Emotions & Politics: A Panel Discussion
Emotions and psychological dynamics are key drivers in politics and organisations, economic activity, and technological development.
Voters judge politicians by their affect; design thinkers and leadership scholars advise technologists and CEOs alike to cultivate empathy and emotional intelligence; brands spend huge sums to link their products with particular emotions and memories in consumers’ minds; social media companies build complex transnational value chains to manage toxic content; public health officials warn of the risks of technological addiction; policymakers debate the necessity of regulating addictive technology designs; and trade unions in a range of sectors warn of an epidemic of professional burnout.
Yet in our civil society discussions of politics, institutional change, and political technology we rarely grapple with the central role played by the emotions — and individual and interpersonal psychology more broadly — in the everyday dynamics of our institutions and the success or failure of institutional and technological initiatives.
In this panel discussion, three distinguished practitioner-theorists will explore these complex but crucial relationships, interweaving their own professional experiences with concepts from a range of disciplines.
Speakers:
Zarinah Agnew is a neuroscientist by training. After spending over a decade in academia, they left to study the science of groups of brains — that is, humans in collectivity. Zarinah serves as the Lecturer in Collective Behaviour at Newspeak House and runs three nonprofits aimed at experimental aspects of society, collective transformation and para-institutions. The Social Science Observatory is dedicated to the study of social science in the wild, Alternative Justices works towards abolitionist community-based harm prevention and response, and District Commons engineers experimental spaces where humans can ‘be otherwise’. Together, these strands allow both the prefiguration of new social configurations, as well as the study of their transformational potential.
Hannah O’Rourke is a bridge builder and network maker, passionate about making politics more open, collaborative, and focused on the future. She has worked in political organising, coalition management and campaigning for over 10 years. She is the co-founder of Campaign Lab, a community of technologists who research, test and embed new tools and new practices in political campaigns. She is co-author of the book Reorganise: 15 Stories of Workers Fighting Back in a Digital Age and the Lecturer in Political Organising at The London College of Political Technology (Newspeak House). She was formerly the Director of Labour Together and convened the 2019 Labour Election Review.
Julia Taranova (MPP Oxon) is a doctoral researcher at the Russia Institute at King’s College London. In 2017 she founded the Social Sciences Lab — a Moscow-based non-profit focused on developing and delivering educational programs for young social scientists in Russia — which was labelled a ‘foreign agent’ and forced to close in summer 2021. Prior to that, Julia spent several years working on the Open Government Initiative.
Moderators:
Ella Shoup is the 2023-24 Intersticia Fellow at the London College of Political Technology (Newspeak House), and holds a Master’s in Public Administration in Digital Technology Policy from University College London.
Six Silberman is the Lecturer in Sociotechnical Systems at the London College of Political Technology (Newspeak House), and a postdoctoral researcher at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, University of Oxford.