MLE Friends Talk with Prof Joanna Cook

“Bringing Something New into Being: Joy and Natality in Anthropology”

If you would like to attend, please join MLE Friends Here!

We are thrilled to announce that our next MLE Friends Talk will be delivered by none other than anthropologist Prof Joanna Cook on Thursday 26th March.

In this talk Prof Joanna Cook asks, what might a focus on joy reveal about how people live, what they value, and how they relate to the world around them? And what might an analytic focus on joy contribute to social scientific theory? While anthropologists have provided powerful accounts of the negative affective qualities of contemporary life, highlighting experiences of ennui and melancholy in the ‘unworkable fantasies’ of modernity, they have rarely focused on joy. She argues that anthropological attention to joy might provide insight into the ‘natality’, in Hannah Arendt’s terms, of contemporary life: how possibility is created and how something new is brought into being. By embracing the complexity of human emotional life, even in contexts of iniquity and injustice, we might highlight the many and multiple ways in which people move from numbness to action. In so doing, she committedly holds open the possibility of hope in relation to wider social, environmental, and structural forces by emphasising narratives of human connection and flourishing.