiate, reproduce and contest contemporary affective canons.
Speakers
Satu Venäläinen currently works as a Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Starting in fall 2026, she will work as a university lecturer in social psychology, University of Helsinki. Most of her research has focused on violence and gender, which she has examined from the perspectives of online and offline discourses, affects and the construction of intersectional identities. Her current research focused on young people’s perspectives, experiences and affective-discursive dynamics of sexual harassment. Her ongoing research at the Collegium focuses on affective dynamics of participation in social media conversations on human and more-than-human violences and inequalities.
Kaarina Nikunen is Professor of Media and Communication Research at Tampere University Finland. Her research interests include digital culture and datafication, affect and emotions, solidarity, migration and hate speech. Her current research explores the emerging intimacies, inequalities and vulnerabilities in data driven society with combination of computational, qualitative and ethnographic methods. She has also led several research projects on hate speech and online racism with focus on affective circulation of hate, politics of irony and gut feelings on social media context. Her book Media Solidarities: Emotions, Power and Justice in the Digital Age (Sage, 2019), explores critically the ways in which emotions and affect drive solidarity and political participation in digital media landscape.
Henri Hyvönen is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland. His research interests include biopolitics of gender and political masculinities, as well as men’s bodies, embodiment, body work, health behaviors, and care practices. He currently works in the AI-driven Platform Care: Promoting Equal and Inclusive Job Quality in Long-term Care (CareQuAI) project, which is part of the European JPI MYBL research programme and funded by the Research Council of Finland.
Dr Octavia Calder-Dawe is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Health at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her work explores the sociocultural dimensions of health and wellbeing, with a focus on privilege, identity, affect and emotion. Key projects to date have focused on youth wellbeing, digital and social media, sexism, ableism and discourses of masculinity and femininity.
Marja Lönnroth has a PhD in social psychology. Her research interest touch upon themes such as gender, ageing, care, and intersectional constructions of otherness and belonging. She currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the university of Jyväskylä, in a project called "Living with dementia: Social relational perspective to sustainable care" funded by the Kone foundation. In the project her work focuses on moral discourses and affective dimensions of family care.
Christian Andres Palacios Haugestad is a University Lecturer and PhD candidate at the University of Oslo’s Department of Psychology. Through his Master's degree in health, development, and community psychology from the same university, he specialized in cultural, critical and environmental psychology. His research has focused on peoples’ affective-discursive entanglements with the ecological crisis. Specifically how “eco-anxiety” is discussed among young people, on social media, and in news media. In his empirical work, Christian utilizes qualitative methods such as focus groups, digital ethnography, discourse analysis and is particularly interested in creative and critical methodologies.