.jpg)
Affective Bordering and the Racial Politics of Deservingness
This event has now finished.
D/L/006, Block L, Derwent College, Campus West, University of York (Map)
Event details
Join us for the presentation and discussion of Billy Holzberg’s monograph ''Affective Bordering: Race, Deservingness and the Emotional Politics of Migration Control'' – winner of the 2025 BSA Hobhouse Memorial Prize for the best first book in the discipline of sociology.
Affective Bordering highlights how border making needs to be understood not just as a political, economic or social but as an emotional and affective practice.
Combining queer feminist theories of affect with critical border and migration studies, the book reveals the racial grammars of deservingness that shape border and migration politics today. In doing so, it challenges the assumption that positive emotions like compassion necessarily work as a counter to negative emotions like anger or fear, instead revealing the entrenched dynamics by which some subjects are interpellated as the subjects while others are relegated as the objects of affect.
This is a hybrid event, jointly organised by the Gender, Sexuality and Inequalities Research Cluster (Sociology) and International Studies Research Cluster (Politics and IR). To join online, please follow this Zoom link.
About the speaker
Billy Holzberg
Dr Billy Holzberg is a sociologist and social theorist whose work interrogates how affect and emotion operate as central forces in nationalism, border regimes and neo-fascist politics.
Interdisciplinary, transitional and collaborative in approach, his work is committed to theorising power on both structural and intimate registers, examining how sexuality, race, and nation are co-constituted through affective economies.
He is a Lecturer of Social Justice at King’s College London and holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics.
Venue details
Wheelchair accessible