TEARS CONFERENCE, 8-10 June 2026. Sala Rossa, Via Azzo Gardino 23, Bologna

To join the conference online:  https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/395465813857449?p=E7fzin43UyKvYiFpCe 

Philosophy Department, University of Bologna. Organizers: Laurencia Sáenz Benavides & Pia Campeggiani

I am happy to announce the conference entitled “The Emotional Aspects of Resistance and Solidarity”. This conference aims to bring in post-graduate students, early career academics and established scholars whose work on the socio-political aspects of narrative practices, affects and emotions can offer illuminating perspectives on some of the issues addressed by the TEARS project, such as:

• Affective dimensions of resistance to social oppression (race, class, gender, sexuality, neurodiversity…)
• Affective conditions for solidarity
• The role of narrative practices for resistance to oppression
• Ambivalence and resistance to oppression
• The affects of fascism

Keynote Speakers: Maria Pia Lara (UAM) & Mariana Ortega (Penn State University)

The conference will take place on the 8th-10th June 2026, at the Philosophy Department of the University of Bologna, Via Azzo Gardino 23, Sala Rossa (June 8th & 9th); Via Zamboni 38, Sala Apollo (June 10th). 

This conference is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement n°1011105929 Project TEARS

If you wish to attend this event, please register here: https://forms.gle/CQvzuoV7YSiautBs5 

For any inquiries, please email  maria.saenzbenavides@unibo.it or laurenciasaenz@gmail.com

Conference Programme:

Day 1. Monday June 8th. 

Venue: Sala Rossa, Via Azzo Gardino 23 and via TEAMS 

14: 30 Welcome

15:00-16:00 “From outlaw emotions to moral injury: Rethinking the affective disruptions of norms” Ditte Munch-Jurisic (Copenhagen) 

16:00-17:00 “Feelings and Epistemic Resistance” Caleb Ward (Hamburg)

17:00-18:30 Keynote lecture (Online): “The Changing Waves of Historical Time: Progress and Regression” Maria Pia Lara (UAM)

19:30 Dinner

Day 2 Tuesday June 9th. 

Venue: Sala Rossa, Via Azzo Gardino 23 and via TEAMS

9:30-10:30  “Affective resistance. Narrating self-transformation under oppression.” Laurencia Saenz Benavides (Bologna)

10:30-11:30 “Pedagogical perspectives on loneliness narratives in extremist and emancipatory movements” Ruth Rebecca Tietjen (Tilburg) 

11:30-12:30  “The Unfinished ‘We’: Longing for Belonging, Loneliness, and the Affective Fault Lines of Political Communities” Marie Wuth (Erlangen-Nürnberg).

12:30-14:30 Lunch

14:30-15:30 “Mass Masochism” Serena Gregorio (Justus-Liebig-University Giessen). 

15:30-16:30: . “Hate marches”? The role of affect in repressive serialisation  Tris Hedges (Copenhagen)

16:30-18:00 Keynote lecture: “On home, longing and the photograph”. Mariana Ortega (Penn State University)

19:30 Dinner 

Day 3. Wednesday June 10th. 

Venue: Sala Apollo, 38 Via Zamboni 

9:00-11:00 Concluding remarks

End of the conference

Ditte Munch-Jurisic (Copenhagen) “From outlaw emotions to moral injury: Rethinking the affective disruptions of norms” Abstract Contemporary philosophy of emotion tends to focus on specific, identifiable emotions such as anger, shame, or envy. While this work has illuminated the political and moral roles of discrete emotions, it often overlooks vague or ineffable emotions or feelings that resist easy classification. This paper revisits Alison Jaggar’s concept of outlaw emotions—unarticulated, uncomfortable feelings that signal estrangement from dominant norms while carrying a potential for critical reflection. Whereas feminist readings have emphasized the epistemic promise of outlaw emotions in contexts of oppression, we argue that the phenomenon is both more radical and more widely applicable. Outlaw emotions can arise whenever individuals feel out of tune with established social or institutional practices, producing discomfort that may prompt moral and political reconsideration. We illustrate this through case studies of soldiers experiencing persistent estrangement and unease during and after military missions, situating these cases within broader discussions of moral injury and moral distress. Importantly, however, we challenge the portrayal of outlaw emotions as inherently liberatory or epistemically authoritative. Outlaw emotions should instead be understood as affective disruptions that open space for reflection without a determined outcome. Drawing on constructionist theories of emotion, we further argue that outlaw emotions are not reducible to combinations of discrete basic emotions but are culturally mediated affective phenomena that precede labeling. In bringing together philosophical, empirical, and phenomenological perspectives, our paper expands the scope of Jaggar’s concept while challenging teleological accounts of emotion and highlighting the ambiguous, disruptive, and generative potential of outlaw feelings.

Marie Wuth (Erlangen-Nürnberg). “The Unfinished ‘We’: Longing for Belonging, Loneliness, and the Affective Fault Lines of Political Communities” Abstract This paper approaches loneliness through the lens of a foundational political affect I call longing for belonging. Longing for belonging names the desire for a form of “we” that we imagine yet never fully grasp—an opaque fiction that nonetheless draws us toward others. Drawing on feminist and affect-theoretical accounts of relational desire and dependency (Irigaray 1991; Ahmed 2004; Butler 2015; Berlant 2011) alongside Spinoza’s conception of affective striving, I develop longing for belonging as an affect shaped by our constitutive need for others, our orientation toward imagined collectivity, and the shifting tensions of proximity and distance that structure political life. This ambivalence makes longing for belonging inherently political: it informs how communities define themselves, establish boundaries, and negotiate power. Placing this affective structure in conversation with feminist and political thinkers who understand loneliness, estrangement, and belonging as deeply political experiences (Arendt 1951; Weil 1952; hooks 2000; Ahmed 2004; Butler 2015; Tietjen & Tirkkonen 2023&2025), I argue that longing for belonging and loneliness stand in a mutually revealing relation. Longing for belonging may remain unfulfilled and take the form of loneliness—for instance, when individuals find themselves suspended between imagined forms of community and the absence of recognition in their lived environments. Yet loneliness can also make longing for belonging newly legible: the experience of estrangement often heightens awareness of the very relations one hopes to form, recover, or invent. These affective dynamics play a decisive role in political subject formation, shaping how individuals position themselves within or against prevailing structures of belonging.

Caleb Ward (Hamburg). “Feelings and Epistemic Resistance” Abstract This paper examines Audre Lorde’s Black feminist account of how feelings (broadly construed) are a source of knowledge that counteracts epistemic oppression. First, I lay out types of oppositional knowledge about oneself and one’s social world that feelings can bring. I then articulate the work that must be done for that knowledge from feelings to be accessed and made effective. In Lorde’s formulation, this entails voicing feelings so they can be examined and understood, recognizing that those feelings are real, valorizing them as a source of information, and finally putting them to use: that is, integrating the knowledge from feelings into action toward survival. Finally, I respond to concerns that feelings may be especially unreliable and prone to ideological distortion.

Ruth Rebecca Tietjen (Tilburg University). “Pedagogical perspectives on loneliness narratives in extremist and emancipatory movements”AbstractThe core goal of this talk is to think together about how insights into the role of loneliness in emancipatory and extremist political movements can be translated into pedagogical and social practices of democratic education and community building. The theoretical background of this consists of reflections on how loneliness is mobilized by both emancipatory and extremist political movements, such as second-wave feminism or the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Both types of movements appeal to feelings of loneliness and belonging, while simultaneously channeling these feelings into a specific direction. In this process of concretizing, collectivizing, and politicizing affects, ideology (understood here in a neutral sense), presented in narrative form, plays a crucial role. I have built up an archive of such loneliness narratives, exploring how different narratives – e.g., Renaud Camus’ speeches on The Great Replacement or Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique – channel loneliness in different ways. While presenting some insights gained through this comparative analysis, I aim to move beyond the level of theory and think together with you about how such narratives can be used in the context of democratic education and community building. The core idea is twofold: First, these narratives can be used to denaturalize specific ways of experiencing and responding to loneliness, thereby opening spaces for democratic discourse, playful inquiry, and freedom. Second, pedagogical practice itself must take a form that embodies the democratic forms of listening and participation it seeks to advocate.

Serena Gregorio (Justus-Liebig-University Giessen). “Mass Masochism” Abstract Migrants voting for far-right, racist candidates, people struggling financially supporting the abolition of welfare, inhabitants of regions particularly impacted by the climate crisis voting for candidates who promise to dismantle crucial nature protection policies, women aestheticizing oppressive narratives like the trad-wives trend, software engineers working to make themselves obsolete – self-defeating patterns seem to be everywhere, and characteristic of many dynamics that currently shape our social and political landscape. Interestingly, while these patterns, and the broader dynamics they are embedded within, look markedly masochistic, the concept of masochism is not particularly prominent in the discussions of these phenomena. This is in contrast to the concept of sadism, or, more precisely, to that of sadomasochism. For instance, it is briefly invoked both in Eva von Redecker’s Dieser Drang nach Härte (roughly, This Urge for Harshness) and in Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey’s Zerstörungslust (Lust for Destruction), in their attempts to account for the rise in popularity of authoritarian politics. Like von Redecker, Amlinger, and Nachtwey, I’d like to start from Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, the locus classicus for understanding the sadomasochistic aspect of the rise of authoritarianism. But instead of stressing the sadistic aspect as they do, I’ll focus on the masochistic one. My aim is to sketch a cartography of masochism, presenting relevant psychoanalytic understandings of the concept, in order to assess which ones are best suited to help us understand the socio-political self-defeating patterns mentioned above.

Tris Hedges (Copenhagen). “Hate marches”? The role of affect in repressive serialisation” Abstract In Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Sartre offers a Marxist social ontology of how groups form out of backgrounds of isolated and atomised seriality. The concept of seriality has been widely received as the most significant contribution of Sartre’s Critique, and it is arguably Sartre’s emphasis on the dialectic of materiality and praxis that is at the heart of this Marxist-phenomenological innovation. Crystallising in the idea of the ‘practico-inert’, Sartre demonstrates how seriality names a form of collectivity that consists of heterogeneous agents having their praxis similarly constrained and enabled by the humanmade socio-material structures that surround them. Affect is a central yet overlooked aspect of this dialectic, especially if we want to make sense of groups that emerge out of seriality in pursuit of urgent political aims. In this talk I want to explore what Sartre’s late Marxist phenomenology might offer when theorising the emotional aspects of resistance and solidarity. To do this, I examine the ways in which hatred has been weaponised to repress pro-Palestine solidarity. We see this in the repeated reconstitution of pro-Palestine demonstrations as “hate marches” and the characterisation of multiple banners, chants, and symbols as inciting racial and antisemitic hatred. While such affective reconstitution is oriented toward material and ideological aims, these are achieved through the means of systemic serialisation. Bolstered by a liberal affective economy that both pathologises hatred and follows a logic of “carceral anti-antisemitism” , those who express feelings of solidarity, moral anger, grief, and rage now face affective exigencies that render their affective praxis inevitably suspect and criminal.