The construction of awe in science communication

2020 ◽  
pp. 096366252096325
Author(s):  
Daniel Silva Luna ◽  
Jesse M. Bering
Keyword(s):  
Science Communication ◽  
Affective Experience ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
Communication Situation ◽  
Affective Science ◽  
Experienced Emotion

Awe is a frequently represented and commonly experienced emotion in science communication. According to a popular account of this emotion, awe is an innate and universal human affective experience that occurs when a person evaluates a target as vast, forcing a shift in their worldview. This shift is portrayed in science communication as resulting in an enhanced interest in the scientific material at hand. Based on the latest research in affective science, however, we challenge this narrow version of awe in science communication and instead advocate a broader account of this emotion in line with a constructionist perspective. We argue that there are a variety of awe types in science communication, each with different forms and functions in relation to the mandates within the multiplicity of contexts in this cultural space. We also contend that people’s awe experiences result from their previous interactions with this emotion and the unique affordances provided by the science communication situation.

Race and Affect: Pleasurable Mixing in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Carol Mejia Laperle
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Critical Field ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Affective Experience ◽  
Undue Influence ◽  
Racial Identities ◽  
Racial Impersonation ◽  
Blackface Performance ◽  
Performance Text

The critical field of The Masque of Blackness often annotates Queen Anne and her ladies’ blackface performance with a courtier's eye-witness comment that the “lean cheeked moors” were “loathsome” and “ugly.” Yet Ben Jonson's performance text, when read beside Dudley Carleton's correspondences, resists the undue influence of the aristocrat's anecdotal disparagement. This project refuses to take Carleton's denigration as fact. Instead, it investigates the masque's representation of Niger's daughters to develop the affective experience of pleasurable mixing across racial identities and to show how the opulence, innovation, and beauty afforded by blackface are the means to underwrite arguments of political authority. Rather than a deviation from the performance's magnificent appeal, racial impersonation is constitutive of the masque's demonstration of beauty and invention of pleasure. As such, the allegory of King James I's power hinges on a fiction of idealized incorporation that is ideologically powerful precisely because it is primarily an aestheticized, affective experience. Beyond the ostensible trope of racial transformation, Jonson presents the pleasure of mixing across racial identities as the precondition for Britannia's absorption of migrant bodies. Blackness is a visual reminder of an indelible difference that can be absorbed, incorporated, indeed “salved,” by the monarch's faculties of conversion. The affective experience afforded by blackface is thus an argument for the sovereign's power of unification, underwriting what was a largely unfulfilled and controversial political agenda: the coalition of realms under the aegis of Great Britain.

Naming as an indication of orientation in the socio-cultural space

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 351-363
Author(s):  
Ágnes Kapitány ◽  
Gábor Kapitány
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Space
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